Life is so precarious in New Idria that when one vehicle breaks down, it has a ripple effect on the entire populace, scant that it is.
The old heaps around here are all pensioners — on their last legs. They move slow and they’re legal (sort of), but you’d be dumber than a thieving highgrader to try to outrun a cop in any one of them.
Reigning at the top of the vehicle pecking order around here was my Jeep, a workhorse that did the round-trip 140-mile voyage to town and back everyday for two years without a grudge. But it all came to a screeching, smoking halt two weeks ago when the head gasket blew its top as I rolled into the driveway.
Was it pent up anger the Jeep was exhibiting? Like a mystified woman driver, I decided that the Jeep was a textbook case of psychopathic catatonia.
“We need to talk,” I said to the Jeep, as we were both smothered in black smoke. It only hissed back at me.
My brother, Kemp, who overheard my feeble attempt at a heart-to-heart with the contraption, interjected his opinion.
“When one vehicle goes down up here, everyone suffers,” said the former New Idria councilman. “All are punished.”
He’s right. I drove his ’88 Dodge Dakota truck into town the next week. With the camper shell attached it was like navigating a steamboat, and when I had to stop I had to start braking two miles beforehand. Then I drove my mom’s gutless ’88 Ford Escort, which was kind enough to die after I pulled into The Pinnacle parking lot.
Kemp suggested I hop in the dead 1972 Badillac DeVille, and just coast all the way to town using gravity and a mass weight that would rival that of a cosmic black hole.
Instead, I decided to take the heinous plunge into the world of buying a new car. I hadn’t done this before, because the tales of woe I’ve heard from others who have suffered through the process were enough to make me opt for a pogo stick if I had to. The fact is, I don’t care if a car I drive looks like a barrel on wheels, all I want is to get from point A to point B.
But Idria is hard on cars — and pogo sticks. I needed something dependable, with a warranty.
The salesmen at the car dealership were on me like flies on poop — until they learned about my, as they put it, “damaged” credit.
“Mr. Woods,” the head guy said, “you would have to put $30,000 down and pay $600 a month for the next 40 years to buy this car, with your damaged credit.”
They had advertised the econo-auto at $10,000.
“It’s Miss Woods,” I said, sticking out my chest as proof of gender. “And how in the Sam Hell could a $10,000 car cost nine times what you advertised it for?”
“Interest — at 700 percent,” he said. “We’re taking an awful big gamble on you.”
“And I’m the one that’s absorbing it. So you mean some greedy fly-by-night CEO with lots of stolen money can get a good cheap deal, but some poor working stiff like me has to pay nine times the amount it’s worth? Are you guys Republicans by any chance?”
“We’re sticking our neck out for you,” he said.
“Would you take my left kidney as a down payment?” I inquired. “It’s done all the time in India, you know.”
He took my latest offer to his superiors. He came back some minutes later saying I would have to put down both kidneys, plus $5,000, payable in two weeks, and make payments of $500 a month.
“I’m glad you guys are open to compromise,” I said, trying to relieve the growing tension over this absurd haggling.
In the end I finally got a kind of new 2002 small commuter car, which of course is not nor ever will be “mine.” I never want to go through that ordeal again, but I know I will when I have to trade the car in after putting it through two years of New Idria/Panoche Road commuter hell.
When I drove it home, Kemp marveled at the sporty, tiny bright-red jalopy, which looked so incongruous sitting in the orange mud of the driveway in New Idria, it prompted him to ask where I had “pinched” it from.
“I am now an embonded slave,” I announced. “Want to help invest in it?”
Kemp said all he wanted was to get his homemade gyro-copter going, so he could forever transcend the automobile industry.
San Carlos Creek Update: The new car has been properly New Idria-ized. Two days after I arrived with it, the welfare bum dogs waded in the staining orange goo of the polluted creek, then barged their way into the vehicle as I tried to get in it the other day. They rolled around on the seats before I could beat the orange hell out of their asses to get out.
Not to be outdone, Mayor Orange the Cat managed to crawl through a cracked window and sprayed the interior from top to bottom.
But Kemp had the last word after he went bumper-sticker mad and plastered every square inch of the car with Libertarian slogans, like “Vote Libertarian or get in the cattle car.” As much as I agree with the sentiment, I’m still trying to blow-dry them off.
Comments about the Badlands? Email Mr. Kate “wheeler and dealer” Woods at [email protected].
