Fighting Fires

"Hey man, your Jeep's on fire!" The voice yelling to me was that of a girl that I was dating at the time. She had just come into a friend's restaurant where my Jeep Renegade was parked directly in front, very near the overhang of the front porch. My first thought was that she was talking to someone else. After all, "Hey man" could be anyone, right? As I watched her running toward me, my subconscious willed her to run right on by. The negative feeling of her message made me think that perhaps it was time to dump her and find a new girlfriend ... apparently my mind had no qualms with killing the messenger.

"Seriously, it's on fire! The Renegade is on fire!"

When I had purchased the Jeep, I had done so against the will of my father. (At that time in life, I did a lot of things against the will of my father, it seems). But alas, the car that preceded it had broken down and, rather than spend the $500 to fix it, I traded it in to a local used car dealership owned by a man referred to throughout the town as "Starvin' Marvin". My dad played golf at the same country club as him and was apparently well aware of the reputation that preceded him.

Trish grabbed my hand and literally drug me to the front door of the restaurant, my friend David closely in tow. It was his restaurant, after all, and the idea of a vehicle burning in his parking lot did not sit well with him. He stopped by the front door to dislodge a fire extinguisher as I pulled ahead into the cool evening air.

I looked at the billowing of smoke rolling from under the hood of the black jeep and watched in amazement as the golden eagle logo on its hood began to bubble like a newly boiling pot of water. My beloved eagle, the symbol of freedom from parental encasement that winked back from my hood each time I drove away from the house, was silently dying a slow, painful death before my eyes. With approximately $26 in my checking account that had been planned for beer on that very night, I knew right away that I'd be spending a lot more time at home during the coming summer. As I stood frozen in shock, staring at the demise of my new found love through tear-warped vision, David popped the hood latches and sent a billowing cloud of white rising through the image with a long blast from the extinguisher. Symbolism at work once more, my dreams of unrestricted roaming drifted away with the last wafts of smoke.

The damage from the fire was fairly extensive and the next morning Paul Griffith from the repair shop informed me that it would be a couple of grand to fix the Jeep. "Fortunately", he told me, "your insurance will cover it ... all but the $500 deductible, that is". $500, I thought. It might as well be a million! David had paid for the beer in light of my tragedy, but $26 was a long way from $500 when you work closing shift at McDonald's to supplement a small-market radio salary. With a car payment looming, insurance and other expenses, it would take at least six more paychecks to cover the deductible alone. I told Paul to hold off and caught a ride back to Starvin' Marvin's lot with a buddy.

"Your credit is good with us", Starvin' told me. "You made your first five weekly payments on the Jeep right on time, so you don't have any problem getting the Z. I'll go write it up for you."

Starvin' himself addressed the issue with the month-and-a-half old Jeep purchase and talked me into a trade toward a shiny red Nissan 300Z on the lot. They had "just gotten it in" and it was bound to be a "hot car", but he was willing to give me what I paid for the Jeep in trade, minus, of course the $2,000 repair bill and the five weekly installments that I had made thus far. It was only fair, he explained. I was reluctant at first, having initially gone there to complain about the mysterious fire so soon after purchasing the vehicle, but after about 20-minutes with Starvin's logic, I could hardly argue that it had obviously been my fault ... somehow. Besides, the T-Tops on the 300Z screamed out at me, beckoning me to a summer of wind-blown fun that only a red sports car with heated leather seats and a jammin' stereo could offer. How could I possibly argue that?

My father had a cow. "Why would you spend another $6,000 on a different car when you could have fixed the Jeep for $500? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!" Of course, he hadn't heard Starvin's logic behind the decision and besides, he'd yet to drive the 300Z. I finally gave up on the fight and gave into the flight, leaving the house in a cloud of burned rubber as I drove off into the night with a ZZ Top cassette howling through the T's.

A month and a half later, I decided to go visit my new girlfriend Kayt a couple of hours before my radio show. (Somewhere along the line I had decided that poor Trish had to go. How really could she expect to survive informing me that my Jeep was gone, after all? It was just too negative). I ran the Z hard up Interstate 44, blowing by the radio station in the 3-digit range in the hopes that my co-workers might be standing outside, impressed with my hot ride. I looked over my right shoulder as I sped past and indeed, one of my co-workers was watching from the parking lot with his fist held high in salute as I blew by. A flushing of pride touched my cheeks as I mashed my foot further to the floor, invincible as only a 21-year old can be. That was when all hell broke loose.

A loud, metallic bang was followed immediately be a sudden forward jolt that sent my face very close to the steering wheel. The car quickly lost all forward momentum and the speedometer dropped like a rock through its green digital display, the digits quickly counting down to near nothing. A gray cloud of smoke billowed up behind me as though I'd taken fire from an RPG and a slick of oil covered the side of the car distorting the reflection in the right hand mirror. I navigated the Z to the shoulder as it lurched to a choppy halt and cantered slightly off into the grass. A few moments later the co-worker arrived at my window to find me still sitting in the driver's seat trying to decide what had happened. It was obvious to him that I had thrown a rod right through the side of the motor. Starvin' Marvin strikes again.

A couple months following the death of the 300Z, and having replaced Kayt with Dawn - I mean come on, I was headed to Kayt's house when the car blew - I finally grew tired of borrowing a vehicle from my parents for work transportation. Without notifying my parents of my decision, (what am I, crazy?), I visited a Volkswagen dealership to check out the new Passat. It was a cool car, electric sunroof and power everything. German engineering that reminded me of a Mercedes on a budget. The heated leather seats were again an attractive addition and, though they didn't have the black color that I was fond of at the time, I decided that the trade value of the blown 300Z was enough to entice me to take the maroon model on the floor. After all, my credit was good enough to warrant it and the payments, while pushing the envelope of my budget, were within the grasp of what my mind specified as a basic need ... freedom.

I had finally grown up enough to move out on my own and was en route to meet up with Dawn one Friday night, when I noticed a smokey smell in the car. I sniffed the air mindlessly, Aerosmith pounding a vicious rendition of "Ragdoll" from the superior sound system, and wondered briefly if I had driven past some sort of brush fire. Oddly, I recognized the scent of electrical smoke and a brief flash of memory skittered through my mind; the strange bubbling of the golden eagle on the Jeep's hood. As I came back to reality, I noticed that I could no longer see the curvy road ahead of me from the thick plume of black smoke that had filled the car. I instinctively reached for the window button and found that it wouldn't work! Panicked, I did the only thing that I could think to do ... I opened the door and stuck my head out into the wind as I hit the brakes, trying desperately to breath and keep the car on the road.

I was in the middle of nowhere, a common place within Missouri, and the only hope I had was to pull off into a gravel driveway ahead. Driving with my right hand and holding the door with my left, I steered the car into the drive and applied the emergency brake to keep it from rolling backward into the vacant road. Looking through the windows, I could see smoke billowing from behind the rear seat back that appeared to be coming from the trunk. I reached back into the front door, popped the trunk release and ran to the rear of the car, throwing the trunk lid up as fast as I could. At that moment, flames jumped out at me, singing my hair and then immediately pushed their way through the back seat and into the cabin of the car!

I ran back to the front door and reached through, grabbing my wallet from the console and the "bag phone" cellular that I had recently purchased; the newest, coolest gadget to hit the market. Using the bag phone, I dialed 9-1-1 and was rewarded with a high-pitched siren sound telling me that I had no service in that area. Shocking.

As the flames rose from the interior of the car, I ran to the house at the end of the driveway and banged loudly on the front door until a lady opened up. "Help!" I yelled at her, "My car is on fire in your driveway! Call the fire department!" No sooner did I get the words out, and as if to emphasize my claim, a loud POP! sounded from behind me, which apparently was the noise of the emergency brake's cable snapping in the heat. The burning mass of metal began rolling backward, leaving the poor lady's driveway, crossing the road and rolling down a steep embankment on the other side. Thankfully no cars were coming.

Nearly a month later, Christy and I, (well, you didn't expect Dawn to make it through the car fire, did you?), went to an appointment at the VW dealership where I was presented with an official check in settlement of physical losses and the keys to a replacement Passat, (this one was black), in exchange for not pursuing any legal claims against the company. Unlike Starvin', they didn't try to tell me the fire was my fault and all in all, they handled the thing quite well. I still had the steep car payments, but the new car was the color that I had wanted all along and I was happy.

I continued to trade cars and girlfriends for a number of years until I finally settled down, both emotionally and financially. Now nearly twenty-years later, I look back on that time in my life and realize that my inability to commit to anything was directly related to my financial situation at the time. The constant trading of vehicles ensured that, no matter how much money I made, I was inevitably broke. Likewise, the swooning of new girlfriends and showering them with flowers and gifts had kept any remaining funds at bay. And, because I was always broke, I did what many of us tend to do ... I valued myself constantly by looking at the balance of my checking account. My own self-worth was, in my mind, directly related to the financial worth that I saw in the ledger and therefore my self-esteem was low. I realized that by valuing myself so low, I was also casting aside relationships thinking that presenting the facade of something new and exciting was more beneficial than actually letting someone get to know me for who I really was.

Interestingly, my late-blooming realizations have proved this point. I've been married for nearly 11-years, have two wonderful children, a 10-year old business and I've only owned two trucks during that time. Consequently, I've found that while we tend to spend more as we make more, money is still easier to come by when you consistently pursue the same long-term goal and work for one success rather than diverting attention to multiple short-term interests.

Coincidentally, as I've stopped burning relationships I've also not had a car catch fire. Of course, now having said that ...

All the best,

WDL