Jinxed

To all outwards appearances, it was just a nice car: a 1968 Plymouth Barracuda with the Commando Engine, it was the Detroit version of a sports car.  You had to know the car better to realize that it was actually Satan’s version of rolling Hell.

Either the car was profoundly unlucky or it hated me.  I owned the car for three years, and it was an adversarial relationship to the very end.

The day I bought the car, I stopped for gas on the way home.  While the tank filled up—at about thirty-nice cents a gallon, I bought a coke from the machine—for a dime—and while I was leaning against the machine drinking it, my car was rear ended by a woman in a Buick.  She hit my car so hard that the pin in the transmission holding the car in park broke, sending my car into some rose buses.  The gas pump snatched out of the side of my car, spraying gas into the air.

The woman admitted it was her fault, paid to fix the car and I forgot about the matter.  For about a week, until someone backed into my parked car at work.  Once again, I got an insurance check for the damages. 

That turned out to be the pattern for that car:  it had an unbelievable number of accidents--none of which was my fault.  One of the more spectacular accidents involved a Beaumont City Police vehicle in a high-speed chase when the cop lost control of his car and hit mine.  By the end of two years, various insurance companies had paid for that car—twice.  During that time, the car was hit multiple times, was semi-drowned in the Atlantic Ocean (long story there), got sprayed by a skunk, and had an astounding number of flat tires and blowouts.

However, the car's crowning achievement came on Thanksgiving Day, 1973.  My boss had called me in to work early on a holiday to take inventory, had gotten mad at me for not laughing at his ethnic joke (well, to be honest, after he told the joke, I told him I was that ethnicity—and he had promptly fired me).  Suddenly with free time on my hands, I decided to drive to Wichita Falls and join my girlfriend for Thanksgiving Dinner.  Somewhere outside Buffalo, Texas, in a steady rain, the Barracuda blew up.  Literally.

There was a loud FOOMP!, a roaring noise, the back of the hood blew up about a foot, and flames covered the windshield.  I remained calm….I distinctly remember turning off the radio because I didn’t want to die while listening to country western music.  I pulled to the side of the highway, grabbed a coat and a rifle from the back seat, and ran for it. 

Well, actually, I may not have been that calm, since the first thing I grabbed was a fistful of road maps out of the glove compartment.  To this day, I have no idea why that was the first thing I wanted to rescue from the flames.

There are a lot of things I remember about that night.  I remember sitting on the side of the road watching my car burn to the ground.  I also remember how hard it was to hitchhike a hundred miles back to Houston if you are standing on the side of the highway in the rain holding a rifle.  (That’s something the NRA never told me.)

The car was jinxed and I have to say I never really missed it.  The car had obviously been trying to kill me for years.

Lately, I have begun to think my house may be jinxed, too.  I’m not talking about the usual things that go wrong with a house such as plumbing and wiring problems--though this house does have its share of those.  I’m talking about the weird little stuff that keeps happening around my house.

There was the time the Hooters waitress was on her way to work and her car was T-boned by a college kid who ran the stop sign.  The poor waitress had pieces of glass showered all over her.  Luckily, every cop and fireman in town showed up to slowly pour countless bottles of water over her uniform trying to dislodge microscopic pieces of glass.  Meanwhile, the other kid could have bled to death for all any of the first responders cared. 

I’ve already written about the time half the law enforcement people in the state attacked an empty house with tanks and robots.  They didn’t catch their man, but they were amazingly successful in using explosives to remove a screen door.

One evening, I went outside to see what all the sirens and lights were about and discovered a lone policeman trying to arrest 4 large drunks.  Suddenly, I heard myself say, “Officer, do you need help?”

That’s the kind of thing you say because you know the police officer will never take you up on the offer.

“Yes,” he said as he pushed a guy who had a hundred pounds on me into my arms.  “Hold him!”

And there was the night I was in the kitchen cooking dinner.  Suddenly, there was a loud bang and we all turned to the kitchen window where an outstretched hand, flattened against the glass, was slowly sliding down the window.  When I went outside, I found an unconscious woman in the middle of the flowerbed, collapsed into a fetal position.  I picked her up, carried her inside and after we had revived her, I discovered she was from Kansas, with a penchant for running.  On her first day in New Mexico, she had not realized the altitude was almost a mile higher in elevation than her home.  As she was passing out from altitude sickness, she had focused on the grail-shaped light in our kitchen window.

The list of weirdness around our house is extensive.  The woman who fell on the sidewalk and broke her hip, the teenager who stole her mother’s car and took out a rock wall, the truck that slid on ice and high-centered on the median, taking out a tree, or the bicyclist who--for reasons only he and his scumbag lawyer understand--steered his racing bike into the back of a parked car. The incidents keep happening.

The Doc and I have figured out the cause of one of the more frequent events.  On a regular basis, we find people asleep in our front yard.  (It happened, today.)  Several times a year, we find someone lying in the grass, snoring away, occasionally with a blanket.

It was the blankets that provided the clues necessary to solve this riddle.  They are all marked "Memorial Medical Center"—the local hospital.  The hospital is on the edge of town, and if you walk back towards town, our front yard is the first one you come to that boasts a soft, green lawn.  Our neighbors, obviously more perceptive than The Doc and I, all have front yards covered with rocks and cactus.

Luckily, this problem also presented its own solution.  Now, when I find these unfortunate people, peacefully resting in our yard, I turn on the sprinklers.