Living in Philadelphia made it a lot easier to see my parents and my siblings more often. In the late 90s, my sister was still pursuing an acting career in New York. We don’t get along, but I will never deny her the credit due for pursuing a life that is as difficult, albeit in different was, from being a musician. Even if we did get along, I doubt we’d see too much of each other, and certainly didn’t back then: we both led, and continue to lead, incredibly busy lives. But one weekend evening, I had a night off and decided to drive up to New York to meet my parents and catch her latest performance.

The trip went well, until approached and entered the Holland Tunnel, which as usual in a Friday, was backed up and moving slowly. I wasn’t more than a minute into the tunnel when all of a sudden, my thermostat began moving very quickly toward the red zone. The engine was overheating, and traffic was going about 10 miles an hour. I turned the heat up as high as it would go, and tapped on my horn. C’mon, c’mon I muttered, not here, not fucking now. It was like the GWB all over again, and I wanted no part of it. I’d opened the windows to let out the overpowering heat, which stank like the previous owner’s damp cigarettes. C’mon, C’MON.

And then, I rounded the curve out of the tunnel, steam beginning to pour out from under the hood, and there on the right was a mechanic. “OH GOD, THANK YOU GOD,” I shouted as I pulled over to the side. Halle-fucking-lujah, they were open.

A guy with bad teeth came out and took a look at the van. “Holy shit man, you got a baaaad problem,” he said. “That radiator is fucked!”

My heart sank. That wasn’t a 10 minute fix. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be $5.00 either.

“Or maybe not,” the guy said. “Maybe not. Could be your thermostat.” He must have seen the desperation in my face. “Listen man,” he said. “How much you got on you? We’re closing soon, but if it’s just your thermostat, I can squeeze you in.”

“I have about $55.00 to my name,” I said, “unless you take credit.”

“We do, we do…. Tell you what buddy, you come back in a half hour. If it’s the thermostat, it’ll be done by then. Gonna cost you about $85.00 though. On the other hand, you need a new radiator? You’re kinda fucked.”

I had no idea if they were overcharging me or not. All I knew is I wasn’t getting to my sister’s play, and I was out at the very least $85.00. As it happened, a thermostat was exactly what I needed. Until a week later when the radiator itself died. That was another couple hundred down the drain, but I didn’t have much of a choice given the bass and the gigs.

The shit really hit the fan that summer. It was sometime in July, a brutally hot day, and the engine began acting up almost as soon as I hit the Holland Tunnel. By the time I arrived in Manhattan the temperature gauge had bounced up and down so many times I felt like I was on the business end of a bungee jump. This time I didn’t have time to pull into a garage: I was already late for the damn gig, and fighting traffic besides. As I headed uptown through the Bowery, I got caught in a massive jam at Bowery and Broome. Caught in traffic, the temperature freaking out, I had no choice but to turn off the car to let it cool down.

That’s when that little hiccup I mentioned went nuts: the engine refused to stop trying to turn over. “Ka-chug…ka-chug…ka-chug. ka……..CHUG. With a shudder the engine finally shut down. By this time traffic was moving around me. “He’s in trouble!” I heard someone yell, and I turned to see a group of polo-shirted tourists, many wearing big cameras around their necks, running toward me. I hopped in the van and put it in neutral as they pushed me across the intersection and off to the right on Bowery. In front of us was a huge protest, blocked off by police barriers.

“Management unfair to gays and immigrants!” was what they were yelling, as the crowd threw rubber rats through the air at some unfortunate restaurant. “BUNCH OF RATS! BUNCH OF RATS!” they chanted. The entire street was blocked. But behind the barrier stood one free parking spot: I looked at the cop bemusedly overseeing this whole scene, and caught his eye. “You think I can squeeze in there?” I asked.

“If you can move the barrier, I don’t see no problem,” he replied. A few of the protestors noticed what was going on and helped me drag the barrier out of the way. As we pushed the van into the space, i tried to start it one last time. It caught briefly, and then sputtered out reluctantly, ka-chug ka-chug, trying its damnedest not to stop.

I got out of the car and dialed the band to let them know I was running late. Then I looked at the cop. “So… how long do I have before you give me a ticket?” I asked. “And how long before I get towed, which might be the best thing to happen to this fucking piece of SHIT!” I said, kicking the door. I was pissed. Sweat was beading down my forehead, I had a 25 pound bass to haul across town, and I was looking, at the very least, at a NY-sized ticket and bankrupting impound fees. I realized that the saying “my blood’s boiling” is neither metaphor nor hyperbole.

“Actually, you don’t have to worry about nothin’,” the cop said. “It’s Friday, and in about 20 minutes, the parking limit’s done for the weekend. You don’t have to move this thing til… about 9:00 AM Monday. And I’ll comp you that 20 minutes, you look like you’ve had a hard day.”

I could have kissed the guy. “You have no idea officer. One question though, I gotta get over to 12th and B. You know where the nearest subway is?” He gave me directions, and as I turned to leave, an elderly Chinese man standing over a massage chair called to me. “Hey mister, you look like you havin’ a bad day! You want massage, I do this one free!” And what the fuck, I was already late, so I laid down the bass and flopped my weary body into the chair, before lugging the bass to the old Devil Moon playing all night, and eventually winding up in some girl’s bed.

I left the bass overnight at the Moon, and wandered down to the Bowery to see if the van would start. After sitting all night, the engine was nice and cool, and started right up. I began to plan how I’d get home with a misbehaving van, which is what it started doing within a few blocks. By the time I got to the venue to grab my bass, the temperature was back up in the red, and when I tried to turn it off, the van just refused. The ka-chug was louder and more persistent than it had ever been. I popped the hood, and a group of Puerto Ricans sitting across the stoop came over to look.

“Hey mang, your muffler’s glowin’ red hot!” one of the guys said, pointing. I looked down. KA-CHUG KA-CHUG KA-CHUG! It was glowing!

“Look out man, it’s gonna explode!” another guy yelled, and all of a sudden, TWELVE-FOOT HIGH FLAMES SHOT OUT OF THE HOOD!

“Get an ’stinguisher!” someone yelled, but I was already bolting into the Old Devil Moon for just that. As I ran back out, I heard the shriek of fire engines. They were too late: as they rounded both corners of the small one-way street, the fire had subsided. Horns were blaring, traffic backed up across the avenue. Fucking van. It took about another half-hour, but after inspecting the area and making sure the car wasn’t going to explode again, the fire department left.

The Puerto Rican guys crowded around, looking into the engine. One guy slid under the car. “What you needa do is poke a hole in the muffler,” he shouted from the undercarriage. “I gotta screwdriver, I can do that right now, you want.”

“I dunno,” I said. “I replaced it this past January, it’s only been six months. Shit, I’ll bet it’s under warranty!” I walked back into the restaurant and asked for a phone book, looking up the nearest Meineke, which was way out on Utica Avenue in Bed-Stuy, and then calling a AAA tow-truck (after the previous adventures, i figured becoming a member was a good investment). A few minutes later, the wrecker showed up. On the way out to the muffler shop, the driver, who was Israeli, told me how he’d arrived in New York. “I came over here in 1987 to visit relative, and I loved it so much I never left! I have never left New York City, and I never will! It is most wonderful place in world!” Between the Puerto Ricans and the Israeli, it was beginning to be an international day.

Out on Utica Avenue, the Pakistanis who worked at the Meineke inspected the car. “There’s nothing wrong with your muffler,” was their final diagnosis.

“Nothing?” I said. “The engine just practically exploded while the muffler got red hot! There’s gotta be something wrong with it.”

“Nothing we can find,” the guy said in his precise way. “Although I might recommend using a higher grade of gasoline. It burns cleaner, and you won’t have the same problem.” I was thanked him, warily (there was clearly SOMETHING wrong) and pulled out of the lot. I was almost out of gas anyhow, so I pulled into the nearest station, where the engine predictably refused to turn off AGAIN. I popped the hood, and the muffler was (unsurprisingly) glowing hot again. The last thing anyone needed was an explosion at a fucking gas station, so I shouted to the attendant, “Is there a muffler shop anywhere around here? And NOT the Meineke!”

“Next door,” the attendant yelled back. “It’s a little Jamaican place in the yellow building.” I pulled out and around and into the garage. A guy with a Caribbean accent so deep I could barely understand a word that came out of his mouth popped the hood, and helpfully pointed out that my muffler was red hot. “Dass a not goood mon,” he mumbled, “ya muffla be in baaaad shape.”

“It can’t be,” I said. “It’s not even a year old. I can’t figure it out, I try to turn the thing off and it keeps trying to run, until it explodes.”

“Datsa da pre-igneeeetion mon,” he said.

“The pre-ig– what?”

“‘Pre-ignition’”, he repeated carefully.”‘Sa when ya fuel burn too hot, it don’t leave the muffler, so it tryta burn inside.” He pointed to a little piece of plastic that looked like a flattened pitch-pipe. Wires came out of both ends. “Thass probally ya problem right theah. Dass ya ignition control.” And he explained that the ignition was controlled by a small computer, and if the component died, the fuel wouldn’t burn at the right temperature, leading to the problems I was having.

He went into the back of the shop and came back with few parts books, After thumbing through them, he looked up and said “Dey don’t sell these onna after market. i gotta order it from the factory.”

He sighed. “Where you live?”

“Philadelphia,” I said.

“You gotta come back next week,” he said. “It’s gonna take that long to get the part.”

I was pissed: this was going to kill my budget for the next two weeks at least. On the other hand, I had met a really pretty girl at last night’s show, and she had invited me over to a cookout that weekend, which I’d declined. Maybe it was time to give her a call.

I spent the rest of the day hanging out on a rooftop somewhere in Brooklyn, eating burgers, drinking beer and hanging out with the really pretty girl and her friends. Two of them, randomly enough, turned out to be people I knew from UMass. They lived right around the corner from Old Devil Moon in an apartment the size of my upstairs hallway, with the living room divided from the bedroom by a cheap tapestry, a bathtub in the kitchen, and the toilet in what should have been a broom closet: I ended up staying with them a few times in the next few months, until I had to listen to them having sex from behind the curtain. Speaking of sex, I don’t remember if I got laid the weekend my van died, but I do remember the train ride home being Hellishly long.

Almost as long as the trip back: a train ride, followed by a bunch of subways, followed by a taxi ride out to Utica Avenue. The repair itself wasn’t that expensive, less than $100.00 if my memory’s right, but the transit costs killed me.

By this time I hated that van. I loathed it. And I couldn’t get rid of it. I cursed it the entire two-hour drive home. Fucking piece of shit crap ass motherfucking albatross fucking shit fuck fuck. All the way home like that.

The very next weekend? It was gone. I looked out my bedroom window, and it was missing, vanished into thin air. I called the police to report a missing vehicle, and when I gave them the license number, it turned out it was towed for an expired inspection sticker. They gave me the lot where it was, but warned I’d have to pay the ticket and the late fees if I wanted it back; another $185.00, on top of whatever fees the lot would charge me.

I called the lot: it was going to cost another $200 to get it out. There was no question: I couldn’t afford to do it. Not only that, the “storage fee” was $25.00 a day, so by the time I got paid in four days, it’d be another $100 on top of everything else!

“So… what happens if I leave the car there?” I asked.

“After about two weeks we label it abandoned, and it gets crushed. Believe me, a lot of people do that,” the guy on the other end of the phone said. “In fact, sometimes people come down, get their valuables out of the car, and leave it for us.”

“REALLY?” I said. OH JOY, THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS!. “Really, you can do that? Does it cost any money to do that?”

“Not at all. Hell, we’re the ones making money of your abandoned vehicle. But if you want your stuff, you gotta show us your license and registration.”

“The registration’s in the car,” I said.
“That’s fine.”
“What time do you close?” I asked.
“5:30,” he said.

I looked at the clock. It was 3:00. “See you in an hour,” I said. And with that, I called a friend, grabbed a ride, cleaned out that van, and left my car troubles in a junkyard somewhere in southwest Philly. I didn’t own another car until well after my son was born in 2004.

After making the inaugural trip to Philadelphia, and losing the muffler in the process, the van and I began our daily relationship driving back and forth to my advertising job. It was a piece of shit, maroon with fake wood paneling on the sides. Inside, it was power everything, although if my memory’s right, the mirrors didn’t actually work. The power steering fluid reservoir needed to be refilled monthly, and never seemed to make the groaning noise go away. On the other hand, the brakes were new and the heat worked, which is more than I can say for the pickup truck I’d sold off. I removed the middle and rear seats to make more room for my bass, which was also going on bi-weekly trips to New York, where the band had a residency at a restaurant, the late great Old Devil Moon.

I had finally admitted to my boss that I was moving to Philly. I felt terrible: not two months earlier, the guy gave me, a totally inexperienced mug, a copy writer position, and here I was telling him I was going off, wheeee, to play fucking bluegrass music? While my boss was understanding and encouraged me, my father was none too pleased: when I called to tell him I was moving to Philly, and why, his response was “WHAT. ABOUT. YOUR. JOB?” I don’t think he’d talked to me like that since I was a teenager. Thanksgiving was coming up, and it was going to be my first as a single man in five years: between that and the need to patch stuff up with my dad, I decided to make the trip to South Jersey.

The engine burp I’d noticed on my initial trip to Philadelphia had been getting worse, but on the drive to my parents, it really made itself known. If I was driving anywhere other than the highway, the Caravan would sputter and cough. In fact, when I pulled over to get gas in New York, it wouldn’t start until I let the damned thing sit for twenty minutes, while I shivered in the frosty night air.

The rest of the trip to Jersey was uneventful: once my parents understood that the Jim and Jennie thing had legs, and that i would find work in Philadelphia, their nerves were settled and Thanksgiving was great. By the end of the weekend, everyone was really looking forward to the move, especially my brother who now had a place to crash whenever he wanted to get out of the woods. My dad even paid for the van to get a tune-up, and oil change, and a full safety inspection.

That’s why it was so surprising when, at the tolls at the northern tip of the Jersey Turnpike, the engine burp came back. The damned thing almost stalled out, but I gunned the motor and brought it back to life. I wasn’t so lucky as I paid the toll to get on the lower deck of the George Washington Bridge: as I pulled past the toll, at 6:00 pm, right in the middle of the post-holiday rush, in the center fucking lane, the van gave one last belch and stalled out. I turned on my hazards, rolled down the window, and through a cacaphony of blaring car horns, began waving drivers by. HONK HONNNNNNK BRAAWWWWWNK!! I tried to start the engine, nothing. HEY JACKASS WHAT THE FU— HOONNNNNKKKKK HOOONK!! I waited five minutes and tried again, nothing. I didn’t have a cellphone, so I couldn’t even call for help. I cranked the engine again, and got worse than nothing: it sounded like the battery was dying.

And that’s when the guy rear-ended me. Or to be honest, tapped my rear bumper, on purpose. I leaned out the window and looked back.

“Get the fuck outta da way,” he yelled at me in Spanish-accented English. “What the fuck is wrong witchoo?”

“Dude, the engine won’t catch,” I yelled back. “Can’t you see my hazards, go around, what the hell’s wrong with YOU?”

“Pop da clutch!” he yelled back. Cars were just whizzing by. “Pop da clutch!”

“It’s an automatic,” I yelled back. “No clutch to pop!”

“Put it in neutral!” he replied. “NEUTRAL!”

“I just told you, that won’t work!” He looked at me like I was an idiot, got out of his car, and walked over. Leaning his head in the door, he repeated, “Put her in neutral.” I was beginning to think if anyone was an idiot, it was this guy. “DUDE.” I said. “THIS CAR IS AN AUTOMATIC. I KNOW YOU WANT ME TO SLAM IT IN FIRST AND POP THE CLUTCH, THAT WON’T WORK.”

He sighed. “No man, I’m gonna push you.” I was right the first time: I was the idiot.

“Gotcha!” I said, and put pulled the shifter to the big letter N. A second later, the guy’s sedan bumped into mine, and slowly but surely we started moving across the GWB, heading for the right lane and into a really sketchy looking neighborhood. As we coasted down the exit ramp, I tried to start the van one last time, and miraculously, it caught. I pulled into the breakdown lane, hit the hazards, and popped the hood. My rescuer came over and looked at the engine with me.

“I don’t understand it,” I complained, “my fucking old man just paid for a tune-up. This should be running like a clock!”

The guy looked closer at the front of the engine, at a dingy grease-smeared little cylinder-shaped thing with a small pipe on each end. “Did they replace this?” he asked, pointing.

“I, uh… well I don’t know.”

“It looks dirty,” he went on, “I’ll bet they didn’t. It’s your fuel filter.” He poked at it. “If it wasn’t replaced, that could be shutting off your engine. You gotta let it drain a bit when it does that, maybe 20 minutes, and it should start right up again.”

“Thanks a million,” I said. “Say, any idea how to get back to the highway?”

“Where you goin?”

“I gotta get over to the Hutch,” I replied.

“Oh man… you from here? Listen, just follow me, you gotta go through the Bronx.” And so this total stranger led me across the city to where the Hutch picks up. before we parted, i noticed he was puffing away at a cigarette.

“Listen man, you helped me out. I don’t have any cash to spare in my pocket, but let me get you some smokes, what’s your poison?”

“Man you don’t gotta.. well, OK Marlboro box.”

“You got it, just wait right here!” I had to put it on my credit card, $40.00 for a carton of of the awful smelly things, but it was worth it. The dude saved my ass.

Once I was on the Hutch, the ride was like butter. The only thing out of the ordinary was the way the engine didn’t want to stop running for a turn or two when I shut off the ignition. And the next day, it turned out the guy was right: a $5.00 piece metal had shut me down on the GWB.

But the saga of the van wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

Last year when whenI bought my van in Mt. Airy, the seller brought me to a nearby auto tags place called Reese Auto Tags (7150 Germantown Avenue, 215-242-8247) to transfer registration, title, and the other necessary documents. For those of you who don’t live in Pennsylvania, the work of registration and titleing is actually farmed out to for-profit businesses, instead of a government agency wehere this kind of work belongs. The result is a patchwork quilt of reputable and disreputable businesses. Unfortunately, Reese Auto Tags, and their on-site notary James J. Conaghan, are the latter.

After paying the fee for document processing (about $100.00, maybe more), Conaghan gave me my temporary plates, and assured me that that tags would arrive in a few months. When the tags didn’t arrive and the temporary plate expired, I went back to the storefront, where Conaghan gave me a new temporary, and a new assurance that the tags would arrive.

When that set of tags didn’t arrive, I called again to get new temporary plates. Then I called again. And again. In the year that followed, I must have called Reese Auto Tags at leats every other month inquiring into my tags and never once got a response. Worse, when I called the state to see if there was a delay on their end, they told me there was no record of my van in their files. To this day, I am driving around on expired tags.

My van goes in for inspection tomorrow, and since I was home from work sick yesterday, I placed one more call to Reese Auto Tags, hanging up in exasperation before the machine clicked on with the same message it’s been giving me since last year. Instead, I called up an auto tags place in my neighborhood. After I explaining my situation to the woman on the other end, she told me “You have to get your title before we can get you started on the procedure, and that’ll cost $115.”

“But I don’t have the title,” I said. “Reese Auto Tags does, and they’ve been ditchign em for a year. How do I get it back?”

“It sounds to me,” she sighed, “like they never processed your paperwork.” Her weary tone indicated she’d been through this story before. “Here’s what you have to do: call the state police.”

“The staties? isn’t that a little, uh drastic?”

“Not at all,” she replied. “It’s the job of the state police to monitor the tags agencies for exactly this kind of nonsense. Leave Reese a message saying that if he doesn’t get you your tags, you’re calling the cops.”

I thanked her for her advice, and redialed Reese Auto Tags. Interestingly, the message had changed to a panicked man with “very little time” told incoming callers to fax their pink temporary registration and insurance cards to Kathy for processing. The words were fast and nervous, and I was imagining an angry mob outside the office with pitchforks and torches trying to batter down the door yelling, “We know you’re in there Conaghan! We want our tags!”

I think he may have gotten nailed by someone else. Just a hunch. I did my fax this morning. If I don’t get my tags damn soon, I’m reporting him to the staties.

DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH REESE AUTO TAGS. THEY ARE CROOKS.

The enging cranks but doesn’t catch, which could be any number of problems. What I can tell you for certain is that over the past couple of weeks, the van has had trouble getting up to speed when entering the highway. In last week’s rainstorm, the engine refused to get out of firts gear, and groaned and shuddered as I tried to drive up my street. In the dry weather that followed it had no problem.

I’m wondering if this indicates the need for a basic tuneup (cables, spark plugs, distributor cap, etc.) or whether this indicates something more serious, like the timing belt. Feel free to offer advice in comments.

This isn’t a bleg per se (I hate those), but I DO have a small van, and after this Sunday will be available to do small moving and pick-up trips, preferably on the weekends, preferably in the Philly metro area. $10/hour, plus gas. I have about 170 cubic feet of cargo space, and the van has been used to haul amplifiers, cabinets, and lumber (10 foot lengths or less please).

Leave a comment, and let’s see if we can schedule something.