The Move

John Barea
Nov 5 · 5 min read

The brunch had been delicious and in an incomparable setting looking down on the ocean perched atop sheer cliffs in Palos Verdes. Brian had even picked up the tab. I had a gorgeous eggs benedict, but with pulled pork instead of Canadian bacon.

The baby ran up and down the hill after the meal with her cousins, and we all enjoyed the cuteness and novelty of a 1 year old discovering that she could run down the hill fast and out of control, like a runaway train.

We walked to the valet stand and waited for a few minutes. Brian’s car but ours didn’t. More time passed. Something was clearly wrong. I imagined a mix up with the keys, then I went deeper and darker and imagined someone had stolen the car. My 2 week old Toyota Rav4 was now being joyridden through the desert by a few adventurous valet guys a la Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It was a certainty. A few minutes later a golfcart came ripping around a corner and stopped right next to us. A man got out with a sullen look on his face. “There’s been…an accident,” he said, “a golf ball hit your car.”

“How bad is it?” I managed, expecting a large dent in the side panel or a crack in a window.

“I’m not sure, they just told me.”

We took the golf cart around to the parking lot and we found the car facing out towards us. The windshield looked fine. The driver’s side looked fine. Then I saw the glass on the ground, sprinkled out behind the rear tires like blood at a crime scene. I walked around to the back. The entire rear windshield was shattered, save a few shards around the corners, clinging on like half dead soldiers after a battle. The trunk of the car was filled with blueish glass beads, glinting like a pile of pirate’s treasure.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

We called every glass installation place in the area, but it was Sunday and so the earliest they could come would be the next day. The car was undriveable, we determined, because there was glass everywhere inside, and we wouldn’t be able to use the trunk. And we would need the trunk, because the next day we were moving.

I had never had an experience like this. I’d been in an accident once in my life, in New York, and the tow truck had come and taken away my car and we had gotten a ride back to my house with a taxi. The next day I went with my mom to pick up the car. It was pretty easy, just took a little bit of time.

But we didn’t have the luxury of time that day. Today, Tracy’s mom was watching the baby and we were supposed to be packing up our temporary apartment in Downtown LA and getting ready for our move to West Hollywood the very next day. Now it was 3pm and we didn’t have a way to get home, let alone a way to move our stuff the next day to West Hollywood.

Luckily, the golf course gave us a courtesy lift back home. We tried to figure out a way way we could move all our stuff without a car. We couldn’t, we decided, because grandma was flying home the next day too. We had been planning on buying another car for Tracy, so we decided that we would just do it that day. We got home at 4, and at 4:30 we Ubered to the car dealership that I thought would be the closest to West Hollywood, North Hollywood.

Although North Hollywood isn’t technically a misnomer — it is directionally North of Hollywood — let’s just say its proximity to Hollywood wouldn’t be a 5-star rating. North Hollywood was in the Valley, over the Hollywood Hills, and not even the first town in the valley. I didn’t really know what the valley was until that afternoon. I certainly hadn’t been there yet, we had only been in LA for a few weeks. But as we took the 101 over the hills it became clear to me that I’d maybe underthought it a bit.

A few weeks prior, on the day I arrived in LA, I had bought my RAV4 from Marina Del Rey Toyota, it was the easiest car buying experience I could imagine. The showroom was bright and there was a giant blue mural of a whale on the wall outside the lot. The salesman I talked to didn’t come off as salesy, and I left feeling I’d gotten a good deal. My license plate said I’d gotten a Whale of a deal.”

The North Hollywood dealership sold the same cars but couldn’t have felt different. The showroom had a gray feeling to it. The lighting was harsh. It had a huge processing counter with a billboard of the financing rates in the center. It felt like a factory.

There’s a certain freedom to getting dropped off at a car dealership knowing that you need to buy a car in order to get home. It feels romantic, spontaneous, and logical. But it’s the absolute worst thing you could do from a buyer’s perspective, especially if those dealers get a sense of your need to buy at that moment. It gives off the beautiful aroma of desperation and the delicious result of that desperation — money.

Once we saw that Prius and tried to buy it as quickly as possible (in order to get home and pack), that stench of desperation coming off of us must have smelled like hot garbage to those salesmen flies. There was no room on price, “unfortunately.” There were long periods of time we were left alone. There were tears. It was getting late, and it seemed like the mealy, burnt coffee smelling tunnel we were in would never have a light at the end of it. At 10pm we finally signed the last papers and got on the 101 to go back downtown. Tomorrow’s prospects didn’t seem any brighter, as I had to go down to Palos Verdes to pick up the car and oversee the glass installation and Tracy had to drop her mom off at the airport and then supervise the move to our new place. At least it smelled like new car.

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