Hammer Time: Vandalism

Steven Lang
by Steven Lang

The fellow had spent nearly three hours on the road. Just to drive a 10 year old Isuzu SUV.

Traffic cones. Construction. Stalls and accidents. By the time he got to my lot he was already emotionally spent, and it was only 10:00 A.M.

Then he saw it.

The front passenger tire was flatter than a Ford Festiva going through the crusher. I was at the bank when he called. Hadn’t even opened the lot yet. Finally when I got there I noticed that an old Lincoln Mark VIII had two tires flat as well.

It wasn’t a coincidence.

Last Friday I had authorized my first repossession of the year. All the usual things were done to avoid this step. Plenty of calls. Plenty of broken promises. Finally, one broken promise too many meant that I would get my vehicle back. It was done within a matter of hours.

Except the hour in question was 4:00 A.M. and the person in question had just got out of jail. More times than not, I regret financing someone else’s kid… or grandkid. It never works out no matter the goodwill of the guardian in question.

The usual scenario goes like this.

Young fellow is cleaned up enough to look presentable. The parent/grandparent/uncle/aunt is sick and tired of driving the fellow around, or worse, having them abuse their vehicle on a regular basis.

They come to my lot on the hope that I will let their entitled progeny abuse one of my cars. I say no… and that is usually it.

Except when it comes to certain vehicles I have which can take abuse and aren’t worth all that much. A 1995 Lincoln Town Car that had already been repo’d once fit the bill perfectly. Nobody wants a 17 year old, full-sized V8 car with 175k that was designed with a ruler. More times than not an old Panther like this will be financed to someone’s kid. I have the parent or guardian co-sign on the vehicle. The payments must be directly deposited, and if the insurance is dropped or changed, they get my voice on their phone.

Sometimes you can have the parent make the deposits. Other times it’s the kid. The parents desperately want to teach the kid responsibility. But in real life the deal usually is doomed from the start. Drugs, alcohol, laziness, stupidity, sass and self-destructive behavior invariably lead to several missed payments after five to seven months.

The guy had missed eight weekly payments at this point. A phone that only worked when I dialed it from another number, and every excuse in the world when I had our all too brief conversations. Sometimes a repo can snap someone back to the reality of paying for what is not yet their own.

But when they are on drugs… forget it. You will only get a long list of excuses until you get back your car, and maybe one or two calls from the parent or guardian explaining how it will never happen again.

They’re right. It won’t.

When I got to the lot I saw the damage. I explained to the customer what took place. We worked together on putting the full-sized spare on the car. He drove it. Liked it. Paid for it. To be frank, I was almost misty eyed to deal with such nice folks after having my property violated. It was the third time in four years my property got hit (having a pawn shop adjacent to my lot doesn’t help) and dealing with genuinely nice and helpful souls is what makes any career worth doing.

I still had to repair the damage on the Mark VIII. So i turned off the air suspension. Put two jack stands onto the tires that needed to be removed, and went down the street to a used tire place owned by a fellow named Miles who is from Cameroon. I bought 2 Michelin Harmony’s with about 50% tread on them for $80. Went back to the lot, and three other cars with customers were waiting there for me.

One helped me put the tires back on while the other two went on test drives. The first financed a Saturn. The second financed a Buick the next day, and the other fellow who helped me with the tires is waiting for me to find a true contradiction in terms. A good old Saab.

I used to get into a near ‘Falling Down’ state of mind whenever someone had violated my property. It happened two other times. Though I’m pretty sure neither one involved a customer. The first time they took a couple of crappy aftermarket CD players and probably did me a favor. The second time they stole a Chinese scooter from a storage unit I had in the back and… did me an even bigger favor.

This time it wasn’t a favor. It was a moment that made me think of Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction talking about someone who had keyed his old 1964 Chevy Malibu.

“Boy, I wish I could’ve caught him doing it. I’d have given anything to catch that asshole doing it. It’d been worth him doing it just so I could’ve caught him doing it.”

Go to 2:13 for the Vincent Vega moment.

Well, I didn’t catch him doing it. But at this point in my life I wouldn’t want to catch him. I have too much to lose and nothing to gain from random acts of bullshit machismo. I’ll leave that to the movies.

How about you though? Did anyone ever vandalize your car? If so, did you have the chance to make your feelings known?

Steven Lang
Steven Lang

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  • WildcatMatt WildcatMatt on May 17, 2012

    All of my incidents happened while I lived in a gated community, go figure. It was rural mostly retired people so I never locked my car doors. One day my CD wallet disappeared. I figured okay, lesson learned. I started locking my car. Four months later I get in my car at 4:30 on a 20-degree morning and my back window shatters. Someone had punched a neat hole in it and used a stick to unlock it. This time they completely cleaned the car out. Turned out my next door neighbor was distracted by a protracted divorce and her starved-for-attention kid was letting a fencing ring into through the gate at night. Eventually she discovered a cache of stolen property in his closet and turned him in, so I got restitution. I also went out of town over a Halloween weekend and came back to discover some wonderful person had driven 100' down my driveway to rear-end my '65 Buick hard enough to push it forward about 5'. Never did find out who did that one.

  • Flowerofhighrank Flowerofhighrank on May 18, 2012

    in, like, '83? I had a '68 Camaro. My dad's buddy had a Camaro racing team and he'd dropped a racing engine into it, without doing any of the stiffening or tranny work or ? (I'm not a gearhead. I'm an English teacher.) Anyways, it was a very, VERY quick and whippy car. Another small detail: I was engaged to two women at the same time when I had the car. How does that happen? Well. I was working with S, a lovely single mom; we just had a great chemistry. Through my work, I met T, a rich girl who needed help with her homework. I'd go back and forth between their houses, sleeping three nights here, two nights there. I'm sitting here, telling the truth- I loved both of them. I really did. But I couldn't...oh, wait, this is 'The Truth About Cars', not 'Some Guy Examines His Past.' Sorry. One day, S handed me a package and said, this is my grandmother's wedding ring. I looked inside, and gosh. A lot of gold, a lot of diamonds, maybe a pearl- Grandma must've had a mitt like the Hulk's. I looked at S and she smiled and said we could get it melted down into two wedding bands and keep one of the diamonds for my pierced ear. (Stop laughing. It was the 80s, I was a bouncer and a college student and it obviously didn't hurt my appeal. Ya go with what works.) Well, it was a proposal and I thought: be rude to say 'no way' outright, right? So I smiled and nodded and spent the night. A few months later, T asks me to go to a wedding in Vegas. We go, it's very touching, about as touching as a wedding performed by Elvis can be. After, sipping coffee, she said: we need to think about getting married soon. To my benefit, I didn't spray the coffee into the air. I just said, "Well, I can't even consider that until I finish college and that's at least a year away." She told me her father would pay for my school from now on, that I could just go to school all the time and get it done faster. (Sure, and end up like her two brothers-in-law, working for Daddy's company and already showing signs of despair) I nodded, thought: okay, it'd be rude to say 'no', we just went to a wedding, she'll drop it, fine. And I didn't say anything. I just smiled, sipped my coffee and kept going from house to house. One afternoon, the Camaro was parked outside S's house. I was kind of helping with her son, kinda maybe jollying her around the kitchen, but the inevitable occurred- T finally went down that street. A white '68 Camaro is hard to miss, I guess. T went to the store, got some serious chemicals and wrote the word 'PRICK' across my windshield, top to bottom. Found it just before I had to go to work and I still remember my supervisor at the Forum Club looking at the car, looking at me and saying,"Your name ain't Rick!" I just shrugged and did the gig. Eventually I went to T's place and got a very hearty slap across the face and realized...well, the jury's till out on what I realized, because I kept going from house to house. Eventually, S caught me lying and married a guy who treats her like crap, T married her tennis pro, thereby killing her father, inheriting a huge pile of money and starting a long series of stays in rehab...and I sold the Camaro for about two grand. Yes, I know. Dumb. Every time I see a '68, I check the windshield for those ghostly letters and wonder if the new owner got the glass replaced.

  • MaintenanceCosts It's not a Benz or a Jag / it's a 5-0 with a rag /And I don't wanna brag / but I could never be stag
  • 3-On-The-Tree Son has a 2016 Mustang GT 5.0 and I have a 2009 C6 Corvette LS3 6spd. And on paper they are pretty close.
  • 3-On-The-Tree Same as the Land Cruiser, emissions. I have a 1985 FJ60 Land Cruiser and it’s a beast off-roading.
  • CanadaCraig I would like for this anniversary special to be a bare-bones Plain-Jane model offered in Dynasty Green and Vintage Burgundy.
  • ToolGuy Ford is good at drifting all right... 😉
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