It Might Be Your Alternator…Pt. 2

I was on my way to my Beginning Reporting lab when I noticed that Big Green was driving a little funny. A few days before, she started making a high-pitched squeal whenever I started her up and hit the gas. After a few minutes the squealing would stop, but it was annoying nonetheless. Although she was driving okay, I decided to call my dad to see if he knew what was wrong.

"But she’s driving okay?" Pops said after I got through explaining what was going on.

"Yeah."

"As long as she’s driving okay," he said. He didn’t sound concerned, so I figured that what was causing the squealing, although annoying as hell, was something minor. Big Green was old and had a lot of miles on her.

As I was making the turn at 50th and Fowler to go to my class, however, I noticed that Big Green was slow to start moving—kind of like when you’re first learning how to drive a stick shift and you’re going way too fast in first gear but too afraid to shift the car into second. As a result, you’re going down the road with the car dragging its ass and making a God-awful, "RRRRREEEEEEEE" while the RPM needle is inching its way up to 3—and you’re still in first. This was how Big Green was driving.

When I turned onto the USF campus, I noticed that the RPM needle was fluctuating between 0 and 3 and that the speedometer was dead on 0 MPH. I knew I had to be going at least 30 MPH. Big Green was dragging. I tried not to panic as my imagination went into overdrive and I saw my car blow up, right there in the middle of Alumni Drive, with me inside of it. That’s one of my worst fears, my car blowing up with me still inside and no matter how irrational this sounds, whenever my car starts acting funny, a little part of me is afraid that it will blow up.

My car didn’t blow up, and I managed to park and get to my class on time. I tried calling Pops to tell him what was going on, but his cell was in a "no service" area—he told me so when he called back, two minutes before my class was to begin. I quickly gave him a run-down of what Big Green was doing and then my professor walked in.

"Bye, Pops, my professor just walked in, I’ll call you after class!" I finished hurriedly, and hung up.

* * *

At 2:00 p.m., my class was over. It was supposed to end at 1:50, but the professor kept us ten minutes late, she said, as makeup for letting us out at 1:15 throughout the semester. She claimed that she didn’t know the class was supposed to end at 1:50—although she kept asking, "What time does this class get out?" the first three consecutive times we met. As soon as I walked out the door, I fumbled around in my purse for my cell phone.

"Okay, what exactly is Big Green doing?" Pops asked when he picked up. I told him again how she was acting.

"Did the squealing stop?"

I paused. "You know, it has," I said. I hadn’t noticed it until then. Funny.

"Okay, was she making any other weird noises while you were driving to class?"

"No, not really," I said. I exited the Communication and Information Sciences building and started walking across the parking lot to my car.

"Was she making a sound kind of like this: ‘RRRREEEEEE?’"

"Pops, she wasn’t making any sort of sound. Well, when I put her in park, she made a noise that sounded something like that."

"Like this: ‘RRRRREEEEE?’"

"Yes, Pops." I made it to my car and threw my backpack in the backseat. I hopped in the driver’s seat, inserted my key into the ignition, turned it—and only got a "click, click" sound in return. Crap.

"Pops, now she’s not starting up."

"What’s she doing?"

"Going, ‘click, click, click’ and not starting up."

"The engine won’t turn over?"

"Nope."

"Are any lights flashing?"

"Just the dashboard lights."

"Okay," Pops said. "I need you to check on some things for me." He then had me turn on the car’s dome light and headlights to make sure they were working (they were), and then he had me pop the hood and examine the belt thingy next to the engine. I forget what the name of the belt is; I just refer to it as the "belt thingy next to the engine."

"Does any part of the belt look broken or stretched out?" Pops asked.

"No."

"Push it down. Does it feel stretched out?"

I rolled my eyes and grimaced as I pressed on the belt, thinking of how dirty my hands were getting and reminding myself to NOT wipe them on my pants when I was done. The belt felt normal, I guess; I mean, what was a belt supposed to feel like? How tight was too tight and how elastic was too elastic? I rolled my eyes again. This was another one of those rare occasions where I wished I had a boyfriend. He would come in handy in situations like this.

"It feels normal, Pops," I said.

"Hmmm," Pops paused. "Well, I don’t know what’s wrong."

I sighed and rolled my eyes. "You’re a big help," I muttered.

"What? Well, never mind. Listen, I think our insurance has roadside assistance. Let me make a few phone calls and I’ll call you back," Pops said, and hung up.

While I was waiting for my father to call back, I called in to work and told them I wasn’t sure about the probability of my coming in on time. Luckily, the manager was pretty understanding.

"Do you think you could help us close tonight, though?" she asked. "I only have one other closer."

"If my car gets fixed, then I will help close," I said. "But right now, I have no idea."

"Okay," she said. "Keep us posted…Do you want to kill your car now?"

"Like you wouldn’t believe," I said, and hung up. Pops called a few seconds later, saying that he had made arrangements with a company called Tommy’s Towing to pick me up and take me to the Meineke on Fowler to get Big Green fixed. He gave me the number to call Tommy’s to give them directions to where I was at and told me to call him if I needed anything else.

"Thanks, Pops," I said. "I appreciate it."

"No problem. Take care, I love you."

"Love you too."

I called Tommy’s and gave them directions and they informed me that they were a little behind schedule; one of their tow trucks had broken down. It would be about two hours before someone would be by to pick me up. I looked at my watch. It was 2:30 p.m. Great. What would I do on campus for two hours?

Now in the movies, this would be the part where the so-called damsel in distress would accidentally run into the man that she had a crush on. He would have some time to kill between classes and would ask if she wanted to grab some lunch. She would, of course, accept, and it would be a phenomenal lunch—they would laugh, the conversation would be easy and smooth and there would be this chemistry between them that would be so electrifying that the other restaurant patrons would be able to feel it. However, this was not the movies, it was reality, and instead of accidentally running into Juan, my very cute graduate student Spanish professor, I was on the phone, dialing up people to talk to in order to kill some time. I called my friend Liv, who lived on campus, to see if she wanted to hang out.

"I’m actually at the library right now working on a group project," she said. "But if you’re still on campus when I get done, we can hang out then."

"Alright," I said. "Good luck."

"Thanks. You too."

For the next forty minutes or so, I wandered around campus aimlessly, checking my email and browsing through magazines in the periodical section on the second floor of the library. I kept fantasizing about running into Juan and having that phenomenal lunch, except in my fantasies, that phenomenal lunch would turn into a phenomenal make-out session. And he would be a phenomenal kisser. And whisper stuff in Spanish that I probably wouldn’t be able to understand but would be turned on by it nevertheless because it sounded sexy.

My phone brought me back to reality. It was Liv, letting me know that she was through with her group and could hang out. When I met up with her, she said that she got out earlier than planned because only she and one other girl in her group showed up.

"I’m always the one who gets stuck doing all of the work," she said. "I hate working in groups."

"I know how you feel," I replied. "I do all of the work whenever I have a group project to do as well. I don’t want my grade to suffer because I’m stuck with a bunch of slackers."

"Exactly," she said.

We had a good visit; we ended up in the Marshall Center shooting the breeze, talking about everything from psychotic ex-boyfriends to that dreaded visit to the "woman doctor" and how we were ready for the spring semester to end. At 4:00, the tow truck driver from Tommy’s Towing called, saying he was about twenty minutes away. I said goodbye to Liv and walked back to where my car was parked to wait for him. At 4:20 he pulled up and began to load my car onto the truck. He was a nice guy, talkative, and as he was loading Big Green onto the truck, he asked me what was going on with her.

"It might be your alternator," he said after I told him. I rolled my eyes. Like I hadn’t heard that before.

"Did you run into something?" he asked as the car was being pulled onto the truck. He was staring at Big Green’s beat up rear bumper, a product of an accident that happened early March.

"I got into a wreck last month," I said. "A lady hit me, causing me to hit somebody in front of me."

He looked at me. "That sucks," he said. The look on his face told me he felt bad for me; I could practically hear the unspoken, "poor girl." I didn’t tell him that the real kicker was that a week after the accident, I learned that the lady who hit me didn’t have insurance. Had I told him that, I knew I would have heard the "poor girl."

"I’m ready whenever you are," he said after Big Green was loaded up. I hopped into the passenger’s side of the tow truck, brushing away empty candy wrappers and gingerly placing a Styrofoam Big Gulp cup in the cup holder.

"Sorry, it’s so messy," he apologized as he climbed in.

"It’s okay."

On the way over to Meineke he told me stories about USF students he’s had to tow in the past due to drunkenness or car trouble. One story involved a guy who wasn’t wearing shoes.

"Yeah, the guy climbed out of his car and he wasn’t wearing any shoes!" the driver exclaimed. "It was on the USF campus in the middle of the day, too, really hot."

"There weren’t any shoes in his car or anywhere?" I asked, intrigued in spite of myself. I knew of people who drove around barefoot, but at least they bothered to bring shoes with them. Why somebody would drive to school and go to class with no shoes? Odd.

"Nope," the driver responded. "He climbed into my truck and I took him home and everything and the whole time he wasn’t wearing any shoes."

"That’s so weird," I said.

We arrived at Meineke, I paid the $35 towing fee, got Pops on the phone to talk to Bob the mechanic about what was going on with Big Green (the belt thingy next to the engine had indeed broken, and another part of the belt thingy was messed up as well) and began the long process of waiting for my car to get fixed.

The day ended on a good note: I was out of Meineke by 6 and able to help close the store, Pops was able to pay for the car repairs with his credit card over the phone and I made friends with a lady who was also at Meineke, waiting for her car to get fixed.

"Good," Bob the mechanic said after the lady and I introduced ourselves and told each other what a good time we had talking. "Now all you have to do is break down at the same damn time and you’ll be all set."

On the way to work, I chuckled to myself about what had happened. It was like something out of a movie—except that I never ran into Juan. I toyed with the notion of writing a book called The Story of Us, with "us" being Big Green and myself.