One More Goddam Thing
Posted by Al Pastor
4/5/05 Oaks Club $2-4 Hold’em
12:15-4:15 PM
In $60 Out $66 +$6
Hours Played 2005: 83.25 YTD: -$529
If it’s not one goddam thing it is another. Saturday night, as I trudged up 20th Street to get into my car to go see the SIN CITY movie (there are those in the crowd who will remember that in the halcyon days of LOS SINVERGUENZAS de CIUDAD JUAREZ, and the brief period that crisp fall when the bullring we inhabited was named for Jessica Alba), I saw the glass in the street. I was processing the idea that I had been broken into and what might have been stolen and how much the window was going to cost me, when I saw the door below it. The rear driver’s side door, and only the rear driver’s door was pushed in grotesquely. The front door and the rear fender panel were mercifully untouched, but that rear door got smacked. Pushed in from an epicenter just low and inside of the handle, three parallel rasps in the paint like it might have been caused by a swipe of a bear’s claw.
Glass crumbled out of the window when I put the key in the door and again when I turned it. A lot more fell out when I opened the driver’s door. I saw the note on the driver’s seat and was optimistic for a moment. Black ball point on wide ruled yellow legal paper:
sat 4/9
1 pm
a passing witness saw someone
back out of a driveway and hit your car
(license # omitted)
red truck
I begged off the movie, Alba or no, but to do so I actually had to drive to the theater. The rest of the window fell out as I drove, most into the back seat but some into the door itself. I could here it like shifting sand whenever I made a turn. I got a cheesesteak and made my excuses. This was a somewhat ticklish situation, involving as it did trying to normalize relations with an ex-lover, and while there was sympathy for my damaged door, my motives were questioned, and I can not say that before I saw the dent I wasn’t trying to figure out some way to bail.
Anyway, I was now faced with decision of what to do with my car now missing a window. I was reticent about leaving it on the street, but I do not have a garage. I do know of a sort of off street situation, sort of, and there is even a space within this situation where I could make the windowless door all but inaccessible. This spot, which I often find vacant when I don’t really need it, has, since I have been watching it, been occupied by a little BMW that looks like a snake. I took another spot in the little lot, and have been checking in regularly, but the insurance company is going to take a while, like a week maybe, to get me a check.
I should have gone over yesterday, but I had called the insurance company in the morning, and they told me to get a police report, and sort of encouraged the idea that they would pursue the hit-&-runner and try to recoup their money and my deductible. I do not believe this, and Officer Espinoza was careful to tell me that this was not going to happen several times. I was not sure if she was trying to get out of taking the report or if she just didn’t want mt calling looking for results. Whatever her motive, she booked the note into evidence, then looked up the license and told me it was a Chevy truck. Then she asked me if I had any relatives that might have been driving a pickup truck Saturday afternoon. It only took me a minute to realize that this meant the registered owner has the same last name as me.
Later, walking up to the park after I decided to leave the car where it is and do laundry rather than cross the bridge and play cards, I saw the big Chevy truck with the license plate matching the one in the note. Not really much I can do about it unless I was willing to physically confront the guy, which I am not, and I sort of have some karma coming in the old hit-&-run department, so I don’t want to needlessly persecute the dude, although he did paste my door, which means I he was either backing up real fast or he hit it and didn’t give a shit and just kept coming. Doesn’t matter, though, insurance should pay most of it, and maybe I can find someplace that will do it for what they give me and I can skirt paying the deductible. I need to do something about the window soon though. In the meantime the Oaks Club parking lot has security.
4/5/05 Oaks Club $2-4 Hold’em12:15-4:15 PM
In $60 Out $66 +$6
Hours Played 2005: 83.25 YTD: -$529
If it’s not one goddam thing it is another. Saturday night, as I trudged up 20th Street to get into my car to go see the SIN CITY movie (there are those in the crowd who will remember that in the halcyon days of LOS SINVERGUENZAS de CIUDAD JUAREZ, and the brief period that crisp fall when the bullring we inhabited was named for Jessica Alba), I saw the glass in the street. I was processing the idea that I had been broken into and what might have been stolen and how much the window was going to cost me, when I saw the door below it. The rear driver’s side door, and only the rear driver’s door was pushed in grotesquely. The front door and the rear fender panel were mercifully untouched, but that rear door got smacked. Pushed in from an epicenter just low and inside of the handle, three parallel rasps in the paint like it might have been caused by a swipe of a bear’s claw.
Glass crumbled out of the window when I put the key in the door and again when I turned it. A lot more fell out when I opened the driver’s door. I saw the note on the driver’s seat and was optimistic for a moment. Black ball point on wide ruled yellow legal paper:
sat 4/9
1 pm
a passing witness saw someone
back out of a driveway and hit your car
(license # omitted)
red truck
I begged off the movie, Alba or no, but to do so I actually had to drive to the theater. The rest of the window fell out as I drove, most into the back seat but some into the door itself. I could here it like shifting sand whenever I made a turn. I got a cheesesteak and made my excuses. This was a somewhat ticklish situation, involving as it did trying to normalize relations with an ex-lover, and while there was sympathy for my damaged door, my motives were questioned, and I can not say that before I saw the dent I wasn’t trying to figure out some way to bail.
Anyway, I was now faced with decision of what to do with my car now missing a window. I was reticent about leaving it on the street, but I do not have a garage. I do know of a sort of off street situation, sort of, and there is even a space within this situation where I could make the windowless door all but inaccessible. This spot, which I often find vacant when I don’t really need it, has, since I have been watching it, been occupied by a little BMW that looks like a snake. I took another spot in the little lot, and have been checking in regularly, but the insurance company is going to take a while, like a week maybe, to get me a check.
I should have gone over yesterday, but I had called the insurance company in the morning, and they told me to get a police report, and sort of encouraged the idea that they would pursue the hit-&-runner and try to recoup their money and my deductible. I do not believe this, and Officer Espinoza was careful to tell me that this was not going to happen several times. I was not sure if she was trying to get out of taking the report or if she just didn’t want mt calling looking for results. Whatever her motive, she booked the note into evidence, then looked up the license and told me it was a Chevy truck. Then she asked me if I had any relatives that might have been driving a pickup truck Saturday afternoon. It only took me a minute to realize that this meant the registered owner has the same last name as me.
Later, walking up to the park after I decided to leave the car where it is and do laundry rather than cross the bridge and play cards, I saw the big Chevy truck with the license plate matching the one in the note. Not really much I can do about it unless I was willing to physically confront the guy, which I am not, and I sort of have some karma coming in the old hit-&-run department, so I don’t want to needlessly persecute the dude, although he did paste my door, which means I he was either backing up real fast or he hit it and didn’t give a shit and just kept coming. Doesn’t matter, though, insurance should pay most of it, and maybe I can find someplace that will do it for what they give me and I can skirt paying the deductible. I need to do something about the window soon though. In the meantime the Oaks Club parking lot has security.
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