Car-ry Me Home

Thanks, big parking lot.

My car's brakes gave out today in the parking lot after work. Somehow I had traveled the 30 miles to work uneventfully, listening to my iPod and the occasional fundraiser on NPR, National Public Radio. After work, however, I got in my Toyota, plugged in my 'Pod, and got ready to go for the next hour and a half -- only to find out that my li'l teal twelve-year-old sedan didn't want to stop, even at 10 miles per hour. I pressed on the brake -- and nothing happened. I slammed the brake really hard and only then did it make a half-hearted stop... with the momentum of a seventy-five-year-old snail.

Now I don't know much about cars, except for this: they're supposed to move when told, they're supposed to (hopefully) be safe, and they're not supposed to make start-and-stop decisions on their own. The Toyota was not behaving according to the protocol it had followed since I learned to drive it at age 16. I've never yet been towed or ticketed or any of that stuff that happens to mortals in the span of a normal American lifetime.

So I did the next most logical thing and called my mother, who is wise and all-knowing in these types of situations.

"Drive around the parking lot," she said. "See if it happens when you restart."

I restarted, and a little red brake light came on. Bad, bad. Maybe I can make it to the street, I thought, maybe I just pressed the brake too softly? (Could be the shoes!) I started driving around the parking lot but the Toyota still went all "free" on me, leaving black streaks of brake fluid on the pavement behind and refusing to stop at all. Marking its territory. Luckily there weren't a lot of other cars around, but I pressed this way and that way, and it just kept going at the very dangerous speed of 10 mph. But it's the principle of the thing.

I got to the center of the parking lot and, after trying to stop using conventional means, ended the little adventure by putting the car in neutral and using the hand brake to lock it dead where it was in the center of the parking lot. And there it sat for an hour while I, pissed off and flustered, hobbled back into my office and called triple A to come and tow my baby away.

As I waited for an hour for AAA to come rescue me in time for dinner, I tried not to think that if this had happened but two minutes later, I would have been brake-less on I-95/128 during rush hour.

But at least the tow guy gave me a ride to Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, in the span of two hours; with me $66 poorer, my dad picked me up and we left ol' T there at the mechanic's, for fixin' 'em brakes, so she can be 'er wild self again.

Every day's sure a ride, ain't it. Tomorrow I'm taking the Subaru.