This Car Isn’t Working Properly, Sir

I become obsessed with a detail of my new car, but when I arrive at the coffee shop something really deserving attention occurs.

Transcript

I became suspicious of and disappointed in the car as soon as I stopped at my first red light. Pedestrians strode on the crosswalk in front of me, a couple, a senior slowly making her way with a walker, and four teenaged dudes carrying on in exactly the same way that they had been when they were on the sidewalk. Everyone was oblivious to this, let’s call me a distinguished gentleman, waiting at the light and now looking down at his dashboard, partly to admire its newness, its differences from his previous car, and partly so see what the options and arrangement were.

I’m fussy about the way things are organized. Why did they put this button there when obviously it should be here? I got caught up in the examination so much that the light turned green and my eyes were still making their way back and forth across the dash, and then someone jolted me back to practicality when he blew his horn behind me, and a small part of me hated the fact that he probably thought I was surreptitiously texting, my phone straddled between my knees so that nobody could tell.

I hit the gas pedal fast and that’s when I noticed it, and my broken buyer’s-remorse heart was left behind in about the middle of the crosswalk. It was one of those cars where the engine seems to turn off, maybe really does turn off, and then you hear it starting up again, and it starts moving again. I’m an efficient person and I like for mechanical and electronic things to work the same way the light switches do in my apartment. There’s no delay when I click one. The light just comes on in the room.

This whole thing soured me on the car in about a nanosecond, and my first instinct, because efficiency can mean wanting to immediately fix the problem, was to drive to the dealership and start ranting at the hapless sales rep about the undisclosed fault which they and the federal department of the environment consider a feature. All I could imagine though is that in the course of a day I stop, what, hundreds of times, and how is that starter going to survive more than a month with all this off’ing and on’ing?

“Sir,” I was told, a little officiously if you ask me, “nearly all cars manufactured today have this feature.” (That word again.) “It’s an eco thing,” he said, as if eco is a real word that people should be using in public. “It’s for the environment.”

I stopped listening by the time he had started his spiel about why this was not only a great idea, but also even required in new models.

“There’s a solution, though,” he said, and suddenly my ever-vigilant attention kicked back in, kind of like the engine when I was at that red light turning green, but faster. “A button,” he continued, “but”—and here I prepared myself for the worst, like, but, it’s going to cost $2,500 to modify it, or, but yours is the last model year where this can be adjusted. But the but turned out to be a real fix, kind of, in the sense that it actually did work when you clicked this button on the lower dash, but the kicker is that you have to do that every time you get back in the car after having shut off the engine. I complained about this, self-righteously, in the style of the old man who not only wants those damn kids to stay off his lawn, but keeps the beach balls and the badminton shuttlecocks that get bounced or hit into his back yard when the neighbours’ kids are playing. (Noisily, often.) If I’m not in the yard at the time, they know well enough from past encounters not to trespass, but if I’m there they nervously ask me to throw the thing back, but I lie transparently that nothing came over the fence. I know I’m lying and so do they, and they don’t ask a second time.

I lightened up a bit at the car dealer when I thought, You know, I could get used to pushing that button each time, like a ritual, right after I start the engine. I apologized to him for some of the words I had used, and for the few instances when my voice reached the level of what could only be called shouting, and shuffled out of the dealership while I heard tittering behind me. Would love to be able to turn that off, I thought.

The coffee shop I ended up at checked off several important criteria. Finding free parking was easy, they had Canadiano made from espresso beans that they roasted themselves, they had the elusive scones that seem so hard to find in this city of cakey muffins, and they had a basic and inexpensive breakfast sandwich on which everything was fresh and the topper, literally and figuratively, was arugula. My God, it was all so delicious. The food was finished off faster than is really proper in polite company, and so I was left with a half a glass of iced coffee while I surveyed the room and caught glances of various people and couples. The plants really stood out in the place, some of them a good two or three metres high, and I didn’t like that some of the leaves at the top were brown, perhaps moribund, perhaps already dead. The chair accommodated the typical Canadian ass, a bit more room on the sides, please, instead of constraining me onto a hard metal thing that had a small footprint but also dug the bottom of its back into the bottom of mine. I’ve sat in even worse, where the place on the chair where the back meets the seat (its seat) is both narrow and high, and so pinches my love handles, as Carly calls them, and of course a man doesn’t want his handles pinched nor to be reminded that he has them in the first place.

Then things changed. Changed so much that your brain can’t process immediately what is going on, but by the time mine had done its work I could see that there was a skinny young man at the cash register with a very bulky gun in his hand.

“Not just this register, but the other fuckin’ one, too,” he said.

The maker of the coffee and sandwiches was calm. Maybe robberies happen regularly and so she was just going through learned motions. Maybe they never happen, and so the shock of it made her treat the incident as if it were just a guy ordering a latte. Some people had run out of the store, abandoning not only beverages but laptops in some cases. I’m easily prompted to crankiness as you may have surmised, and I hated the fact that the peace of the room had been disrupted, and furthermore that a sudden or wrong move could result in someone getting a bullet fired at them.

I remained in my seat, and even as I drew the Canadiano toward my mouth for one of the last sips, I said, not that loudly but audible because there was absolute silence in the room: “Hey, shit-stink, take whatever money you’ve got from that one register and fuck off out of here.”

The silence got more silent. He looked at me, up and down and sideways. I think he was trying to see if it were an even bigger gun that was giving me the oomph to say what I said. To say anything.

He saw nothing except a man laying his now empty glass onto his table. “What the fuck did you say?”

“I think you heard me, dickweed. Haul your skinny little ass out of here, and use some of the money to buy a fuckin’ belt for fuck sake.”

At that point, he started to walk toward me, and I didn’t even follow him with my eyes. I was looking down at the concentric circles that the coffee glass had made due to the lack of coasters. But I felt him, I could sense his distance. Just when I knew he could blow my head off if he wanted to, I shouted, to nobody because nobody was in on this, I shouted, “Get him!”

The dumb fucker actually turned around to face the horde he expected to be heading his way, but people were in their exact same positions, like mannequins. That’s when I kicked the bottom of his hand and the gun hit the corner of a counter in an odd way and then fell straight down onto the floor.

The calculators started working fast in everyone’s head, and, led by a guy at least twice his size, maybe seven or eight people jumped on him. Money was restored, the police were called, and he got a gratuitous kick in the forehead from the guy with the Marilyn Manson boots who had been sitting alone in the corner.

I couldn’t think of how I could just stay there and order another cup, and so I retrieved my soiled dishes from the table and put them in the little tub they had for that purpose. I walked out slowly, feeling eyes on me, hearing words here and there, hero, I think, and holy fuck, and who was that masked man? It made up completely for the tittering at the car dealership.