So I had some car trouble on the drive from LA to the Bay Area tonight. I usually stop at the same place near Bakersfield to buy gas, and when I stopped tonight a biker at the pump next to me told me it looked like something was wrong with my engine. Being the know-it-all that I am, I told him that it was probably just steam coming off of the condenser, but to humor him I came around the car to take a look.
Smoke was pouring out of the right side of my engine.
Being a bit concerned, I took the car next door to what the gas station attendant said was a repair shop. The guy there poked around my engine a bit, then told me that he thought I had just hit something on the road and it had got into my engine. My brain was obviously still numb from driving, and somehow this explanation seemed logical. “Yeah, I probably hit a bottle of oil, and it miraculously flew into my engine. I’ll buy that.”
Still, to be sure, I drove around for a bit on the local roads, and when the car was still smoking my brain awakened enough to tell me that I was an idiot. It was only after returning to the repair shop and noticing that it was a tire repair shop that I realized how much of an idiot I was.
After debating the merits of getting towed to Bakersfield for $150 I decided to risk driving. Every second building in Bakersfield seems to be devoted to automobiles in some way (auto parts, oil change, tire sales, you name it) but none of these places seemed to do general car repair. Pep Boys sent me to Goodyear, Goodyear sent me to Sears, and Sears sent me to some little shop that they said might help. Following the directions from the Sears guys I turned a corner and was suddenly no longer in Bakersfield, but in a scene straight out of Desperado. The signs were all Spanish, old Mexican men were sitting in front of stores, and the buildings that weren’t auto-related were all taco stands. I half expected to see Antonio Banderas walking down the road with a guitar case.
I finally found the garage, which was a single bay in a wooden building. I parked outside, stuck my head in, and was greeted by a lot of Spanish that I didn’t understand. Finally a four-year-old kid was summoned to translate, and when I said there was a leak in my car then four Mexicans appeared out of no where and began poking and prodding my engine, muttering to one another, and occasionally even tasting the fluid that was leaking. Finally one of them turned to me and began explaining the problem, but he was doing so in Spanish, and the young translator had vanished.
After much confusion another translator was summoned, and this guy told me my CV boot was leaking. “Great, can you fix it?” “The axel is no good. We get new.” “Axel, I thought it was just the CV boot?” “Better get new axel. Monday we do it. Until then, very dangerous. Fire!”
By this point I was loving life very much. If the axel of my car was going to be ripped out, I was going to let a Subaru dealership do it, not a band of gauchos. I found a phone book, called the local dealership, and was greeted by a surly “What?!? Smoke?!? The Subaru guy isn’t here today. Bring it in Monday.” I was taking shit from no man by this point. I told him I was stuck, that I would leave the car, get a rental, and somehow make it to the Bay Area in time for Sunday’s family barbecue.
Once at the dealership I sat down to give my info to the guy I had talked to on the phone (bald head, fu manchu, probably capable of ripping my arms out of their sockets had he wanted to). In the middle of this an old woman wearing heavy makeup walked in, sat next to me, and yelled “My ex-fiance wants me to marry him! But two other guys in Bakersfield want me to marry them, plus another guy in the Bay Area.” I was then subjected to a rant about this Miss Havisham’s life, including a segway into the shoddy treatment American Olympians receive, and a brief treatise on actors and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just at the point where I thought this woman would never, ever stop she abrubtly left, and I noticed that the automotive guy had been silently laughing the whole time. As soon as she was gone he doubled up in a fit of laughter. “That was great. Claire’s crazy. Your car will be fixed in an hour.”
Turns out while Claire was telling me her life story the mechanic who works on Subarus had come in to fix a problem with his own car. My bald-headed friend grabbed him, told him I was stuck, and convinced him to fix my car. I was later told that something in the CV boot had exploded, and the gauchos turned out to have been right after all — I drove away an hour later with a new axel joint, and without the cloud of smoke that had been following me for the previous four hours.
