There she was, a spoon in one hand, a bowl in the other, whizzing through our neighborhood at 40 mph with the steering wheel pinched between her knees.
She was obviously crazy. Not the harmless kind of crazy that makes people buy Toby Keith albums or get excited about watching cars race around in circles. I’m talking about the kind of crazy that leads to people biting off other people’s ears during boxing matches or trying to privatize social security.
I decided that I couldn’t keep quiet about it. No matter what the consequences, I had to let this woman know that her behavior was simply unacceptable.
So I turned to her and said, “Honey, can you please not eat cereal while you’re driving!”
But my wife wouldn’t listen.
Remember how in Driver’s Ed. class your teacher always instructed you to drive defensively? It’s because he knew that one day you’d be sharing the road with my wife.
Whether she’s putting on her stockings or trying to balance her checkbook, you can be sure that at any given point while she’s driving, my wife is performing at least one other task that requires the use of both hands and usually a foot or two. I’m pretty sure I once caught her in the middle of a yoga pose while she was driving us to the mall, although I couldn’t prove it.
You know how when people are bowling they do that little dance to help steer their ball away from the gutter? That’s me whenever I see my wife driving down the street, only in my case, the gutter is the oncoming lane of traffic and the pins are the neighbor kids. She is to a highway what a tornado is to a house of cards. If she were a professional wrestler, they’d call her “Royer the Destroyer.”
Riding passenger in my wife’s car always makes for a rather transcendent experience. Watching kitties bounce off your windshield really has a way of putting the rest of your problems into perspective. The fact that I have no clean underwear for work tomorrow, for example, seems like much less of a crisis as my wife and I are plowing through our neighbors’ trashcans or taking out a rhododendron bush.
Whether we’re speeding the wrong way down a one-way street, turning a curve on two wheels at 70 mph or ripping off our bumper as we back into the garage, I can just sit back and relax as what I thought were my biggest problems simply melt away.
There is one small problem that won’t go away, though, and that is the fact that, thanks to my wife’s rather relaxed approach to driving, our car looks worse than Michael Moore in a pair of Daisy Dukes. From the scrapes running the entire length of the car to the ominous poodle-shaped dents on the hood, this vehicle is in sad, sad shape. Any day now, I expect it to follow Vin Diesel’s acting career right into the Cosmic Crapper.
On a good day, the car moves with all the enthusiasm of a fat kid who just got picked for the skins team in gym class, which is a subject I know a thing or two about. It’s really a minor miracle that it even starts at all. Although, once you get that car rolling downhill, it’s a force to be reckoned with. Just ask our neighbors’ cats.
The only thing that looks worse than our car’s exterior is our car’s interior. I’m not sure what happened in there, but it wasn’t good. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that at some point a grizzly bear and a mountain cat must have broken into the car and had a wrestling match in the front seat in a vat of pudding. I mean, there are actual chocolate stains on the ceiling. But I guess that’s what happens when you take a speedbump at 70 mph with a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles in your hand.
So basically, we need a new car. The problem is, I have a hard time justifying going even deeper into debt just so my wife can have a new, more luxurious vehicle with which to terrorize our neighbors’ mailboxes. Although, for as much time as she spends in her car waiting for the cops to fill out accident reports, she might as well have reliable heating and air conditioning.
When the subject comes up – which is only as often as my wife hits something with her car, by which I mean daily – my wife swears that things would be different with a new car. She’d be careful, more responsible. No more backing into our garage when the door is closed. No more sideswiping old ladies walking down the street. She even promises to steer with her actual hands. Which is comforting, if not entirely believable.
I don’t know. Maybe I should be more trusting and just get the new car. Then again, her current car was new when we got it, and now it looks like it’s been trampled by elephants. If we get another car, how do I know that she won’t just get bored with it three weeks later and start using it to knock coconuts out of trees or something?
It’s a real conundrum. Until I get it all sorted out, all I can say is, watch your back. My wife is on the move, and the Wheaties are missing from the cupboard.
I mean, sure, her car looks like it just lost a wrestling match with Anna Nicole Smith over the last Twinkie on earth. But for all we know, all of the damage to her car was caused by a series of completely unavoidable accidents. Maybe it wasn’t really my wife’s fault at all.
Like how her front bumper is twisted up like a pretzel and practically dragging on the ground – I think it would be a mistake to just assume that this was caused by my wife’s allegedly terrible driving. Maybe her car was charged by an angry rhinocerous, and she was lucky to escape with just a busted bumper. Or maybe she saw a bank robbery in progress and rammed the getaway car to foil the crime. You can’t rule that kind of stuff out.
Or how her right tail light has been shattered – who says it’s because she backed into a telephone pole because she never, ever, ever looks behind her before going into reverse? For all we know, she was outside doing some gardening one day when suddenly she saw a senior citizen in a wheelchair speeding wildly down the hill without any brakes, so she jumped in her car, raced down the hill, surpassed the senior citizen, let the wheelchair gently bump into the back of her car, and eased the old man to a stop mere yards from the dangerous intersection at the bottom of the hill.
Sure, the impact of the wheelchair shattered her tail light, but it was a small price to pay for the life of the hapless senior citizen.
Or consider the countless scrapes, scratches and dents that cover her entire car from dangling bumper to bumper. You can’t just assume that these were the result of my wife being the absolute worst driver ever in the history of the world. I mean, maybe she was on her way to the grocery store one afternoon when ... uh ... an airplane transporting thousands of frozen turkeys flew overhead and ... um ... and right when the airplane was over her car, it was struck by lightening and cracked in half, and all of the turkeys fell out and plummeted through the sky right at my wife’s car, and ...
No, I would never, ever call my wife a bad driver. Because she’s not a bad driver. She’s just a terrible parker.
Watching my wife trying to maneuver her car into our garage is like watching Jessica Simpson trying to work her way into a childproof bottle of aspirin. It’s embarrassing for everyone involved, but try as you might, you just can’t make yourself look away from the carnage.
I’ll be standing in the kitchen, tirelessly slaving over dinner as usual, when suddenly I hear the sound of crumpling metal screeching through the air like Joan Rivers on fire. Through the window, I’ll see a hubcap slowly rolling its way from the garage to the front door.
“Hi honey. How was your day?” I’ll say.
“Fine. How was yours?” she’ll reply.
“Pretty good. Was that our hubcap?”
“Shut up.”
“Honey, you can’t just ...”
“Shut up.”
“How hard is it to just ...”
“Shut up.”
“But ...”
“Shut up.”
Fortunately for my blood pressure, I care as much about our cars as I do about Joan Rivers on fire, which is to say, not much. No, that’s not true. If Joan Rivers was really on fire, I’d probably throw some water on her; if my car was on fire, I’d rescue my box of casette tapes and then toast some marshmallows.
But my wife brings up a very good point just now as I’m writing this: without a functioning car, how in the world would she get to Payless each day to buy a new pair of shoes? This is something I had neglected to consider.
But in order to keep her car in top shopping condition, I have to take it to the mechanic approximately once every 15 minutes, which is about how long it takes for my wife to drive her car home from the mechanic’s and try to park it.
The problem with that is, my mechanic is the devil.
I wouldn’t be as frustrated with my mechanic if I didn’t have the sneaking suspicion that he was making stuff up.
“Unfortunately, it looks like you’ve got a major problem with your pim-pom,” my mechanic reported during my last visit.
“My pim-pom?” I winced.
“Oh, yeah. Big time. You’re lucky we caught it when we did. A few more days of driving, and your pim-pom would probably have been grinding right into your patooter – and you know what that means!”
“What?” I gasped.
“Well, for one thing, the heat from your patooter would have worn your snoozle all the way down to the gingerdoodle!” he exclaimed. “And patooter-provoked snoozle-wear on your gingerdoodle is no laughing matter. Why, you’d be lucky to get another five miles out of this car!”
“Five miles?” I cried.
“Tops.”
“Oh, man!”
“Yeah!”
“Whew!”
“Uh-huh!”
“That was close!”
“You bet!”
We stood in silence for a while, shaking our heads and marveling at our good fortune.
“So,” I said, taking in a deep breath, “How much does it cost to replace my ... uh ...”
“Your pim-pom.”
“Sure.”
“Let’s see ...,” said the mechanic, picking up a clipboard and furrowing his brow. “After parts, labor and sales tax, automotive repair tax, repair-of-automotive tax, charging-you-way-too-much-because-you-don’t-know-any-better tax, breaking-stuff-myself-so-I-can-charge-you-to-fix-it tax, and tax tax, your total would be ... $800.”
I peed my pants a little. “$800? American dollars? Like, U.S. dollars? I need to sit down.”
When your car is worth less than the Backstreet Boys’ autograph, it’s difficult to invest another $800 into it. But my wife brings up another very good point just now: if we spent all of our money on a new car instead of fixing up our junker, how in the world would we be able to afford more dogs and the multiple doggie sweaters, doggie hats, and doggie toys that each of them would clearly require?
Yes ... I hadn’t thought of that.
If only our insurance covered rhinocerous attacks.
