Braking Point

Last week, Rhumba and I drove over to the Seabright district after work for an early dinner at Engfer’s Pizza Works. Great pizza, by the way: a thin and smoky-flavored crust; and imaginative combinations of toppings that really work -- try the garlic and pineapple, I dare you. Nothing but top-quality ingredients. And a ping-pong table in the back.

Funny thing about Seabright: it’s this funky little district of Victorian vacation cottages and stucco bungalows, and yet some of the best restaurants in town live there, far off the beaten tourist track. Seabrighters like to eat well, and do. They may dress like hip beachcombers, but they’ve got the bucks.

Afterwards, in no hurry to get home, we cruised down Seabright’s narrow streets through evening sunlight. The many trees are large and old and heavy with foliage. Comfortably run-down wooden homes crowd up to the sidewalk; in places the streets aren’t quite wide enough for two cars to pass. That’s all right; there’s little traffic on these quiet streets, so oncoming vehicles have plenty of leeway to move aside for each other. Usually.

We approached an intersection. At the house on the corner, a bearded man stood on his porch and chatted amiably with a guy on the sidewalk. Rhumba pointed out a interesting old house, and I slowed to see it better.

All the rest of this happened in the space of maybe three seconds:

A bicyclist sped into the intersection from around the left-hand corner, pumping at top speed. He turned into our street without looking ahead of himself: head down, legs a blur of motion, iPod headphones on his ears -- no helmet. So fast did he peddle that he had to swing wide out of the turn. Way, way, wide: when he straightened out he was pointed right at my front bumper.

I jammed on the brakes; we’d only been doing 10 or so, so the car stopped almost immediately. But the bicyclist was doing 20 mph easily, and he stayed on course. He did not even look up and see me until his bicycle was ten or 15 feet from our car. Then he mashed down his brake levers. I heard his tires bite the pavement, saw the bike begin to slow. But it was too late. His bike rammed the front of our car and hurled him straight forward over the handlebars. He slid up the hood and hit the windshield with a mighty THUD. All we could see through the windshield was a disorganized mass of sunburned, hairy flesh. With a few tattoos.

In a second, we all came to ourselves. He slid off the hood and regained his feet. I opened my window and called out, “Are you all right?”

“Oh yeah, I’m fine,” he said in a raspy voice. He was 40 or 50, skin dark and crusty from ‘way too much sun, naked except for cutoffs and a pair of shoes. And tattoos. “My music’s busted, though.” He gestured to the shredded headphones hanging from his belt. Then he picked up his bike and moved toward the back of the car.

“Are you SURE you’re all right?” I asked. I couldn’t see how he could be. I was shaken up, why shouldn’t he be? And he should be hurt, after all that. I got out of the car. But he and his bike were already gone.

This was very confusing. Why was he gone? Was he hurt? Did I do something wrong? The bearded guy and his friend called over to assure me that the bicyclist seemed all right as he pedaled away. Only later did it sink in that the bicyclist was at fault for the collision: he rounded a blind corner at speed and ended up on the wrong side of the (admittedly narrow) street. And he may have intentionally split the scene to avoid trouble: a hit-and-run bicyclist. Or maybe there’s another reason: a severe case of over-extended adolescence? Still immortal after all these years? I’ll never know.

After we got home, Rhumba and I took a good look at the car, and it seemed fine except fa couple of deep scratches in the hood: right down to the metal. Oh, good, souvenirs. Not that I need them: I’ll never forget the sight sound of 200 pounds of brown, hairy meat going SPLAT against the windshield. Never.

But it’s at moments like this one that I’m glad that I’m cheap, and a slob to boot. My car is 15 years old, and I have long since stopped trying to fix all the insults that Santa Cruz (and I) have heaped on it. HERE is the crumpled taillight lens from when I backed into a truck. THERE on the rear bumper is a black oval where a student hit me at a stop light and scaled the paint off the plastic. OVER THERE on the hood, next to the big scratch, is another set of scratches where yet ANOTHER bicyclist hit me years ago -- head on! (What is it with these guys?) Paint on the roof is fading out in patches, and there’s a bubble of rust under the trim along the top of the windshield where water leaks into the cabin during rainstorms. (The windshield guy squirted in some sealer that he said would work for a while, then told us to get the rusty spot sanded down and filled at a body shop. Yeah. Right.) And it burns oil. An oil change every 3000 miles is almost often enough; I keep a quart of 5W-30 in the trunk. The upholstery gave up long ago, we camouflage it with tasteful tigerskin-print seat covers.

So I’m not fixing those scratches. They doesn’t even matter.

A lot of other things happened that week: family member in the hospital, new boss, some financial reverses. I’m just damned glad I have a crappy old car so I don’t have to obsess about every little knick some idiot puts into it, deal with insurance companies and body shops to get it fixed, etc. etc. In this very not-good week, my crappy old car spared me all that.

I’ve been thinking about getting a hybrid car, but maybe I’ll put it off for another year. Or two. Rhumba thinks the car needs a new clutch. I’m thinking that it’s going to get it.

I mean, it’s only got 190,000 miles on it. Practically a baby.