Saturday, December 30, 2006

Stolen Car!

A's car has disappeared. No, not her new car, which is so Republican Grandma that she'll never, ever get pulled over, but her old car, which has been sitting in the driveway for about four months now. Yes, the old gray Saturn with the bolted on hood, broken windshield, cracked door, split engine block and fucked up transmission that barely ran, essentially didn't run, got stolen. It was the car that nobody wanted, or at least we thought it was, until somebody, for some inscrutable and extremely puzzling reason, stole it. Today. In broad daylight, at some point between around noon, when M's friend I left the house and 5:30ish, when A came home from Charleston with her new car and stormed into the house demanding to know where her old car was.

M and I had no idea that it was even gone, which is fairly pathetic, I grant you. But that driveway isn't that close to the house and frankly I have spent the day in my pajamas doing nothing whatsoever on the kitchen computer until it crashed too many times (I think it's a bad sound card, but that's another story). M spent the day lying on the couch with the curtains drawn watching The Mummy Returns and eating leftover Chinese food. The dogs may have barked or they may not: noone pays any attention to them when they do bark anyway, because mostly they bark at other dogs, so we've learned to ignore them.

It's so bizarre it passes understanding. I thought maybe one of the neighbors had reported it as abandoned and the city had towed it away, but the cops said that no, they don't take cars out of people's driveways. If you were looking for a car to steal from my house today, why not take mine? It's also an old Saturn, but it has the vast advantages of not only actually running, but having a full windshield as well. The whole thing is totally inexplicable and the timing is awful, because A actually has a buyer for it. He would have taken it away last week but she couldn't find the title, so they were going to go together to the title office next week and formally sign it over. Now he's mad too and we all drove around the neighborhood looking for the damn thing on the theory that it couldn't possibly have gone more than about three blocks under its own power but it was nowhere to be found.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How strange. what color is the car and how many doors?

Gordon Smith said...

That's bizarre.

So the thieves couldn't have driven it away? They would have had to push it, pull it, tow it, or hoist it from a blimp-mounted crane?

Too weird.

mygothlaundry said...

It's a silver/gray 4 door small hatchback Saturn. It's easy to spot because at some time in it's checkered past, the hood got crumpled and the rocket scientist who fixed it did so by banging on it with a sledge hammer until it was sort of flat and then bolting it down onto the car body with two big old humongous bolts so it looks like Frankensteins head. According to A, it did run, at least in first gear - sometimes it would even get into 2nd (manual transmission)- but then it would stop and die within about 3 - 4 blocks.