Car Talk

I’m sitting in the VenJetta at the Sonic Drive-In the other day. (Don’t judge me. When you need a tater tot, you need a tater tot. I know it’s not healthy; leave me alone.)

It’s a beautiful summer evening, and I have my windows down as I sit in the carport, waiting for my chicken sandwich. There are a few tables set up outside the restaurant, and a family of five is dining near me. (Well, the parents are dining, and the children are climbing on all manner of things, which, I assume, is why the family is not eating in their car.) Suddenly, I notice one of the children keeps glancing in my direction. He’s a small boy, maybe seven years old.

Staring at me, he wanders away from his family and stands directly in front of my car. He looks studiously down at the grill, and stands there for about two minutes. His family does not appear to notice his absence; one parent is fetching some runaway sandwich wrappers, and the other parent is valiantly trying to keep a pair of tater tots from becoming lodged in a two-year-old’s nose. I watch the young boy as he leans in to inspect the hood of my car, and I meet his gaze with raised eyebrows when he finally sees me behind the wheel.

Instead of becoming shy and self-conscious when he sees me watching him, as so many children do, he gets a rather resolved look on his face and marches up to my open driver’s-side window. I look at him sideways. He is exactly as tall as my rear-view mirror.

“That’s a nice-looking Volkswagen you have there.”

There’s something unsettling about a seven-year old with the language skills and demeanor of a 40-year old State Patrolman.

“Thank you.”

“What is it called?” he asks me, leaning in slightly to look at the steering wheel.

“It’s a Jetta.” I don’t think he would grasp the delightful nuance of the name “VenJetta,” so I don’t bring it up.

“Volks…wagen…Jetta.” He turns the phrase over in his mouth like a fine grape juice as his gaze sweeps the inside of the vehicle. Then he looks me square in the face. “And who are you?”

I pause, and look around for his mother. Not seeing her, and wondering if she had ever taught this kid not to talk to strangers, and worrying at how easily I could probably kidnap him, and changing my mind and deciding he could probably take me in a fight, I say, “My name is Melissa. Who are you?”

“Joseph.”

“Nice to meet you, Jose—” He’s not looking at me anymore, and is instead leaning in through my window, trying to get a closer look at God-only-knows-what. I am momentarily speechless, my eyebrows crawling right up over my sunglasses and making their way into my hairline.

“Joseph!” Finally, his mother seems to have noticed that her oldest child is crawling bodily through a stranger’s car window, and she comes to retrieve him. She is an amusing combination of surprised and so obviously not.

I smile wanly at her as she extracts her child from the VenJetta and shepherds him off with an apologetic “Guess who’s a car buff” tossed in my direction. Had she left him here long enough, I would have warned him against the Jetta’s tendency toward electric malfunction and demonic possession, and perhaps suggested other vehicles in the same class that he might be interested in, referencing Consumer Reports and making a bar graph out of French Fries. But the mother is already busy steering Joseph away from the Explorer two stalls over, and my chicken sandwich has arrived, so I point my car toward home and hope the VenJetta doesn’t let all this attention go to its head.

Leave that periodical depository where you found it!

Everybody has that one friend that always has a story to tell. The stories are fascinating and bizarre, often hilarious, and utterly unbelievable. Everyone knows that one friend should really grow up to be a sitcom screenwriter or a comedic fiction bestseller, but the friend never does. She is happy to be a mild-mannered professor in Jersey, with a really colorful past and a lot of chalk.

I have that friend, and her name is BeowulfGirl. Since I’ve known her, I’ve been treated to countless jaw-dropping narratives involving society’s most astounding characters that seem to be drawn to her like an ADD child to a drum set. Perhaps sensing that I felt unfairly privileged to be the only audience to her anecdotes, she has decided to start a blog of her own to recount her adventures with some of the more fascinating people to come out of western civilization.

(And by “fascinating people,” I mean fascinating in the way that you are fascinated when you turn on the Discovery Channel and learn that there really are species of animals in this world that can remove and replace their stomachs at will, or that have rectangular pupils, or that can sleep for three years. You had no idea you wanted to know those things, but now that you do, you can’t really imagine not knowing them.)

In an effort to encourage blog traffic, BeowulfGirl has provided me with a “sneak preview” story to share with my viewers. The following is true, though the names have been changed or omitted to protect the innocent (and the people who should have been innocent, but really, really aren’t).

Enjoy!

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While I was attending high school and college in New Jersey, I lived one town over from a well-known movie actor--trust me, you would know him. Although I never saw him around town, I did know where his house was. It was a very nice house, in the mountains, with a long, winding driveway and lots of maple trees.

During this time, I was good friends with a guy named Charlie, a wildly histrionic, neurotic gay man who was actually a member of a rival Repertory Theatre that worked near me. Despite our competition and his insanity, Charlie and I managed to become close and have wonderful adventures together.

One day, Charlie came over to my house with his camera, and begged me to take him to the actor's house so he could take pictures of it. It was a nice day, so we got in the car and we drove to the house, where we idled outside his mansion and Charlie took pictures of the house.

Then he got all weird and insisted that I take a picture of him posing by the actor's mailbox, which was a completely normal looking, gray aluminum mailbox (with his last name on it in those gold and black letters). So I did this, and Charlie was absurdly happy.

Everything was fine for a few weeks. When I got the film developed (yes, this was in the days before digital cameras), I sent Charlie pictures and he was delirious over his portrait with the mailbox.

Charlie steadily got more and more obsessed with the mailbox. He started to tell me that he was going to STEAL IT, just to have a memoir of his parasocial relationship with the poor actor, who knew nothing of this.

I honestly didn't expect he was serious. Charlie had a history of announcing that he was going to do things that he never ended up doing (including a four-year suicide threat, which usually only ended in fainting and anxiety attacks until he smartened up and entered therapy).

Several more weeks went by, and in mid-July, my birthday arrived. Charlie showed up gleefully at my house with a huge and cumbersome wrapped package. It was heavy and made a strange noise when I shook it. He was actually cackling with glee.

I opened the package and saw, to my utter horror, that it was, in fact, the well-known actor's mailbox.

I just stared at it, and Charlie beamed at me from across the couch.

However, the biggest problem was not, as you might think, that Charlie had stolen the actor's mailbox.

The biggest problem, of course, was that it contained the actor's mail.

The mail itself was no great shakes. There were a couple of utility bills, a mail-order catalog from an expensive department store, some junk mail, and what appeared to be a greeting card. Still, I sifted through it with a terror as if it were body parts.

Terrified, I tried to explain to the gushing Charlie that he had now committed a federal crime. I didn't think that either of us would do well in a penitentiary. He didn't have any problem with it, insisting that the victim of his thievery could simply purchase a new mailbox. Horrified, I insisted that we take the mailbox back IMMEDIATELY, hopefully not running into the burgled thespian on the way. (I kept envisioning him standing outside his house in a red smoking jacket, saying: "Will you kindly get your hands off of my postal receptacle, and leave that periodical depository where you found it!")

Nervously, before the FBI agents came to take us to Leavenworth, we drove the five miles or so to the actor's home and parked down the block. We both wore sunglasses. I made Charlie carry the mailbox and we approached the lonely-looking post which until recently had housed it. A cursory glance told me that there was no hope of reattaching the mailbox without the help of power tools, and we would have to just set it out there in front of his house and pray that he would chalk it up to vandals.

Unceremoniously, we dumped the mailbox on the lawn, and some of the mail spilled out. It made an enormous crashing sound, and I suddenly had visions of the actor lurking behind a tree with binoculars, hoping to catch whichever evil person had done this to him.

I panicked. "Run!" I screamed. "Run!"

Charlie and I took off like bats out of hell and dove into my car. We sped away, praying to God that we hadn't been spotted. Considering that neither of us was arrested for mail tampering, we assumed we hadn't.

An interesting footnote to this adventure is that, years later, I met the niece of this same well-known actor at a school function. She was very nice and friendly to me, so I never told her that a friend of mine had vandalized her uncle's mailbox, years before. I'm afraid of karma.

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For more shenanigans, visit BeowulfGirl here, and show your support by leaving a comment or two.