More than a year in the life of my car

I wish I had an actual before picture of my car, but I don't. Neither do I have an after one, because all the digital cameras in my house are broken. It is a 1989 Nissan 240SX. It took me several weeks to learn that. Now, whenever anyone asks what kind of car I have, I recite it like I have memorized it for a test: 1989. Nissan. 240. SX.

It's clear that the main problem with my car is that it's 18-years-old. I'm 26. I was nine when my car was new.

Despite its age, it was practically perfect when I bought it more than a year and a half ago. For two weeks afterward, people stopped me in parking lots to tell me how pristine and amazing it looked. I assume these people knew something about cars.

Come week three, I parked it in a convenience store parking lot at noon. I went inside for five minutes and I think I bought a Subway sandwich (veggie, wheat, cheese, everything except hot peppers). When I came out, my perfect trunk was popped open and the back smashed in. Hit and run. No witnesses in broad daylight. Right.

It was a sign of things to come. I'll skip over the hassle that is the District of Columbia's Car-Registering Train of Hell. Let me just say that the conductor's "computers" twice said that my brakes were not working at all. And yet, by some miracle, I had managed to bring my car to a complete stop in front of the inspecting station. In fact, it stopped many times in the slowly creeping line.

Then, one day not so many days later, I happened upon my beloved with its passenger side window smashed to smitherines and the car's only redeeming quality — its radio and CD player — ripped out. The cop who came to take my report shrugged and said, "This is a bad neighborhood. You should move." Yeah, thanks buddy.

When I finally did get D.C. plates instead of living a life of crime, I forgot to put the sticker on my windshield that in all normal municipalities goes on the back license plate. Two hours later, I had a ticket for $100.

At some point, I parked on the street near my office, opened the door slightly and reached over to the passenger seat to get my bag. My foot nudged the door and it swung open just as another car was grazing past. The car was occupied by a nice old lady. One day, I found a note on my car in a parking lot from someone saying they had nudged my bumper and left their phone number. I crumpled it up and threw it in the back seat. A couple times, my car just hasn't turned on, which typically costs me $400 a non-turn-on.

Recently, I caught a bunch of hoodlums (The use of the word is not an overdramatization. A U.S. Secret Service officer who patrols the neighborhood confirmed that they are crack-dealing gang members.) sitting on my car. I instructed them to remove their bodies from my roof. A few weeks later, one of the retractable headlights, which had been stuck up due to what I can only imagine is some electricity problem, became stuck down.

A few months ago, a 12-passenger van I was waiting behind on a one-way street decided to back into me. My retractable lights popped up for a second and my once-pristine hood was slightly bent. Luckily, the 12-passenger van's insurance company sent me a check for the entire worth of the car no questions asked. So, it wasn't all bad.

The crack-cocaine hoodlums also apparently had fun with my radio attenae, which thanks to the window-smashers is of no use to me now, except that everytime I close my trunk, it catches the attenae. It's sort of fun to watch it spring back up.

And, as I always say, this is what AAA is for. Plus, all in all, it's good for Benny, my mechanic. He's great, and will soon be figuring out how to make my lights retract and unretract, as well as how to make the heat, air-conditioning and fan work again.

And, just by coincidence, I tried to start the car yesterday and exactly nothing happened. No lights of any kind, no 18-year-old engine coughing. Just silence, as if the key in the ignition was meant to be a decoration, rather than a tool to turn the car on and make it move.

Let me just say that the engineer who decided retractable headlights were a cool idea is an outrage.