It’s good to have a ride worth primping

Okay, it finally happened. I got a “new” car.

My “old” car, newer in actual age than my “new” car, needed help. Badly. Being editor for this newspaper means I need a working car 24/7 —fitting in time to see my mechanic is difficult. The old car, a 1989 Jetta, needs about a week of “the spa treatment,” and quite honestly, with nearly 243,000 miles under that car’s very bald tires, I just couldn’t see making it happen.

So I let it go, and limped along. Any car that age with that many miles acquires “character,” if you know what I mean...and this Jetta’s got a lot of character.

It’s the little things that add up. The lighter doesn’t work. I first discovered this when I went to run a mini air compressor after some fool let the air out of two of my tires one night while parked around the corner from my apartment. The annoyance of having the air let out of my tires in the first place paled to my reaction when I found out I couldn’t fix the situation as I’d first so cleverly thought. Whoever heard of the car lighter socket “breaking,” anyway?

Being a car of some age and mileage, one expects quirks, but this vehicle was particularly inventive. I learned to remain calm in the face of some alarming habits. At one point, disappearing never to (thankfully) return before I could diagnose the problem, the engine would suddenly, with a heart-stopping lurch, stall while driving. (Luckily, it’s a five-speed.) Particularly memorable was the time it did this on Route 22, which I decided the car didn’t like and avoided for most of the duration of nine months of my Jetta ownership.

Another week brought the more minor, but still-annoying turn signal problem, which also disappeared before I could “fix” it.

At an average rate of a problem a week, my car was quickly dubbed “The Rolling Disaster.” Some problems fixed themselves, others came and went, and others were permanent failures. Interestingly, the most permanent problems were the ones that didn’t actually interfere with the car’s safe operation; they seemed designed to be the most irksome devisable.

There was the failure of the driver’s side door handle. At some point, though I bought the car from a guy in the suburbs (where supposedly there is no crime), the car had been repeatedly vandalized. One of these incidents involved the driver’s side lock having to be replaced, so the car had an extra key for the non-matching lock. (It also came with a key that went ultimately went nowhere, or opened something I never identified, but that’s really just another example of how colorful this car’s character is.) The passenger side door lock was non-operational when I bought the beast for $500, so locking the car (usually a good idea when one lives in the city) was a strictly driver’s side activity. One day about six months ago, locking the car ceased to be an activity at all, since when the door handle ceased operation from the outside on that side of the car, I’d have no way of getting into the car without being able to open either the driver’s door or unlocking the passenger’s door.

Since there was a gaping hole where a radio used to be (stolen in one of the nonexistent suburban vandalism sprees; the second time it happened, the prior owner decided not to replace it, and I never got around to it either), I decided as long as I didn’t keep anything obviously valuable in the car, it was pretty safe, even if it was rather annoying to always have to open the passenger side door to open the driver side door from the inside so I could run back around and actually enter the car.

I was beginning to half-hope some one would be stupid enough to steal it and end my misery, though I didn’t go so far as to leave the keys in it.

No such luck. On no less than two occasions, though, some criminal genius (possibly related to the moron who let the air out of my tires) tried to break in to my unlocked car by attempting to force the driver’s side window down. Lucky for me, they didn’t succeed or break the glass, and the car wasn’t particularly damaged. The incidents did transform rolling up the driver’s side window into a two-handed affair , however. More “character.”

I started to joke that one day I’d be leaving in the morning to go to work, and just find a pile of parts parked by the curb. But I also began to plot.

I’m not usually superstitious, but I know it’s not a good idea to let your current car know it’s about to be replaced. Let that happen, and catastrophic automotive rebellion is imminent.

I started to look around. I knew exactly what I wanted: a replacement for “The Swedish Princess,” my poor 1990 900S 16-valve, five-speed transmissioned silver beauty hatchback, whose demise on an Ohio highway last year lead to the Jetta saga in the first place.

It took two months, but I finally found a close, if slightly less-wealthy relation. My new Swedish prince is a red 1987 Saab 900 five-speed sedan, bought at a reasonable price from the original owner. I’m looking forward to giving it the spa treatment.

My Volkswagen is for sale, cheap. Underneath it all, it really is a good car. It wouldn’t have lasted so many miles if it wasn’t. I think the constant character acquisition is really its way of looking for attention. Since I’ve gotten a bunch of calls from folks contemplating its reconstructive reincarnation, I figure someone else can write any future installments of its story, to be titled, no doubt, “The Return of the Jetta.”

If my experience is any indication, it should be quite an adventure.

(Originally published in The Easton News, July 13, 2006)