I dug a few things out of my computer I liked.
===
The last time I saw her, she was complaining about her health. Then she said to me,
all I do anymore is talk about my health.
Maybe next time, if she ever comes back from Brooklyn, I'll run into her again, and I'll run into her, and I'll have to confess that I've been dreaming of her,
unwillingly,
again.
===
My karmann ghia was cursed. It wasn't a muscle car,
it wasn't lowered. All of my mother's friends called it cute.
But it was cursed.
A year ago, I was looking for an antique car; maybe a Mustang, I thought.
All of my friends advised me against this choice. Apparently to purchase a Mustang is to prove oneself to be either a frat boy or a homosexual. The ambiguity of this appealed to me, but I couldn't afford one. Nor could I afford the huge, powered-as-hell old black convertable Mercury, or the beautifil old black-and-white
skylark. Then, driving my mother's car home one night, I saw my Ghia.
It was Red. It was black. It was up for sale. It looked like a porsche. I drove it for ten minutes, and wrote a check for $3,000 to Moto, the Japanese guy who had owned it before. "I know you'll take care of it," he said. "You're a Karmann Ghia lover." I didn't tell him that the only time I had seen such a car previously was when Mike Myers drove one in "So I Married an Axe Murderer". No matter, no matter. Suzanne, my girlfriend: "You just bought it? Did you even test drive it? No? Nothing? Well, cool!".
I drove the thing for about a week before receiving my first parking ticket, in a downtown bus zone, for three hundred dollars. I shrugged it off. This is what you get, I thought to myself, for driving a slightly-flashy car with no hazard lights.
I've always felt that people who believe the universe is out to get them have too much time on their hands, and that they would've prosecuted Galileo for saying that the earth revolved around the sun. These are the people who believe that their toaster geniunely hates them. So when I got the second ticket in the same week, a bullshit little no-left-turn num, I chalked it up to the end of the month and a bored police officer.
Then the car got slammed.
I wasn't even there to see it happen. No one was, apparently. Sometime, late at night in my parking garage, a large vehicular-type mass slammed into the rear end of my little red Ghia, caving in the rear hatch. The attendants at my 24-hour parking garage swear they saw no one. No paint from another car, no bumper marks. Nothing on the ground. There was simply no sign of the fairly large scale ramming that took place. I now had one heavily dented, cute, red and black Karmann Ghia.
I shrugged it off again. These things happen, you know. Insurance won't cover it? Ah well, so it goes. My friends and co-workers were amazed by the zen-like attitude I took, but it was just a front. I couldn't be angry at whoever hit it: there was simply no one there to hate. So I internalized it. I said nothing, but every time I drove, I could only think of how beautiful it used to be. How it was ruined now. I started thinking about the car's history; the Karmann Ghia is a direct descendent of the Bug, the car Hitler had ordered designed for use in the second world war. My car had been imported from Germany; inside the glove-box was a indecipherable little message in German. The message might have read "The SS recommends that you wear your seat belt for maximum jew-killing potential! Drive safe!" for all I knew. A strange guilt had crept in.
Once I convinced myself that I owned a car whose ancestors had beat up my ancestors, Nazi imagry started popping up all over the place. A swashtika drawn in freshly-poured cement. The spiky-haired blond at work revealed that her grandfather had been a high-ranking officer in the third reich. A day at the beach, Suzanne and I snuck into a secluded cove for sex, only to find swashtikas written in the sand. We began kissing, but the air had started to close in on me. We kicked out the symbols and moved on.
By now a switch had been flipped in my head. It was no longer simply the Nazis, those silly clowns, but the Devil himself. He was around, evil was being done, and it wasn't even the stupid humans doing it this time. He came to me as the shell game player on Fillmore Street. Written in my notebooks at the time, in bold, is "Enter the Devil". Eventually he translated himself into my lover. She looked particularly wicked one night in the moonlight, and I asked her her thoughts on the devil. She only grinned with all of her teeth and said "You know my feelings on the devil."
By the time the Karmann Ghia was hit a second time, caving in the front fender (again, no witnesses. No evidence), I was in no great state of mind to care one way or the other. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that something was telling me to rid myself of this automobile.
I took the coward's way out; I parked it at my mother's house. It's sitting there now.
