It Might Be Your Alternator…Part 1
The first of a three-part saga where my car keeps breaking down at inopportune times and the lengths I go through to get her fixed. In this adventure: I have a hectic day at my Spanish class after being forced to walk to school.
I was so pissed off I couldn’t talk. Well, I could, but it didn’t make much sense.
"This—mother of—I can’t believe—son of a—are you kidding me?!" And so it went, as I frantically turned the key in the ignition over and over again and got nothing but a "click-click-click" and then silence. And then I didn’t even have the "click-click." It was official—my car was dead.
This had happened before, when I first moved to Tampa. I was getting ready to leave for work when my car wouldn’t start; the battery had died. I didn’t really know anybody and the only person I did know who lived in town—my best-friend-now-roommate-Goldie—wasn’t home. I ended up asking my neighbors downstairs, a nice, hospitable Hispanic family, to help me jumpstart my car. They, in turn, ended up asking the neighbors who lived across from me to help me jumpstart my car because something was wrong with their truck. To make a long story short, the neighbors across from me jumpstarted my car and I got the battery replaced and went on to work. The whole ordeal was a pain in the ass.
And now it was happening again. I couldn’t believe it. Ever since I left Perry, it seemed that my car—a 1997 Saturn SL-2 that I affectionately called Big Green—had given me nothing but trouble. It was as if she was making a conscious decision to crap out on me. And it was always when I had to be somewhere. Last time it was work. This time it was Spanish class.
I liked Spanish class. I thought it was interesting and I was actually learning something, as opposed to high school, where I spent the majority of my Spanish II class trying to figure out which eye was my teacher’s glass eye. And my professor was cute. He was a grad student named Juan and he was from Colombia. He had the most intense dark eyes I had ever seen and an awesome accent. I loved watching him teach and would study every detail I could see from my seat in the classroom.
And now today, thanks to my crappy, rattle-trap piece of tin, it looked like I wouldn’t get to see or hear Juan. My Spanish class was starting and I still had to find some way to get there. My roommates, Goldie and her fiancé, Jarvis, had already left. Everybody else I knew was either in class or at work. I toyed with the notion of riding my bike, but when I attempted to try to half-roll, half-carry it down the stairs (our apartment was on the top floor), I realized that it was more trouble than it was worth.
"Screw you!" I yelled at my bicycle, slamming it against the railing. "Your seat hurts my ass whenever I ride you anyway!" I pounded down the stairs. I was left with no other option than to walk to school.
As I passed by Big Green, I gave her the finger. "I hate you!" I said. I trudged across the parking lot and out of the complex, carrying my backpack and my purse, praying to God it wouldn’t rain—it looked like it was starting to cloud up. I crossed the street to the sidewalk and walked up to Fowler Avenue.
As I crossed Fowler Avenue, I felt like the world’s biggest dumbass. First of all, I wasn’t dressed for a hike to class—I was wearing a nice brown sleeveless sweater that accented my waist nicely, jeans and black boots. I had makeup on and my hair was styled perfectly. Second of all, I realized I was going the long way to USF, but I didn’t turn around and go back because then I would look like a total moron. Instead I set my jaw and trudged on, trying not to think about how late I would be for my Spanish class.
Crossing Fowler Avenue is like playing a real-life game of Frogger. Looking both ways and walking safely to the other side isn’t possible because you are invisible to drivers. That and drivers assume that you’ll be out of their way before their gas-guzzling, four-door SUV’s come hurling through the intersection at 50 miles per hour directly in your path. The only way to cross Fowler is to say a Hail Mary and hit the pavement, running, NEVER walking and never looking back. Sometimes it’s good to run with your eyes shut tight so you don’t see the vehicles of death plowing towards you. If and when you do make it to the other side alive, it’s always good to thank God and ask forgiveness for all of your sins so you’ll have a clean slate just in case you’re not that lucky on the return trip. When you cross Fowler, you take your life into your own hands.
So when I got the little blinking man giving me the go-ahead to cross (which, minds you, blinks for all of two seconds before you get the red hand that gives drivers the go ahead to hit the pedal to the medal and hope they don’t hit you), I took a deep breath, shut my eyes and hauled ass as fast as I could through the intersection. I made it to the other side without event and as I walked down 50th street, I began to go over my list of sins and ask forgiveness of God.
I got to the end my list as I approached the entrance to campus. I noticed how much I was sweating and stinking at the Park ‘N Ride bus stop two minutes later. Then I looked at my watch and saw that I was 20 minutes late to class. Great, I thought, not only will I be inexcusably late, I’ll be as rank as that hippie in Goldie’s fiction class. Earlier that day, my roommate had mentioned that there was this bearded guy in her fiction class who literally stunk up the entire classroom, causing her stomach to turn. What was worse, Goldie continued, was that he was very self-confident. She was of the belief that somebody who smelled that bad had no reason to have that much self-confidence.
I waited for the campus bus a full five minutes before I decided to trudge on to class by foot. By this time I was almost a half-hour late. I cut behind the new gym built especially for the university’s athletes, across the parking lot, between the education building and Burger King and finally up the stairs to the second floor of Cooper Hall, where I tried to go as unannounced as possible into my Spanish class. It didn’t work. The heavy door slammed shut behind me and Juan and half the class looked up from the Spanish song lyrics they were reading. A salsa song was playing on the portable stereo Juan had brought and some guy was singing about a girl named Maria.
I managed a sheepish smile and sat down at the first empty desk I came across. Juan came over and gave me a copy of the song lyrics and then went back to singing along with the song, urging the class to join him. The minute I began to follow along, however, the song ended.
"Take out a sheet of paper," Juan said. The class groaned and I began to have a miniature panic attack in my brain. A quiz? A QUIZ?! I didn’t know we were having a quiz! What are we being quizzed on? We just had a quiz yesterday! My face is so oily and gross!
"First question," began Juan, "Who are the characters in the song?"
I began to relax a little. This wasn’t so bad. I scanned the lyrics and quickly scribbled down Maria Theresa, Danillo, Alejandro and Lucia.
"Second question," continued Juan, "Who is Lucia marrying?"
Uh-oh. The panic attack started up again. I read over the lyrics again and again and nothing was making sense. What is the Spanish word for marrying? I thumbed through my Spanish-to-English dictionary like a madwoman. I finally wrote down the first name I saw—Alejandro.
"Third question: How come Danillo won’t let Lucia go through with the marriage?"
Crap, crap, CRAP!! my mind screamed. I looked at the lyrics, trying to recognize any words. I was able to make out the words father (padre), mother (madre), brother (hermano), kitchen (cocina) and love (amor). What does it all mean? I tried frantically to piece it together and, realizing I was running out of time, wrote down an elaborate, bullcrap answer: "The family and Lucia are at odds and her father, mother and brother won’t let the marriage take place without their blessing. They tell Lucia this while they are in the kitchen eating dinner one night and she responds by saying that she loves her groom." I didn’t even want to imagine what Juan would think when he read my answers.
"Final question: What is the twist at the end?"
I didn’t even try to make out the words. I was freaking out so much that any attempts to understand the foreign language that was neatly typed out on the sheet I held in my hands would have been useless. I instead pulled another answer out of my butt: "Lucia is really a man." I handed in my quiz without making eye contact with Juan.
* * *
After another sweating, stinking, life-threatening journey back to my apartment, I made a phone call to my father and explained to him what was going on. Since this had happened before, Pops suggested that I keep jumpstarting the car (jumpstarting Big Green seemed to make her run for short periods of time) until he and the family made it down for the weekend (they were coming for my Easter confirmation the following Sunday). He speculated that it was the battery again, that I must have gotten a bad one.
Goldie speculated otherwise. After I finished relaying the day’s events to her, she responded, "It might be your alternator."
"It might," I said. "Pops seems to think it’s the battery."
That weekend, after much arguing with the guy at Advanced Discount Auto Parts, Pops got the battery replaced and Big Green ran like a charm.
"This—mother of—I can’t believe—son of a—are you kidding me?!" And so it went, as I frantically turned the key in the ignition over and over again and got nothing but a "click-click-click" and then silence. And then I didn’t even have the "click-click." It was official—my car was dead.
This had happened before, when I first moved to Tampa. I was getting ready to leave for work when my car wouldn’t start; the battery had died. I didn’t really know anybody and the only person I did know who lived in town—my best-friend-now-roommate-Goldie—wasn’t home. I ended up asking my neighbors downstairs, a nice, hospitable Hispanic family, to help me jumpstart my car. They, in turn, ended up asking the neighbors who lived across from me to help me jumpstart my car because something was wrong with their truck. To make a long story short, the neighbors across from me jumpstarted my car and I got the battery replaced and went on to work. The whole ordeal was a pain in the ass.
And now it was happening again. I couldn’t believe it. Ever since I left Perry, it seemed that my car—a 1997 Saturn SL-2 that I affectionately called Big Green—had given me nothing but trouble. It was as if she was making a conscious decision to crap out on me. And it was always when I had to be somewhere. Last time it was work. This time it was Spanish class.
I liked Spanish class. I thought it was interesting and I was actually learning something, as opposed to high school, where I spent the majority of my Spanish II class trying to figure out which eye was my teacher’s glass eye. And my professor was cute. He was a grad student named Juan and he was from Colombia. He had the most intense dark eyes I had ever seen and an awesome accent. I loved watching him teach and would study every detail I could see from my seat in the classroom.
And now today, thanks to my crappy, rattle-trap piece of tin, it looked like I wouldn’t get to see or hear Juan. My Spanish class was starting and I still had to find some way to get there. My roommates, Goldie and her fiancé, Jarvis, had already left. Everybody else I knew was either in class or at work. I toyed with the notion of riding my bike, but when I attempted to try to half-roll, half-carry it down the stairs (our apartment was on the top floor), I realized that it was more trouble than it was worth.
"Screw you!" I yelled at my bicycle, slamming it against the railing. "Your seat hurts my ass whenever I ride you anyway!" I pounded down the stairs. I was left with no other option than to walk to school.
As I passed by Big Green, I gave her the finger. "I hate you!" I said. I trudged across the parking lot and out of the complex, carrying my backpack and my purse, praying to God it wouldn’t rain—it looked like it was starting to cloud up. I crossed the street to the sidewalk and walked up to Fowler Avenue.
As I crossed Fowler Avenue, I felt like the world’s biggest dumbass. First of all, I wasn’t dressed for a hike to class—I was wearing a nice brown sleeveless sweater that accented my waist nicely, jeans and black boots. I had makeup on and my hair was styled perfectly. Second of all, I realized I was going the long way to USF, but I didn’t turn around and go back because then I would look like a total moron. Instead I set my jaw and trudged on, trying not to think about how late I would be for my Spanish class.
Crossing Fowler Avenue is like playing a real-life game of Frogger. Looking both ways and walking safely to the other side isn’t possible because you are invisible to drivers. That and drivers assume that you’ll be out of their way before their gas-guzzling, four-door SUV’s come hurling through the intersection at 50 miles per hour directly in your path. The only way to cross Fowler is to say a Hail Mary and hit the pavement, running, NEVER walking and never looking back. Sometimes it’s good to run with your eyes shut tight so you don’t see the vehicles of death plowing towards you. If and when you do make it to the other side alive, it’s always good to thank God and ask forgiveness for all of your sins so you’ll have a clean slate just in case you’re not that lucky on the return trip. When you cross Fowler, you take your life into your own hands.
So when I got the little blinking man giving me the go-ahead to cross (which, minds you, blinks for all of two seconds before you get the red hand that gives drivers the go ahead to hit the pedal to the medal and hope they don’t hit you), I took a deep breath, shut my eyes and hauled ass as fast as I could through the intersection. I made it to the other side without event and as I walked down 50th street, I began to go over my list of sins and ask forgiveness of God.
I got to the end my list as I approached the entrance to campus. I noticed how much I was sweating and stinking at the Park ‘N Ride bus stop two minutes later. Then I looked at my watch and saw that I was 20 minutes late to class. Great, I thought, not only will I be inexcusably late, I’ll be as rank as that hippie in Goldie’s fiction class. Earlier that day, my roommate had mentioned that there was this bearded guy in her fiction class who literally stunk up the entire classroom, causing her stomach to turn. What was worse, Goldie continued, was that he was very self-confident. She was of the belief that somebody who smelled that bad had no reason to have that much self-confidence.
I waited for the campus bus a full five minutes before I decided to trudge on to class by foot. By this time I was almost a half-hour late. I cut behind the new gym built especially for the university’s athletes, across the parking lot, between the education building and Burger King and finally up the stairs to the second floor of Cooper Hall, where I tried to go as unannounced as possible into my Spanish class. It didn’t work. The heavy door slammed shut behind me and Juan and half the class looked up from the Spanish song lyrics they were reading. A salsa song was playing on the portable stereo Juan had brought and some guy was singing about a girl named Maria.
I managed a sheepish smile and sat down at the first empty desk I came across. Juan came over and gave me a copy of the song lyrics and then went back to singing along with the song, urging the class to join him. The minute I began to follow along, however, the song ended.
"Take out a sheet of paper," Juan said. The class groaned and I began to have a miniature panic attack in my brain. A quiz? A QUIZ?! I didn’t know we were having a quiz! What are we being quizzed on? We just had a quiz yesterday! My face is so oily and gross!
"First question," began Juan, "Who are the characters in the song?"
I began to relax a little. This wasn’t so bad. I scanned the lyrics and quickly scribbled down Maria Theresa, Danillo, Alejandro and Lucia.
"Second question," continued Juan, "Who is Lucia marrying?"
Uh-oh. The panic attack started up again. I read over the lyrics again and again and nothing was making sense. What is the Spanish word for marrying? I thumbed through my Spanish-to-English dictionary like a madwoman. I finally wrote down the first name I saw—Alejandro.
"Third question: How come Danillo won’t let Lucia go through with the marriage?"
Crap, crap, CRAP!! my mind screamed. I looked at the lyrics, trying to recognize any words. I was able to make out the words father (padre), mother (madre), brother (hermano), kitchen (cocina) and love (amor). What does it all mean? I tried frantically to piece it together and, realizing I was running out of time, wrote down an elaborate, bullcrap answer: "The family and Lucia are at odds and her father, mother and brother won’t let the marriage take place without their blessing. They tell Lucia this while they are in the kitchen eating dinner one night and she responds by saying that she loves her groom." I didn’t even want to imagine what Juan would think when he read my answers.
"Final question: What is the twist at the end?"
I didn’t even try to make out the words. I was freaking out so much that any attempts to understand the foreign language that was neatly typed out on the sheet I held in my hands would have been useless. I instead pulled another answer out of my butt: "Lucia is really a man." I handed in my quiz without making eye contact with Juan.
* * *
After another sweating, stinking, life-threatening journey back to my apartment, I made a phone call to my father and explained to him what was going on. Since this had happened before, Pops suggested that I keep jumpstarting the car (jumpstarting Big Green seemed to make her run for short periods of time) until he and the family made it down for the weekend (they were coming for my Easter confirmation the following Sunday). He speculated that it was the battery again, that I must have gotten a bad one.
Goldie speculated otherwise. After I finished relaying the day’s events to her, she responded, "It might be your alternator."
"It might," I said. "Pops seems to think it’s the battery."
That weekend, after much arguing with the guy at Advanced Discount Auto Parts, Pops got the battery replaced and Big Green ran like a charm.
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