The Monster at the End of This Book

Three days before Christmas, I got into a car accident.  My first one, hitting another car, while in motion (hitting parked vehicles and low stone walls as I’m backing out of a parking space doesn’t count).  I was driving and a car pulled out right in front of me, then the driver froze, too close for me to stop my vehicle’s momentum. 

It was a fender bender.  No injuries to either party.  Just bumper dents, scratches, cracks, a broken headlight, some body dents.  It was still completely driveable.  I thought, I am so lucky. 

The insurance company, however, saw repairing it as a loss, so on Christmas Eve Day, they totaled it.  Talk about shocked; I truly did not expect that to be their verdict.  I thought if it wasn’t driveable—that was a total loss.  But no, they do math—if the cost to repair it is greater than the worth of the car, they total it.  I could have had it back, tried to repair it myself, but I don’t have any savings, so that would have taken a long time to deal with.  They offered me a settlement check and I took it.  

I looked the day after Christmas for a car.  I made an appointment with a third party seller to test drive the Saturn SL1 he was selling.  It drove well—no knocking or grinding or wiggling or any other scary noises.  It looked in decent shape for a 13-year-old-car.  No rust or oil on the engine.  70,000 less miles than mine had.  No ‘check engine soon’ light.  It wasn’t inspected, but there was no ‘check engine soon’ light.  That’s what you look for. 

I bought the car.  Finagled all of the “bank cashing my check before meeting the guy to sign the paperwork and get it registered and inspected before I go back to work” dance.  I even had money left over from the settlement, after all was said and done.  I went to go start it, after it was sitting in my driveway, and the ignition wouldn’t turn.  Okay.  I called the seller to see if there was a trick to starting it that I didn’t know about.  No rings on his cellphone, straight to voicemail--he probably threw the phone away after we shook hands.  I called mobile a locksmith out—which Triple A wouldn’t cover because the car wasn’t registered.  I couldn’t register it without the mileage, which I had to turn the car on to see.  You get the Catch-22.  The key was so worn, it wouldn’t turn the pin anymore.  I got two new keys made, and they worked perfectly. 

It didn’t pass inspection.  Okay.  Minor things that Martin says are easy fixes that he can help me with, like the O2 sensor, spark plugs, exhaust valve.  But my mechanic said the ‘check engine’ light should also light up when the ignition starts the car—there might be a bulb out or they sometimes put black tape over it, so it doesn’t show as lit when you start it up for a test drive.  I looked closer and sure enough, I saw the tape I hadn’t seen on the test drive, bubbling slightly though it had been carefully pressed flat.  Son of a bitch…I had my mechanic fail the car so I could buy time and have another 30 days to get it fixed. 

I’ve been driving it around to run errands and it runs well.  It’s a little ragged on the inside, but all things I can fix.  I can decorate it and make it an art car.  It has manual door locks and roll-up windows, which I didn’t even notice on the day I saw it.  Fuck.  But it has a new stereo (NOT $400 like the seller had said it cost—we saw it for $50 at WalMart…) and it works.  I don’t like that the seller didn’t inform me of certain things, and tried to hide the ‘check engine’ light…but the car runs.  It gets me from place to place reliably, and that’s all I need.  And I maintain: I am so lucky. 

But the real reason I’m telling you this is that I’d been telling myself a story for the last three years: if I lose my car, and can’t get to modeling gigs, I am FUCKED.  I kept internally hoping that my car would last and last and last.  Because if it didn’t, THEN what the fuck would I do??   That would be one of the WORST possible things that could happen regarding my career and supporting myself (another of those would be injury, and the absolute WORST would be death itself).   

If you remember the Little Golden Book, “The Monster at the End of This Book”, it was like Grover being so impossibly scared of the monster he had heard about that would be at the end of the book.  Each page, he was more and more TERRIFIED that it would be the end of him when he got to the last page.  But when he gets to the last page (because you MUST reach the last page, always)…the monster is HIM, something that had never occurred to him in his fear frenzy.  

Losing the car is the fear of the monster at the end of the book.  Quickly and easily finding another car that I could afford is seeing that the monster was simply my fear all along, and that there was no actual monster.  

And we all have monsters that we are scared to death of meeting face-to-face: losing our partners, our kids, our parents, our jobs, our homes, our health, our minds, our bodies, our dignity, our power…But what if the monster comes (or doesn’t come) and it’s not what we think it is and…we survive it?  Because sometimes, that’s all we need to do to understand that this, too, as shitty as it is, shall pass.  As long as I am above the ground, I will survive this, too.   I will figure it out.   It may take time, it may take grieving and a lot of counseling and support and crying and shouting and rending of garments, but I’ll figure it out.  

There is no monster.

(Wait for it….)

Only Zuul.