Life, as always, had other plans.
On May 21, I was returning home from visiting Dad at LakeWest (sadly, his home away from home anymore) and idling in line at the Chick Fil-A drive-thru when something gave under the hood of the Beretta. There wasn't a bang! or crack! or anything dramatic like that, just a sudden, tangible change in the character of the engine noise, coupled with a sinister new vibrating thrum that immediately began clattering the exhaust pipes noisily against the frame of the car. The Beretta immediately sounded rougher, louder, and wheezier than it ever had before, lending me to suspect that I had somehow just managed to wreck my brand new (and apparently useless) exhaust system. But no, this noise was different ... it was coming from the engine itself, not from the rear or bottom of the car. There was also a whiff of something burning: not gasoline, not rubber, not coolant ... engine oil?
I got the car back home and worriedly popped the hood, sniffing around and smelling that weird, wispy tang of something wrong while not knowing what it was. On Sarah's advice, I checked the oil and was relieved to see that I was still filled up and looking good. That led me to wonder about the fuel lines being clogged, or maybe the transmission being compromised. Sarah wondered if the gas tank had taken on water.
The next morning, to my consternation, the car's new running characteristics remained unchanged. I tried gunning the engine a few times on the way to work (in an attempt to "blow out" whatever seemed to be making my engine sound asthmatic) to no effect, and adding some fresh gas to the tank didn't seem to help either. In fact, it wasn't until I was cruising down Mentor Avenue in the homestretch towards work that I realized that the Beretta was actually running semi-normally once I had it cruising along in third or fourth gear: it was getting to that point where I was having problems. That led me again to wonder if the transmission was at fault here, and I found that to be the case later that evening as I noticed a large puddle forming behind the left front tire. I backed the car away from the pool and dabbed at it with a paper towel, immediately spying a thick blot of pink fluid spreading across the surface of the paper. En route home, I smelled that burning scent again, and noticed wisps of steam/smoke crawling up the side of the Beretta from the vicinity of the left front wheel well. Ah, hell, that would explain a lot of things, wouldn't it.
I had already resolved that there would be no additional repairs to the Beretta, no matter what. So, it was going to be showtime ... two months early. Beautiful. With nothing else to be done for it, I parked the Beretta in the rear parking lot at the condos, where it sits as of this writing: cleaned-out and awaiting to be towed and ultimately junked.
I did some car shopping online looking for something cheap and (hopefully) semi-dependable, while consulting a bit with my brother (who is far better versed in cars and car repair than I am). After some poking around, I'd found a possible candidate to look at, but ran into a timing snafu: Sunday and Monday are my weekends, and the used car dealership where I found my pick was closed for business on Sundays and would be closed the following Monday since it was Memorial Day. Of course.
At least with Brett being currently out of work, we had some scheduling flexibility that normally wouldn't exist between us, so we arranged to meet early Tuesday morning to do some looking around. Brett was pretty skeptical of my initial pick, a 2001 Sebring sedan, and it turned out he had good reason to be: after some close inspection of the dessicated inside of the drivers compartment, the damaged front clip, and a small coolant leak under the hood, the Sebring looked like a bad investment waiting to happen. Next!
With an hour and change to burn before I had to be at work, we headed up to Vine Street and started driving eastward, eventually coming across Transportation Outlet Inc. An initial pass through their lot didn't look very promising: I was not in the market for an SUV or pickup truck, and I also wasn't looking right now to take on a few years of car payments just yet. On the second pass, however, we finally came across what turned out 45 minutes later to be the new Vicmobile:
And there she is, folks: a 1998 Saturn SL2. Considering what I am moving up from, this rather tame acquisition feels like a freaking luxury sedan, despite the lack of CD player (the only demand I had for car audio was a working AM radio so that I could listen to Indians games on the road, so this was a forgivable omission). It's also about as far from the old hot rods of my early twenties as I could have imagined myself buying. Priorities definitely change as you age, and while my priority in 1994 was "how cool does it look and how good is the stereo?," the biggest priority I have in 2009 is "will this car be dependable enough to get me through, say, the end of 2012?" Brett thought so, and his approval of the car itself and the asking price was instrumental in me sealing the deal.I feel a strange mix of emotions writing this: that exotic blend of giddiness and terrified accomplishment that only comes from spending most of your hard-earned money on something you really hope was worth the splurge. I think most of my friends felt this way when they walked out of the realtors office with the keys to their first house. For me, it was driving off the lot in this car. While the price was good, it was also at the very top end of my reach financially, which will almost certainly make June and July a bit of a monetary high-wire act (at least until this thing has plates on it), but so far it appears to have been worth the risk.
Happy updates are hopefully forthcoming.
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