Destiny's Buick

The smashed glass of the driver's side rear window of a 1995 Buick looks like a pile of shaved blue ice when it hits the city street. I suppose that would be the same of any car, but in my case it was the Buick. You could say the car had it coming. A date with destiny. Looking back, the car had no chance to deviate from a path that seemed predetermined, just like a projectile moving in its predictable parabola will always land where you expect when you know all the variables involved.

Thursday, the serpentine belt fell off right in front of nannar's house. I muscled the car, which had lost its power steering, to the side of the road in a cloud of engine smoke. If the car had died anywhere else, I would have had it towed immediately. Friday, krasota was very ill. If she hadn't been sick, forcing her to stay inside, she would have had a look at the car and had it towed that afternoon. Saturday, we had an annual Apple Festival to attend and I had to rock out with Terminal Ready. Also, our usual repair shop doesn't work on the weekends, so we weren't in a hurry to get the car towed. This scenario forced the car to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I didn't see it coming because I was more concerned with Saturday night's show.

And the show was great. Tacit Act looks like a promising new band. The Last Dance was splendid, as always. And we, Terminal Ready, brought the rock. We brought the rock and dropped it like a bomb on the Outback Lodge. We dropped it so hard the rock burst apart, sending chunks flying. One chunk of rock landed two miles away, punching a hole in the Buick's window. The next day, I met the woman who called the Police to report the "vandalism." She called just after 11pm Saturday, which was around the same time Terminal Ready threw down the rock. I got the call from the Charlottesville police around 1:30am Sunday morning alerting me to the smashed window. I headed over to meet the young man (the cops around here look like high school kids) and provided him with the information to fill out the report. I just gave him the basics, my identifying information. I didn't tell him that Terminal Ready had just unleashed a meteor shower upon the city. I did a little forensics work and discovered scraps of pumpkin littering the street. Some of its guts were still hanging from the bits of glass left in the door.

Needless to say, I was a little disappointed. Here I thought it was carnage from the rock bomb that exploded on stage. But it appeared to be a mere pumpkin. And on November 3. What kind of wahoo yahoo commits vandalism with a pumpkin in November? You're supposed to fire those things at private property no later than Halloween. Was it some street urchin, I wondered? Some roving band of slack jawed teenagers? Or was it Nannar's neighbor? The old lady. You know, the one with the stooped walk and the hump on her back. You know what that fucking hump is? It's a pumpkin cannon. She chambered a round in that hump, hobbled over to my crippled car, ducked her head just a little bit so as to not blast her head off, and torpedoed my car. Satisfied with that conclusion I went home and to bed.

But the next morning! The next morning I found the rock! There was damage to the passenger side door on the inside. No pumpkin inside the car! I found the rock wedged between the back seat and the door where it had come to rest at the end of its inevitable trajectory. The pumpkin had me fooled. The old lady might have blasted the side of our car, but that was harmless tomfoolery. Behold, dear readers, it was a shard from the rock that Terminal Ready brought. Blackened. Scorched. A single rhine-stone embedded in its craggy surface and wrapped in a pair of panties that it caught on its way off the stage. My Buick never had a chance.