*Disclaimer. All names used in this dossier are fictional and do not depict any living or dead persons. Parental Advisory. Material may contain adult themes and abusive language.
*Please read part I of the blog ‘The Thingamajigger Gets Into An Accident And Other Stories… (Part I) (choose from the menu) if you haven’t already done so that you may get the gist of the story.
My Hyundai Accent needed repairs that I could not afford. I remembered the ‘wise’ words of the black yoga pants lady who had assuaged me into suing the owners of ‘Sheila’, the bitch that had crossed the road without a leash, causing the accident. Before suing, I wrote a demand letter to the dog owner for $1,700, the cost of repairing the car according to the quote I had received from the auto body repair shop. He ignored the demand letter and exactly 32 days later, I went to the district court and paid about $70 and wrote out a complaint and sued the dog owner. I attached a copy of the quote. I was very broke and $70 was a lot of money for me at the time but I was desperate enough to try. A few people dissuaded me from suing and wondered if I could even get a penny from the dog owner.
A week or so later, I received a call from someone who introduced himself as a representative of the dog owner’s home insurance company. He let me know that he had been assigned to my case. He needed to take pictures of the car so as to assess the damage that I had claimed had happened. We met a day later and he took pictures of the car. There was a dent from a previous accident from the previous owner but I did not see the need to point that out. Once he had taken enough pictures, he told me that he would submit the pictures to the claims department and see ‘what they could do’.
A week or so later, the representative called. He gave me some good news. The insurance company had agreed to settle the issue out of court and had written me a check for $1,648! I could not believe it! Just like that! I thanked him profusely for his efforts and he promised me that the check would be mailed to my address in 3 to 5 business days. Once I hung up the phone, I danced a happy dance. I needed to be patient as being a Kenyan had made me wary of insurance agents, especially when paying out claims! Every day in the news, there were stories of those buggers sending checks (cheques back in the 254) that bounced or they never sent them at all! Two days later, I got an envelope in the mail. It was the check all right. All $1,648 of it! I could not believe my eyes. I dashed to the bank to ascertain its authenticity and once the check went through, I was elated. My bank account was probably startled by the huge amount as it had been teetering on the brink of the world of overdrafts since I got to the U.S. Essentially, I was merely acting as a conduit between my employer and my usual creditors, my landlord and my school accountant. I never got to ‘touch’ the money or enjoy it. The ‘standing orders’ I had between me and my creditors saw to it. I had never been the recipient of such a large amount in my life. I had to plan carefully. This was a lot of money and I had heard of stories of lads who had ‘made it rain’ by visiting brothels of ill repute and tucking a few crispy notes into the ng*thas of dancers and/or strippers and I was not about to fall into that trap. I also had arrears in school to pay ( I always had school fees arrears) and I decided to fix the car just to get it back on the road and use the rest to pay off the always mounting school arrears.
The Hyundai was back on the road. Some patchwork was done to it to legalize it via the state inspection and I decided to buff off some of the most visible scratches myself. However, it did not quite feel right after the accident. One of the CV joints was slightly bent after the accident and it prematurely wore out the tires. This forced me to become bosom buddies with used tire salesmen as I could not afford new tires at that time. However, there was something wretched about buying the used tires. They never lasted. They always went flat after four or so months. ‘It’s because these are old tires. They suffer from winter rot. The microscopic cracks slowly release the air in the tire. You are better off buying a new tire’, my roommate informed me. A new tire cost $80 or more and a used one cost $25. So, I decided to gamble with the used tire but I kept on losing.
In addition, the thingamajigger had another problem. Whenever it rained, some of the water seeped into the car, leaving the car carpet wet. If not mopped and shampooed immediately, it would leave a putrid, moldy smell. Despite these quirks that I had learnt to easily overlook, I had no problem with the car. It was my daily driver and never failed me. When I showed the car off to people, or rather, when people spotted me driving, or parking the car far away from shinier, newer cars, they tried hard not to laugh or snicker and told me that everyone buys a ‘junk car’ when they first land in the land of Abraham Lincoln. The thingamajigger was no junk car, I defended the Hyundai. It went wherever I went to, hardly got stuck in the snow and seeped gas like a well mannered socialite sipping expensive wine. I loved it!
One day, I was getting off class and a lass with an ass asked me how I managed to get back and forth. I told her that I had a compact car. She asked if I could give her a ride home, or a ‘lift’ as we called it in Kenya. When she saw my beloved thingamajigger, she was crestfallen. The dents, scratches and faded paint did not make for an ideal looking car. Like the gentleman I am, I held the squeaky passenger door open and she entered the car like a condemned woman walking towards the guillotine! She sat in the car as if the car itself held her hostage. I overlooked her facial expression and body language nuances and cranked the car to life. We started moving and she decided to roll the window down. However, once the window was rolled down, it did not go up unless extreme pressure and patience was applied. And just like I thought would happen, the lass wanted to roll the window up after our speed increased slightly. ‘You mean this window does not go up?’ she asked? ‘Yes, I need to stop the car so that I can push it back up.’ My reply drew a sneer from the now discombobulated belle, who seemed to want out but did not know how. I stopped the car and rolled the window up. I grunted as I pushed the window up but this got her more disgruntled. ‘We’ll use my window as ventilation’, I helpfully added. The car drove fine but this lass was like the princess in the fairy tale ‘The princess and the pea’ by Hans Christian Andersen, who felt the pea right through the 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds. She felt everything that was wrong with the car and complained about everything. ‘How many miles does the car have?’ the diva inquired. ‘Around 102,000 miles. The car drives well. It looks like the engine is just being broken in…’ I joked. ‘It’s time for the car to go to the car graveyard, too many miles’, she interjected, ignoring my appalling attempt at a joke. She had to be kidding. This car ran like a champ. ‘What’s that noise, I feel like I can hear the road beneath me!’ This statement from her confused me. Maybe the car did not have the best sound deadening material out there. As long as you did not see the road beneath you, you would be alright, I figured. As fate would have it, it started drizzling. I needed to use the air conditioner to defog the car for clear visibility. The car’s air conditioner didn’t work. It blew hot air towards us. Maybe the hot air was ruining her makeup (and mood) as she looked flustered. Her face was twisted into a rictus of pure revulsion! This cleared up the foggy windows but prompted yet another question from the sassy lass. ‘The a/c doesn’t work?’ she asked the obvious. ‘No, I probably need to add some freon soon…’ I started to explain. ‘This car is something!’ she retorted nonchalantly. Luckily, we arrived at her destination and immediately we stopped, she tried to open the passenger door latch so that she would disembark, more like flee. ‘I need to open it from the outside, something is wrong with the latch’, I sheepishly explained. I ran over to the other side and opened the door from the outside. She half jumped out half ran and said a heartless thank you as she fled from the evil thingamajigger! I wondered how someone who did not even own a vehicle herself could be so critical. Suffice it to say that she never asked for a ‘lift’ again!
The spring semester was done and school was out. The weather got hotter and I realized why a working air conditioner in the car was a good thing. I had always heard of ‘summer’ but no one had told me that it gets this hot in the U.S. I had arrived in the country the previous year at the end of summer, so I did not experience the ‘proper’ intense summer heat. ‘Summer heat, summer rain’, sang JT Taylor in his song ‘Long Hot Summer Night’. There was hardly any ‘summer breeze’ that the Isley Brothers sang about, to cool down the Sahara-like temperatures. You could fry an egg in a minute on a hot day. It wasn’t the heat so much as the humidity! The Americans say ‘it’s the humidity stupid!’ I used to think that Mombasa, a Kenyan coastal city was humid but the humidity in the U.S was something else. You would take a shower and start sweating as you were shutting the shower faucets off! As soon as you got outside the house, you were drenched in sweat, wondering why you even bothered to take a shower in the first place! I had to buy one or two wife-beaters and a towel to wipe the sweat off the brow of my face, amongst other places. I was working like a maniac to make as much money as possible for the next semester, desperately trying to make hay while the sun literally shone.
I picked up another job to help me amass the requisite funds for the school accounts office. Boy did I work. My other ‘summer job’ consisted of assembling carnival equipment. Slides, swings, Ferris wheels, bumper cars, that sort of thing. This job was hard! I may have had acrophobia before starting the job but my fear of heights was cured when, on the first day, as a tenderfoot, I was forced to climb up a tall Ferris wheel and latch up the metal pieces. These pieces were heavy, greasy, had sharp corners and needed to be installed quickly. Despite wearing gloves, my hands were singed by the scorching metal pieces made hot by the sun! These carnivals travelled from town to town, city to city and they were in a city for a week at a time. They therefore had to be assembled quickly in readiness for the start of the carnival and disassembled quickly for transportation to the next carnival. Once the carnival commenced, we were at the gate checking the tickets. At the end of the carnival, usually on Saturday or Sunday night, it was ‘tear down’ time! Huge Ferris wheels were taken apart in hours and packed into trailers, ready for the next stop. Once the trailers arrived at the next town, it was time to set the equipment up again! In Kenya, this menial job was disparagingly referred to as ‘kazi ya mkono’, ‘work using one’s hands’ or ‘kazi ya mjengo’, ‘construction work’ I was a ‘mtu wa mjengo’, ‘construction worker’. As I toiled in 90 plus degree heat and 100% humidity, I recalled the unfortunate workers who used to walk from their homes to work in Nairobi, usually to the Industrial Area factories or construction sites in the suburbs and back every day and work backbreaking jobs! I now understood what these chaps were going through! I juggled the jobs with dexterity and what you may consider to be madness! I was working 7 days a week. I reminisced about the good old days in Nairobi when the weekend would start on an exhilarating Friday evening and end on a high note on Sunday evening/night. I saw why Kenyans in America rarely went out. They were chasing the elusive dollar! I was rushing from one job to another, assembling equipment, rushing home for a 3-5 hour nap and doing it all over again! I remember driving home one day and sort of dozing behind the wheel. The small rumble strips on the edge of the highway promptly woke me up. I was surviving on coffee, lots of Chinese takeout and prayers! All summer long, I traversed various towns assembling equipment and letting eager teenagers and families and children into the carnival rides. It was a brutal way of life but I had to adopt a Panglossian way of thinking to survive and dredge through the rocky terrain that was my life. When things were ‘thick’ or ‘elephant’, not going well, I always reminded myself of the song ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ by Bobby McFerrin.
The carnival continued its way to upstate New York and I could not follow them there due to distance. Despite the backbreaking work, I had saved enough money to pay for some school, buy books and keep afloat. School fees gobbled up all my summer earnings.
As time went by, I felt that it was time to upgrade the car. I had put in more money into the car and it was running great. However, it seemed like everyone around me had a better car! I tried not to think about keeping up with the Joneses but when a friend of mine gave me a ride in his air conditioned car, It felt good and I wondered if I could ever drive a car that did not feel like an oven inside! I had asked a mechanic for a quote to fix the air conditioner and he had alerted me that as a failsafe measure, older cars usually required the whole replacement of the entire air conditioning system, which would be $1,900 for my car! A co-worker of mine had seen how I meticulously maintained the car and wanted to buy a car for her mother so that she could get around, as her mother’s car had been grounded due to too many mechanical problems. We discussed the price and the lady offered me $US 1,000, which was the Kelly Blue Book value of the Hyundai! I was thrilled as I had paid only $500! It was time to start shopping for another car, I told myself.
Once again, just like the time I was shopping for a car the first time round, I was short of money. The cars I wanted simply cost too much money. The cars that were within my budget were similar in style to the thingamajigger and my heart was set for an upgrade. A friend of mine warned me about selling a car that had no major problems and I listened to him for a while. ‘A car with no mechanical problems is like a good wife or girlfriend. Never get rid of it!’ he advised. However, the desire to upgrade outweighed the desire to live within my means. Another American friend suggested a car auction. He persuaded me to try and visit the auction in Philadelphia. ‘Man, you can get a good ride for cheap. Just got a Jeep from there!’ He truly had a Jeep SUV and this piqued my interest. ‘If you have 2 to 3 thousand, you can get a good ride bro!’ I wanted to believe him but I was wary of cars from the auction. I had heard of horror stories from people who had bought cars from the car auction and lived to regret the purchase. The auctioneers were unscrupulous snake oil salesmen who sold cars that were past their ‘drive’ date to vulnerable, unsuspecting and desperate individuals! Some of these cars were in such bad shape that they could not run off the auction ramp and had to be pushed away. I had also been warned about buying an American made car. ‘These cars don’t last. They are always breaking down. In fact, Ford means found on road daily or found on road dead!’, my friend quipped. He recommended that I buy a foreign car, preferably a Japanese car. ‘Japanese cars never break down. Remember, limit yourself to a Toyota, Nissan or Honda, nothing else!’ I assured him that I would not buy an American car.
However, like a moth drawn to a flame, I decided to attend the auction ‘just to see’. I had also seen a chap purchase a car for about $500, fix a small problem and then have a trouble free car for a while. Buying a car at the auction was like rolling dice at the casino. Sometimes you won but as the truism always asserts, the house always wins.
If you can recall the Moi days in Kenya, former president Moi would attend an annual goat auction in Baringo county where goats and other animals would be auctioned, usually on Christmas Eve, to commemorate the festive Christmas season. Usually, the president won most, if not all of the auctions, leading some to silently wonder whether it was a real auction or a public relations exercise. But then again, it would be foolhardy to bid against a powerful and monied president. The auctioneer was none other than a boisterous funnyman called Ezekiel Bargetuny. The late Bargetuny was a farceur who spoke fast and usually ended his auction with the words with ‘na hiyo imeenda na mtukufu rais, makofi kwake!’ ‘and that (group of animals) has been bought by his excellency the president, let’s give him a round of applause!’
The auctioneers in the auctions in the U.S spoke twice as fast as Ezekiel Bargetuny, as if they had inadvertently swallowed some hot gruel and they were trying to get it out of their mouths! ‘Prraaap prraap prraap a 2002 Ford Expedition prraap 89,000 miles prraap good condition prraap one owner prraap won’t last!’ You had to strain your ears and tune them properly to catch anything he or she was saying! ‘Prraap prraap sold to the gentleman in prraap prraap for $5,000!’ He would hit the gavel like a judge bellowing for order to be restored in the courtroom!
So, I stood there, eyeing the cars that passed by. Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of a reddish Chrysler. This Chrysler was fully loaded! It had a moonroof, excellent radio and CD system with a disc changer, leatherette seats, power windows and doors and all those things that make a car salesman drool as they explain to a potential car buyer about the extra options that serve to inflate his or her markup and thus, commissions and profits. I had quite a few reservations about the buying an American car. I had been warned by my friend of the horror stories. However, the Japanese cars that were on auction were simply outside my budget. People vigorously bid on them and the prices escaped my short financial tentacles.
‘$2,000. Perfect Chrysler prraaap prraaap prraaap fully loaded. Ride in style prraaap prraaap made in Detriot!’ I saw a chap raise his hand. ‘Okay, let’s do this, $2,100 prraaap prraaap…’ I could not tell who was bidding or at what price the bid was currently on in the cacophony of noises. The car driver opened the hood and revved the engine. I inched closer to the engine and saw a good looking engine that purred like a well fed Persian cat. No noises at all. ‘Engine is great, no issues, shall go for another 100,000 miles these Chryslers prraaap prraaap…’ Once the engine was revved, folks who were not interested in the car suddenly seemed interested. ‘$2,500 for the beauty, don’t let anyone else take it home prraaap prraaap can’t get it anywhere for this price prraaap prraaap!’
My adrenaline kicked in. This car was good. It was an American car but it was not a Ford. Chryslers were not bad, or were they? The engine sounded perfect and it was in relatively decent interior shape. With such a car, I would not park it far away from the entrance in shame. Lasses would hop in with no reservations. It would mingle with the shinier newer cars. ‘Does the air conditioner work?’ I asked the driver. ‘Ice cold air prraaap prraaap colder than the Alaskan winter prraaap prraaap!’ It was as if the auctioneer had heard my question. The driver turned the air conditioner on and I put my fingers next to the vent. The car blew ice cold air! I needed this car and I needed it now! I raised my hand, not too certain if I was making the right decision.
‘Sold for $2,600 to the gentleman in the red t-shirt!’ the auctioneer gleefully shouted and banged his gavel. I was the proud owner of a fully loaded Chrysler…
kanyiwest 