April 7, 2003

• Greyfox’s shiny new red used car is back!

  
  

  (photo note:  The shot below, of Greyfox’s car, was taken today, just moments ago, so that’s how April looks in our neighborhood.  My new profile photo was taken by Doug on our last water run.  I was smiling a lot during that shoot, but the kid managed to miss all the smiles and got a good picture of the sun-scowl.  I really wasn’t in pain or pissed off, as it appears.  It is, however, a more representative sample of my normal expression than any smiley face would be.  People are always telling me to smile when I thought I was already smiling.)

  
  

  In case you missed it, back in the middle of January, my crazy Old Fart went absolutely! freakin’! nuts! over a car he found parked next to a second hand store in Willow.  He wheeled and he dealed and scraped up all the cash he could, talked me out of a couple of hundred from my secret stash, and persuaded the junk dealer to accept some knives as part of the deal.

  
  

  The body was scratched and banged up, windshield cracked, a few trim strips and the frame of one tail light were dangling loose, but that’s just cosmetic stuff, no big deal to me.  Jack, the young man who sold the car (Jack’s mom, an old friend of mine, insists that Jack and his wife Melody are just kids and should be excused on that account, but age makes them adults and being in business implies some legal responsibility, so to me they are a man and woman), told Greyfox that the car had a worn or bent tie rod that needed replacing, which accounted for the shimmy.  He offered to do the installation of the new tie rod if Greyfox bought one.

  
  

  Greyfox told me that our friend Sam, who is a competent mechanic,  had “looked at” the car and said it looked good.  He neglected to specify that Sam had seen the car parked there as he drove by and thought the body damage wasn’t too bad.  I foolishly thought he meant that Sam had checked the car out mechanically.  Silly me.  I really should have known that Greyfox cares intensely about appearances and blanks out his mind on all the internal details that are such a mystery to him.  Sam has been teaching him some mechanical skills, and Greyfox can now replace a burned out headlamp.

  
  

  Anyway, we bought the junker and it came with an invalid title.  When that little fact was revealed I came unglued.  I confronted Greyfox for not heeding my repeated warnings about the car, and in the midst of his contrition, he revealed a few unrelated things he had been trying to keep from me.  That’s how it goes when you start spilling your guts:  a lot of stuff comes out.   I knew he had resumed smoking cigarettes.  Crap!  I could smell the Kools on him and I had told him so.  But while we were hashing out the car title and his scornful disregard of my cautions, he told me that he had been purposely avoiding touching or hugging me to KEEP ME from smelling it–after I had told him I could smell him from across the room.

  
  

  I am so allergic to tobacco smoke that entering a room where there’s smoke residue on furniture and drapes, or getting close to a smoker with it in hair and clothing, makes me cough.  When there’s cigar or cigarette smoke in the air, I have to use my “rescue” asthma inhaler.  This is in addition to my regular daily asthma meds.  When I go to town, to prepare for the onslaught of smoke and perfume and other chemicals, I take antihistamines.  The rescue inhaler is contraindicated for anyone with my medical history and the antihistamines likewise, but that risk is more acceptable than the alternative.  Not smoking has always been one of the conditions I placed on Greyfox’s sharing space with me.

  
  

  My love is unconditional, but dammit I’m not going to quietly allow anyone to endanger my life and health in my own home–and it is MINE, not his.  I am quite willing to love the man from afar but he won’t go away and for much of the twelve years we’ve been together he has tried to sneak smokes.  I always know, how could I not under the circumstances?  That night that he spilled his guts when I was already furious over the disrespect and the extravagant expenditure for a defective vehicle and invalid title, after he went to bed, I vented.  I sat here dripping tears on the keys and pounded out my feelings.

  
  

  Later on, I felt it appropriate to write a response to the comments I’d gotten.  A couple of weeks later, when we had gotten the title and registered the junker in our names, I blogged about that.  Then months passed.  Charley (Doug’s dad, my ex, my best friend), on one of his visits soon after Greyfox brought the car home, had expressed some interest and I had told him, “Don’t ask.”  Later on, urged by a healthy curiosity, he had again wondered aloud what the story was on that vehicle that had been parked in our driveway for weeks.

  
  

  By then I had cooled sufficiently to be able to explain the situation and tell him that Greyfox had taken the car in and had a mechanic look it over and give him an estimate on repairs.  According to the man at Midas, the full thing would be about $2,000, but it could be safely road worthy for about half that.  It had come as no surprise at all to me that there was nothing wrong with the tie rod, which Jack had said was the only mechanical problem.  The big thing making it unsafe to drive was a cracked axle, and there were also several lesser problems including brakes.  I had refused to drive the thing and told Doug and Greyfox that I strongly objected to my kid’s riding in it as well.

  
  

  Next time I saw Charley, he said that our neighbor Ray was willing to install a new axle.  Knowing that Ray was a good mechanic and cheap, I strongly suggested to Greyfox that he let Ray take a look at his car.  Greyfox had been using my car for his business and was hoping to make enough money that way to get his car fixed.  It wasn’t working out because business is really sucky this year.  Going back and forth to town to set up the stand was costing more than he was making.  The secret stash of money from last summer was gone, our debts were piling up–we live this way:  seasonal income, credit to get us through the winter and then we pay off last winter’s living expenses when money starts coming in again as tourists return.  Not surprisingly, there aren’t many tourists this year.  But I’m kinda anxious to get my wheels back before Greyfox totally trashes my beloved Streak Subaru.

  
  

  Ray and Charley came over one day recently and took the car out for a diagnostic drive.  Noises from one wheel made Ray think it was a bad bearing, but when he took it apart that turned out to be the metal-on-metal sound of a brake drum being scored.  We had enough credit left to get the parts.  Ray replaced axle and brakes and brought the car back yesterday.  He only wanted $150 for his labor, and–wonder of wonders–Charley paid it. 

  
  

  I had helped Charley during the winter, filing for his Social Security retirement online, using my credit card to pay for a copy of his birth certificate, filling out the forms at his direction, doing a lot of things that Charley finds extremely trying and tedious.  He had gotten his first SS payment and, knowing that I had no cash, he paid Ray.

  
  

  The car is still not roadworthy.  There are a couple of tires with tread separating, and it needs alignment badly, something Ray’s not equipped to do.  Fortunately, some of our friends at the motel up on the highway near here have opened a tire shop as a sideline–in these times, with Alaska’s economy in one of its periodic busts between booms, we all need a sideline or two.  If they have some cheap but serviceable used tires that will fit, Greyfox will have them installed.  If not, we have some snow tires we can put on there long enough, maybe, to make enough money to buy new tires.  Then Greyfox can maybe drive the thing the fifty miles or so to someone who can do the alignment.  And then Streak will be mine, all mine, again… and I can start cleaning Greyfox’s mess out of him.

  

  • 4:35 pm
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