"Baby You Can Drive My Car"

So I spent most of my weekend trying to fix my car. This was not how I'd originally planned to spend my weekend, but car repairs are the sort of thing that just pop up whenever they want to, regardless of your prior plans. They're like pop quizes or your in-laws, really.

See, I went to a party with Michelle Friday night, and after dropping her off, the battery light in my car came on. This was pretty disconcerting, I have to tell you, but at least it waited until after I'd driven to Fredericksburg and back to do this. Anyway, I got up sometime around noon Saturday (hey, I was out until around 5.00 am, I felt I deserved at least a few hours of sleep) and took my car to the local GMC dealer, explaining what had happened and asking for assistance. Sadly, the guy said they were all booked up, and I should try the Chevy place up the street (they're all GM vehicles, anyway, so it really doesn't matter one way or the other). Unfortunately for me, the Chevy place was already closed by the time I got up there.

"No problem," I say to myself, "I'll just find the nearest Autozone and have them test the battery. If that's the problem, I'm sure we can get it fixed easily."

Well, after searching around, I discovered the nearest Autozone was clear over in Manassas, about 20 miles away. Undaunted, I drove to Manassas. I actually made it as far as the parking lot of the place before the car gave out, which would be the last bit of good luck I'd have this weekend.

The folks at Autozone tested my battery and told me it was deader than a doornail and stood no chance of resurrection, so I purchased a new one, they popped it in, and I drove off, thinking I'd defeated my problem with aplomb.

Oh, how naive I was.

See, I noticed as I was getting ready to leave that the battery light was still on, so I went back in to mention this. "Oh, no problem," said the woman who'd replaced my battery, "the system just takes awhile to reset sometimes, that's all." So off I go, traipsing around Fairfax to run a couple of errands and go help Wendy with her students' one acts again (as I'd done before Friday night's party). My car made it back to the apartment afterwards, but just barely. The battery, despite being brand new, was not holding a charge. "Crap," I think to myself, "this is almost exactly like when the alternator went out in the Sunfire a few years ago."

So I decide this morning to head to Autozone again to see about getting a new alternator. Tim agrees to follow me out there in case I need a jump. We get about five miles down the road and the car dies. So Tim pulls up beside me and gives me a jump (after some annoying rearranging...I swear to high holy Heaven, it was so much more difficult getting the cars in position to jump than it should have been. I won't even recount the problems I had with car keys and the removing said keys from the ignition. Be content, gentle reader, in the knowledge that many curse words were cursed, many oaths were sworn to hunt down whatever genius decided cars ought to be more electronic than mechanical, and my keys ultimately stayed in the dead car in the lonely parking lot while Tim and I continued on our quest for an alternator). Sadly, jumping the car proved fruitless, as the car would die as soon as we took off the jumper cables. "Let's just go on to Autozone, grab the alternator, and come back and put it in. It can't be that hard, right?" I say to Tim. "Yeah, we can do that," Tim says, and off we go to Manassas, none the wiser of just what asses we were about to make of ourselves.

A trip to Manasssas and $220 later, we head back to my car, new alternator in hand. We know we need to loosen the tensor arm so we can slip the belt off the old alternator and unbolt it and install the new one.

We couldn't loosen the belt. We couldn't figure out how to get the tensor arm to move, so we sat there, fiddling with crap that we didn't really understand, until Tim hit upon the brilliant idea of going and getting his dad.

"This thing has proven we are not true men, Tim," I said, my head bowed in defeat.

"Yeah," he agreed, "there's clearly a gap in our knowledge base" (okay, that's not how he said it, but that was the gist. Go with the narrative flow here, okay?)?

Anyway, it's getting on near dark by this point, and Tim goes off to get his dad while I stay with the car. Tim and his father finally return about an hour and a half or so after he left, and it's pitch dark by this point. Tim's father breaks out a prybar and goes after the tensor arm, finally shifting it and getting the damn belt off the alternator. It took less than thirty minutes to unbolt the old alternator and bolt on the new one after that, and all told about one hour of actual work was all it took to get the new alternator in place, the jumper cables attached, the car juiced back up, and my car to be running the way it's supposed to.

Yes, today my masculinity was put to the test. I failed. Miserably.

I hope they don't revoke my penis.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Led Zeppelin, "Trampled Under Foot"