We are going to discuss my vehicular troubles now. It started long before week before last.

*dreamy music and swirling water puddle effects to a time long past*

Sometime over the Christmas holidays 3 years ago, my car tried to overheat while in the middle of the line to cross over the Río Bravo back into the United States. I had to pull onto a sidewalk to get out of the increasingly-angry drivers’ paths until my car cooled back down. This happened a couple of times, so when I finally got back into Mexico, I took the car to a man I’ll call Juan (Because that’s his real name. He can go screw himself, frankly. This is the man that shows up at your house at 10 AM to get some breakfast uninvited and downs it with a beer in hand).

Juan played around with it in his ‘garage’, which was actually something out of stock footage for urban warfare in Iraq. It was a compound surrounded by a large concrete block wall. For added security, he adhered to the time-honoured Mexican tradition of breaking glass bottles and embedding the shards in a layer on top while the concrete was fresh, guaranteeing a new rectal malady for the poor thief who dared cross over without observing first. Inside this compound there were abandoned cars everywhere, with a few weeds growing between them for colour. Everything in this place was/is permeated by that damned dust that seems to infest all of Matamoros. In the middle of it all there is something that I would maybe call a shed if I squinted at midnight through a haze of alcohol. It was just about to fall over and probably just might do so given a determined shove or two. The ‘mechanics’ sit around this building at night in a circle of rusty car wheels and drink beer while warming themselves in a fire ignited with old motor oil and God-knows-what-else. I later found out there was a lot of illicit monkey business going on in this place, but that’s beside the point and can’t make me not smile at the usual roundup of calendars with chimpanzees deformed in human clothes and bikini posters. The graffiti was good too. This guy had a graffiti specialist come in and tag his ‘logo’ on the wall…a skunk with a wrench in his hand. By that, there was a baby’s head with “Chato Cagón” written below it. Chato means snub, but it’s like ‘baby boy’. Cagón means ‘crapper’ or ‘shitter’, as a pronoun and not a noun. So translate it “baby boy crapping machine” if you want. Sigh.

Well, to make this long story (somewhat) shorter, Juan and his band of beer swilling dust dwellers couldn’t do anything with it. He told me to go the day-after-next to a place where they work on radiators. Said I’d see a sign by the pharmacy and Oxxo on calle dieciocho. Couldn’t miss it. I couldn’t go the next day because it was ‘nochebuena’, which is Christmas Eve and is actually the day the Mexicans get their so-called Christmas-but-is-actually-a-pagan-Saturnalia-type groove on. Guns. Machine guns, actually. They shoot the things in the air in a raucous orgy-type affair, unaware of the gravitational pull of the earth on lead projectiles and the inevitable consecuences upon re-entry.

I found my mechanics shop 2 days later. It was 4 poles with tin over them in a crude roof, and a hand-painted sign on cardboard that said “radiator work”. Whereas Juan’s goons drank at night, this guy and his friends had quart bottle ‘caguamas’ in the morning and were obviously hung over. They worked on my car, charging me $450 pesos to clean out my radiator and put things back together. Wasn’t too bad, considering that in USD it’s about $45 bucks. They handed me a package wrapped in newspaper when I got back. It was all the rust goop they had extracted from my cooling system.

For literally years after that, the car leaked water little by little and I often blamed it on them, but in actuality it was the goop they had freed. Rust had begun to consume the impeller wheel on my water pump.

*flash to week before last*

I was flying down the road listening to Maiden when I noticed my car wasn’t doing the normal overheat-cha-cha. It was ACTUALLY overheating, pegged in the red zone with a ‘check engine’ light flashing at me murderously. I pulled over, ironically at Exit 69, a favourite of the locals, and listened with sick anticipation as the motor hissed and smoke went everywhere. I waited 45 minutes for a coworker to arrive with water, which we tried to add but noticed it was FULL (wtf). We tried cranking and driving, getting past the highway to the office and getting down to the suburban “Let’s go to Bestbuy and head west into the sunset at 5 PM sharp, toward the golf courses and expensive eateries because we’re white folks and we can do so” exit. It died there, so I called three wrecker services, eventually finding one named Peanut’s that came for my car and took it to a radiator shop. Okaaaay, fine. Carless now. I was disturbed but it was a temporary feeling, like when Empire Strikes Back ended on a bittersweet note, but you knew a third installment was coming out and the good guy would prevail.

The radiator guy called me and said my motor was shooting radiator water three feet in the air on the compression stroke, which means basically the head was warped beyond recognition.

Then I realized my motor’s head is made of aluminum and I began to cringe involuntarily as a sick feeling creeped into me.

Dad and I went with a trailer, got the car on it, and hauled it to a shadetree mechanic’s house 3 counties away. Earl (huhhuhh, Earl) said he could fix it but to give him some time. No problem my dad says as he hands me the keys to his ’97 land yacht. It has dual air, dual stereos, tv, vcr, and a Nintendo all wrapped up in wood grain and a leather interior. It also takes $60 to halfway fill it up. I started using this van to go to work for a week. The last day I use this van, my father calls me in the afternoon to inform me of a slight water leak and to maintain a strict vigil over its water consumption. Sure, fine whatever, I tell him. I was in the middle of a phone argument with my wife who was in another city at the time and had just hung up on me.

I start the long commute home a little late that day, and as I’m going down the road, I’m jamming to the cd’s I had put in the changer, thinking of how I was going to relax when I got home. I passed my work colleague friend who I’ve mentioned previously as being the last bastion of intellectual prowess in his office where stupidity reigns supreme. I tooted the horn in the land yacht and watched him veer off at his exit, with his family in tow. He didn’t recognise me in the brown bomber so didn’t acknowledge me. Hell, I wouldn’t acknowledge me either in that van. I watched him pull off, obviously heading to his home.

Then it happened.

The CHECK ENGINE light on my dad’s land yacht came on and it was overheating! I pulled off immediately, getting out and cringing in the same exact manner from the week before. Same hissing, same smoke. I sat there, desperate. I looked for water in the ditches, under a bridge, and after that proved itself futile, I called my wife. She brought several gallons of water in kitty litter buckets, Dasani bottles, and a milk jug sans top. I ran across the interstate, got the containers, filled it up, and nursed it home. It turned out the van was ok, but the water pump on it is shot as well. I drove it to work like that one more time, nursing it back home with no ill effects as long as I remembered to COMPLETELY refill the radiator and reservoir before departing for any destination.

It has been repaired, but the good news is that it was dropped off at the mechanics. And the blue bomber was driven home for the return journey. Yes friends, my car is back, in a new, improved format. Sure, it cost a couple of grand, but it’s cheaper than a new car. A/C be damned, as long as my car works and gets me from point A to point B, I’ll be forever elated.

Car problems are a thing of the past. For now.