At underground parking garages, I like watching the “valets” gas vehicles up the spiral ramp, weaving around columns and going airborne over grates and speed bumps. But not yesterday, when I saw my own car ascending with a softball-sized patch of pistachio-colored paint next to the headlight, and the plastic belt that secures the bumper flapping about.
An Ethiopian kid hopped out, smiled, and spread his hands, as if to say, “Ta-da!” I’d pressed a dollar absent-mindedly into his palm (showing how little service has to do with tipping) before I said, “Hey, uh . . . ”
“Oh . . . ” he replied, studying the concrete floor. He wasn’t a very good faker.
“Yeah, the, uh . . . bumper.”
“Oh, sir. The car was parked next to a pole. Come. I show you.” He drove us back down. Generally, this is the sort of thing you have to be drunk to do: Just smashed my car? Why don’t you drive it around a bit more? We turned the corner of the “orange level,” and suddenly we were on a level painted pistachio.
“Hey, stop!” I said. “See? It’s the same col –”
“I can fix.”
“Well, actually, they’ll have to rethread that belt at the dealership.”
We were parked by the offending pole. There was a fresh gash in the paint, obviously from my bumper. The guy had really nailed it. Now he leaned across the gearshift and pled: “Oh, please, sir! I ask you please do not to tell my boss. Please!” By laying that decision in my lap, he pretty much wrecked my week.
I’m not a car person. Cars I own tend to acquire nicknames like “The Crate.” And this particular one is wholly unsuited to me. It’s more a Coed Bombshell Accoutrement than a family man’s drive-to-work car — a ten-year-old, fire-engine-red Saab my wife bought in her early twenties. It’s a turbo-charged SPG, which must be the Swedish acronym for “fitted with an Air Force jet engine.” Not to sound like a Beach Boy, but the thing hits 150 mph with no coaxing. BMWs and Mercedes pass it only with my permission.
President Clinton’s recent pardon of Patty Hearst, strangely enough, reminded me just how the car had wowed me during our dating years. A friend of mine confessed that the photos the Symbionese Liberation Army released after kidnapping Hearst (or to use her exuberantly pornographic nom de guerre, “Tanya”) had made a never-to-be-effaced erotic impression on his 13-year-old self. “It was the machine gun she was holding,” he said. “Know the feeling?” I didn’t — but maybe it’s like sitting beside the woman you dream of marrying in a car that does 200 if you push it.
Today my wife drives a mini-van, but (or rather, therefore) the Saab has mammoth sentimental value. Repairing it is a chore — the parts are so expensive you’d think they were handcrafted out of saffron, chinchilla, and emeralds and brought from Sweden by dogsled — but I do it gladly. My bumper was going to get fixed one way or another, whether I paid for it or the garage did, whether I took it to the dealer or the kid’s friends soldered and taped it up in his driveway in Falls Church.
So I told the kid, “Forget about it. I appreciate your honesty.”
I didn’t really mean it. With thank-you-sir-thank-you-sir still ringing in my ears, I drove away feeling terrible, with no idea whether I’d done a good turn or simply been bullied — no idea, in fact, whether I had any moral bearings whatsoever.
It used to be easier. Say the repair costs 500 bucks. If you think of that as 100 pints of Guinness or 30 CDs, then I had done a virtuous thing. But I have children now, and if you think of it as 20 dinosaur books or 10 trips to the zoo (with popsicles after), it looks a bit different, doesn’t it? Somerset Maugham once wrote that money is like a sixth sense, without which one cannot enjoy the other five. Well, courage is like an eighth cardinal virtue, without which one cannot practice the other seven. I began to feel like I’d wronged my children just because I’d been too cowardly to face a showdown with some fast-talking immigrant.
I sifted the facts. On the one hand, I’ve seen the lines of impatient parkers, stomping, looking at their watches, waiting for their cars. Why should the kid suffer because his boss rushed him? On the other hand, I didn’t want to collect from the kid, I wanted to collect from his boss. On the other hand, would the boss not understand that, and fire the kid anyway? On the other hand, Ethiopians run most of the parking garages in Washington — maybe the don’t-tell-my-boss line was a ruse he’d worked out with his father, who owns the place.
I didn’t like this line of thinking. I decided to forget about it, and cover the cost by agreeing to do a book review an editor had offered me days before. I called him up and told him it would cost him 20 dinosaur books.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
