My friend and co-worker, Jacquie, got into a fender-bender yesterday. Nothing major, but she had an annoying 20-minute wait because the lady who rear-ended her insisted on filing a police report. When the cop finally arrived and informed the other driver that she was clearly at fault, she quickly changed her tune. Meanwhile, Jacquie wasted almost her entire lunch hour.
That was not the case when I experienced my first car accident as a driver.
I was playing the Good Samaritan (one of my favorite roles) and had just gone quite a bit out of my way to give my friend, Steve Barker, a ride to his girlfriend’s home in Sherman Oaks. It was pouring rain and I was behind the wheel my ageing Rover 2000 TC sedan, which I had cobbled together from two more-or-less complete cars. The Rover got me around Hollywood pretty well, as long as I remembered to park on a hill somewhere, where I could bump-start it. Some days were better than others. It once took me at least a mile of attempted bump starts down Western Avenue to wake up my recalcitrant engine.
I dropped Steve off and started heading back to the Ventura Freeway. My route took me under the highway to the onramp on the other side. Unfortunately, I didn’t see that the underpass had now collected six inches of standing water. As the Rover hit the long puddle, it started hydro-planing at thirty-miles an hour. I surfed straight through the underpass and then “hung ten” up the slight hill to street level, which thankfully slowed me down a bit. Not enough, though. With a resounding crunch, I ploughed into the back of a pickup truck waiting at the stop light – which I then pushed into the back of a police cruiser.
Needless to say, I didn’t have to wait twenty minutes for my report. The cop was very accommodating. The driver of the pickup truck and I exchanged insurance information and he left, since the damage was mostly to his rear bumper.
The Rover was decidedly more corrugated. I tried to re-start it, but it only ran for a few seconds before dying. The cop pushed my car to a side street where he was kind enough to take pity by not writing me a ticket. “You’ve got enough problems already,” was his parting comment. How true. I found a toll booth and called AAA. It was still pouring rain.
When the tow truck guy arrived, he informed me that he couldn’t take me back to my apartment in Hollywood, since it was outside of the approved radius. I wracked my brain for where to deposit my heap of crumpled metal. The only people I knew in the area were Si and Sarah Simon. They were friends of our family and had given me some handyman work several months back.
They weren’t home when I called, but I somehow navigated the tow truck to their house, where I sat on their porch until nearly 10 pm. I am sure they weren’t expecting to have to drive me home after their night out, but they did so without complaining. Good Samaritans looking out after another of their kind. I felt bad about leaving such an eyesore at their curb, but what else could I do?
As I spent the next two days repairing the Rover and straightening out the fender and front-end as best I could, using hammers and metal bending tools inherited from my father’s orthopedic practice, I discovered the reason my car wouldn’t start.
It turns out that some British engineer somewhere had decided that the optimum material for a fuel pump reservoir should be glass. Yes, glass. Presumably, the intention was so one could admire the gasoline gathering inside. Nevertheless, it seemed like a frivolous substance for such a vital piece of equipment. It’s a bit like making an artificial heart pump out of peanut brittle. Now, can you guess what the only part was that broke in the crash?
There is a joke among mechanics who work on British cars, with their often quirky design and legendarily unreliable Lucas electrical systems: Do you know the definition of “apprehension”? Answer: A man with a Lucas pacemaker. Sort of like a glass fuel pump, don’t you think?
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