It was going to be the best one yet! Our next Suzuki, that is. It was going to be our third vehicle branded with the big silver S. Personally, it would be a chance to underscore my brilliance once again in hopes that like water on stone; the happy accidents that festoon the trails I walk would make some discernible impact on my wife’s obsidian common sense. Here then, is some background on our relationship with Suzi.
After obtaining my second divorce, I found myself driving a beat-up, dusty Volkswagen Van. It had no heater, questionable brakes, an insatiable appetite for clutch cables and a not so secret desire to help my VW mechanics to retire early. Eventually I came to my senses and also divorced that mechanical embarrassment. I watched with a smile and proudly folded arms when the tow-truck driver hauled it away like a giant verdigris lozenge of woe.
Having been without wheels many times in my life, I never found it to be disconcerting, especially if living in an urban area and gainfully employed. Houston, Texas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana excepted.
After a brief withdrawal, less intense than one would experience if their iPhone battery died at noon on an out of town trip. I always rally and become a transit riding reader. And at times cover more ground than when I was paying for gas, repairs and British Columbia's larcenous auto insurance monopoly .
A big part of my reasoning during that particular instance of choosing to live without a vehicle was due to the fact that I was going to have to pay out about fifteen years of child support. I had no qualms about paying, because the birth my first son was a planned and welcomed event. I hadn’t planned and did not welcome the disharmonious relationship that had gone into free-fall soon after his birth, however.
I re-married when I was legally and emotionally disentangled and in possession of my gumption once again. Within a year, I was the proud Papa of another blessed son. As my new wife and I slowly moved from our first third floor walk-up apartment in New Westminster to a succession of slightly larger and more well appointed apartments, I did some financial calculations.
I was amazed to learn that when all the costs incurred by owning a car were considered and averaged per month; the amount so obtained was equal (within tens of dollars) to what I was then paying for child support. I reckoned that if we gave up having a vehicle, the money saved would effectively offset the expense of my child support payments. In that way our new three-person family lifestyle (as dictated by my mail man’s salary) would be the same as if I had never divorced and was a breadwinner of my original family of three. I was motivated by not wanting my new family to suffer because of my past. It was nascent Bobcat Logic and it became our way of life for the next ten years.
My wife worked a variety of jobs and I tried working two full-time jobs for about six months. I carried mail from 6:30 AM to 3:00 PM in Vancouver and then slept in a booth at the old Premier Coffee Shop until 4:00 PM. The sweet waitress would wake me in time to board my bus back to New Westminster, where I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant at the New West Quay until 1:00 AM. I’d be home at 2:00 AM and off to bed by 3:00 AM for two hours sleep.
After paying my income tax for that year of working foolishly, I saw the financial folly of my ways and stuck to just doing my Post Office gig. My wife provided daycare in our home for two and sometimes three little boys, which kept our wee son as busy and entertained as it did my wife. I got to enjoy a few hours with the gang each afternoon when I rolled in from the Sky Train. My wife, Nisa had already raised a half dozen baby boys to adulthood by the time she had given birth to her own and she was a natural. It was like watching a horse whisperer to see her care for them. None of the little fellows ever wanted to leave our place when their parents came to carry them home each evening.
I always approached by the back door of our ground floor apartment because it was nearest to the kitchen. One sunny day, I encountered a biker-type dude sitting on a folding chair in the back alley of our Agnes St. apartment. Right smack in the middle of where I had to walk. He regarded my postal uniform from hat to boots and asked me if I’d like to make some real money. He said he’d been watching me work like a bee for about a year. I asked him what exactly he had in mind. He said it would be pretty similar to what I already did for Canada Post, that is, delivering packages to places.
On the roof of an apartment complex across that alley, a resident herd of under-thirty skinheads cranked up a boom box and began some serious Wednesday afternoon drinking, snorting and smoking. I looked up briefly and then back again at my new prospective employer. He was about forty-five years old and wore an immaculate white tee-shirt, immaculate faded blue jeans and military-grade spit-polished Doc Watson’s. He had an expensive haircut, clean nails, good teeth and a perfectly trimmed beard. All the trimmings of an undercover cop, a high level Hells Angel or a covert intelligence man.
When he stole a glance skyward at the rooftop slam-dancing commotion, I knew that he was the father figure, handler, Captain, enabler, enforcer and alternative Political Science tutor of that crystal meth crib of fatherless skin-heads.
I told him, “No thanks.”
He folded up his lawn chair and gave me that look that clever father’s sometimes cast upon their sons.
The one that says, “I’m not angry at you, son. I’m disappointed in you.”
He strode back to his sadomasochistic wolf-pack and I went inside my kitchen to greet Nisa and the boys.
There was little Joey, who always remarked that his little yeggs (legs) were tired from walking up and down all the riverside hills of New Westminster. His Chinese mother was a sweet, gentle woman who kept a big pet turtle her kitchen.
There was Terrance, whose soft-spoken Brazilian mother was always sleepy and consistently late to pick him up. He had an incredible blond halo of Afro hair and loved nothing better than sitting on his manky (blanket) and drinking chocomomo (chocolate milk) from a sippy cup.
Our son Miggy liked to watch the mototatos (motorcycles) rumble up and down the alley, bang on my old guitar and to blow on a harmonica.
My eldest son Daniel, when he was over for alternate weekends, liked to catch ants outside between the apartment buildings and to watch hellcoppers (helicopters) fly by.
There was Samuel, a little Finn, whom Joey called, Namu. His Scandinavian mother gave instructions to my wife to have him nap outdoors in the Winter to acclimatize him to cold. He was a robust, cheerful little man.
Once I brought a soccer ball home and when Namu saw it, he dribbled across the living room floor in a way that had me wondering if he was related to Diego Maradona. When his mother picked him up that night, I mentioned it and she said that his grandfather had been a professional soccer player in the old country. She hadn’t given him a ball yet due to his small stature and I suggested that it might be time to do so. As I write this, those little guys are possibly fathers themselves. May the Great Spirit hold them all in the hollow of his hand.
We walked and we bussed, in those days. We bussed and we walked. We schlepped grocery bags and babies up to our Agnes St. flat from Columbia St. At the time, we all had legs like tree-trunks and hearts like hammers. Once, I was gifted a Weber barbecue in Vancouver from a postal customer and I ferried it home on the Sky Train.
Another passenger said that if the train broke down he’d donate the meat if I’d light it up. That inspired a pretty young lady to hold aloft a six pack of vodka coolers and wink. I subsequently carried Christmas trees, live birds and fifty pound sacks of rice on that New West run. Fortunately this occurred before the advent of iPhones and Facebook pages. Otherwise, you would already have seen the memes.
Days, months and years passed like water evaporating on a hot rock. My boys got tall and my beard started entertaining more salt and less pepper. One day Nisa told me that in her considered opinion after expert calculations, that we could now afford the luxury of owning a car. I was skeptical at first but soon came to the same conclusion after running the numbers. I began researching what was available and what had changed during the ten years that we had been without a private vehicle.
At that time, the Suzuki Corporation had been conducting a rare TV commercial blitz on Canadian networks. The plots were usually the same. A family group out in pristine wilderness, grooving to some funky tunes, diving off cliffs and four-wheel turtling up impossible inclines. Then there was the classic Suzuki commercial, Wolf Boy. Their slogan at the time was: You belong outdoors. As a family man, that prompt worked on me like a charm.
After a careful review of all available vehicles within our price range and considering our new desire to be outdoors, Suzuki won my business fairly and squarely. The quality of their boat and motorcycle engines was an added reason to trust their automobiles. Their Canadian prices when compared to competitors, were hard to argue with. I had been saving money from my junk mail deliveries for four years, which when supplemented by our other savings, was enough to pay cash for a fine little four cylinder Suzuki Vitara. It had four-wheel shift on the fly which I preferred to the chip-controlled traction sensors of the other manufacturers
We had moved closer to my workplace in Vancouver and were now ensconced near 41st and Main. Our youngest son had only ridden in a car two or three times in his life and insisted that I drive him to his school several blocks away to show off to the other kids. I understood his desire and we proceeded slowly four blocks down a stately row of sycamore trees to Van Horne Elementary, along which route, he did the Royal Wave like a little Prince.
The Vitara had a steel skid plate underneath to protect the gas tank from tree stumps and rocks, so we bought camping gear at the Three Vets store and started looking for such hazards. I washed, waxed and detailed the little red wagon, whether it needed it or not. Once, there occurred a problem of worn out bearings. As it predictably turned out, this was discovered several days after the warranty on those parts had expired. My mechanic friends at North Shore Suzuki made some calls and fixed it for free. There was no other problem with that vehicle. Except the time I parked under a horse-chestnut tree and lost my windshield.
One workday in the lunch room at the Mountainview Letter Carrier Depot on 6th & Yukon; someone left an interesting article lying on a table. As I ate my lunch of adobong pusit (squid adobo), rice, apples and oranges; I read with growing alarm. The article was a precursor of the Peak Oil myth. Some of the personages quoted within the tract had bona fide US oilman names like, T. Boone Pickens and others were lettered experts on economics, the environment and transportation with hyphenated surnames.
Maybe I was tired and maybe mentally exhausted. At any rate, when I finished that article, I was sold down the River of Anxiety and fully convinced that everyone else was wrong. On my way home from work all the grid-locked vehicles on the road looked to me like dinosaurs with no inkling of their imminent demise. As time went on, my feeling intensified. Rising insurance and fuel prices added to my discomfort. I decided that for once, I’d stay well ahead of the curve of the inevitable shit storm. I reasoned that the sooner we shed our wheels, the faster my family could adjust.
I told my wife and children the strange news and researched how much my Suzuki was worth on the open market. I learned that a vehicle has a three thousand dollar spread between its trade-in and its private sale value. A private sale was the way to go. I personally find the practice of haggling in the marketplace to be abhorrent. I think sellers should tag their wares with fair prices in the first instance, if they are proud to sell them. Buyers should not imply that merchants are less than honest by questioning the tagged prices.
I wanted a fast sale, so I discounted a thousand dollars off the fair price. I made a copy of the B. C. price guide and incorporated it into a Craig’s List ad to prove that my discount had been already applied and that the resultant price was thus non-negotiable. Did this haggle-avoidance tactic work on those fellow humans that came calling for test drives? Absolutely not at all. One Russian guy came over three times and had me drive him up and down mountains to see what Suzi could do. He then complained that it didn’t have an air-conditioner. I politely told him that he was a wimp and should just go home.
A Gujarati from Africa had me drive him to his house so his adorable children and beautiful wife could sit inside the vehicle and tell him if they liked it or not. I eventually sold it to him and gave a further discount after he insisted that it was contrary to his nature, upbringing, culture and spirit to buy anything for the advertised price. Evidently, it was also contrary to his personal morality to return an expensive pair of prescription eyeglasses that I had accidentally left inside the glove box.
It didn’t take me very long afterwards to realized that I’d been duped by the Peak Oil scare. There was a Welshman on my postal route who became interested and had me bring him the original Peak Oil article. He was a private detective by trade and was able to trace all kinds of connections that revealed a planned campaign designed to alter the way people thought about vehicles, fuel and transportation. Over time we discovered other bullshit campaigns designed to affect changes in how people banked, invested, ate food and just about any other human activity you could think of.
Nisa bore all this nonsense with great dignity but reminded me from time to time of my folly. She approached me while I was writing at my computer desk one day and asked me to bring up the Suzuki website. I did so and she said to click on a little SX4. I did that and she then said to click on the little copper coloured one.
When I did that, she dropped a heavy envelope of cash on my keyboard and said, “Add to this, Pop and we will have enough to buy that little one.”
She was right. I proudly parked it out back of our apartment and two days later a windstorm tore the flat roll-on roof off the apartment building next door. The meth-heads who installed it had decided that they could save time and make more money by not using any fasteners. It rolled back into a tube weighing several tons and then flew to the ground like a sperm whale, just missing our little copper coloured car by several yards.
I drove that car to San Diego and back to break in the engine on I-5. Along the way I saw a former Navy base in California that had been sold to the China Overseas Shipping Company. It had a big gate with a sign that said that it was off limits to US citizens, which seemed strange. Regarding the man-made uncovered aqueduct that supplied life to the plants, animals, people and swimming pools of Los Angeles, I thought it looked terribly fragile and a hopeful idea at best. Most of it’s contents evaporated in the heat and wind as it flowed Southwards devoid of any security measures.
I briefly visited an old friend that I hadn’t seen since the Sixties but couldn’t tarry and headed North within 48 hours to see my youngest son star in a school play. When I was climbing over the hills from L. A. to drop down into the San Fernando Valley, there was a snow-squall and my Suzi darted around all six lanes of skidding Californians with the speed and accuracy of a young rabbit.
When I was at the Suzuki dealer for an oil change I told my mechanic that I was so happy to have broken-in my new engine on a long straight road like Highway 5. I had been taught by my grandfather that this would greatly lengthen the lifetime of a motor compared to city driving. The mechanic smiled like Buddha and gently informed me that I needn’t have done so, as all modern cars were already broken-in prior to arriving at the dealerships.
I slapped my forehead and said, “What will they think of next?”
When I knew for sure that Nisa and I were moving to Lillooet, it seemed that we’d need a bigger vehicle. In a sudden stroke of brilliance, I decided that for the first time in my life, I’d use an auto broker and save some serious money.
I sold our SX4 to North Shore Suzuki and found a suitable auto broker on Main St. near my workplace. He was a friendly South-east Asian man and after telling him we wanted a four-cylinder, standard transmission Grand Vitara, he located four of them and negotiated a good price for the one we chose. I added undercoating, paint protection, snow mats, window trim and mud flaps to the package. We waited with great anticipation for the blessed day he had promised that it would be ready.
Every time I inquired after that date had passed, I was told, “It vill be ruddy duffinutly ona Vunsdi. Bun hundurd por tant! If nota ruddy Vunsdi, duffinutly ona Frydi. Garantee bun hundurd por tant!”
This excuse went unchanged for a month beyond the promised delivery date and it eventually became an in-joke at the Post Office to use as a response when customers asked letter-carriers about wayward packages.
Finally, the fated day came and it was raining cats and dogs when I went to pick up the new blue Suzi. I dropped a huge envelope of cash on the man’s desk and he looked at me with some undisguised surprise. His expression quickly changed to a knowing wink mixed with some fatherly pride. Like Matthew McConaughey in the Lincoln commercials, I didn’t do it to be cool, I just liked to see people’s faces when I did it.
Within two days, some moron had dented it while it was parked at night behind our building. When Nisa and I drove up to our trailer in December to do some work on our trailer prior to my retirement, the oil light ominously came on just past Hope, B. C. Because the engine was purring like a milk-fed kitten and I reckoned it to be due to some malfunctioning computer chip; I cautiously drove up to Lillooet. The next morning, I checked the oil level. In an ambient temperature of minus six Celsius, the reading was a quarter inch over the top limit!
We were so terribly perplexed and mightily concerned that we decided to hazard a drive back to Vancouver without draining any oil. The engine ran just fine after some initial trouble getting it going. We dropped it off at North Shore Suzuki where my old trusted mechanics still worked, leaving a detailed note before taking a bus home.
I wrote a long e-mail to the Suzuki family in Japan and copied it to the Vancouver auto broker as well as the dealership in Langley where the vehicle had been prepped for delivery. I looked up all their LinkedIn profiles and was able to harvest the personal cell phone numbers that they used on the golf course and thus would actually answer personally.
Each e-mail contained the full contact information of each other character in the drama plus an accurate description of what had happened. I made known that I had researched the potential damage done by such elevated oil pressure and had learned that it might cause havoc years into the future of the engine’s life. I identified myself as an avid Suzuki enthusiast who had purchased three of the vehicles and had paid cash in each instance. I mentioned that I had a popular website, was a mailman and talked to hundreds of people every day. The overall tone of my letter conveyed an old tried and true paternal favourite.
You know, the one that says, “I’m not angry at you, son. I’m disappointed in you.”
I tried to phone the Langley dealer and his secretary expertly kept me at bay. When I promised to come in person and wait for him to return from his permanent lunch, he was magically found. He told me that he had been ordered by his bosses not to speak to me or to treat with me. He said that the whole affair had been given over to North Shore Suzuki, although they were innocent of any involvement.
When I phoned my North Shore Suzuki guys, they said that the phone lines had been burning for days with calls from Ontario and Japan. I was informed that Suzuki was shipping a brand spanking new engine from Honshu and that when it arrived, a single North Shore Suzuki master mechanic would be tasked with installing it. I thanked them and when the job was done months later, I brought that man a big Black Forest cake.
I never found out exactly what had occurred but the suspicion was that a robotic arm which drilled ports might have been slightly out of calibration. That necessitated the shutting down of the whole production line to correct. We had to wait a very long time, but in the end, we felt we had been treated fairly. I was dismayed to find out soon afterwards that Mitsubishi had taken over Suzuki operations in Canada.
The parts would be available locally for ten years from the date of change. I next received a letter that the gear-shift linkage for my model year had been recalled and I eagerly awaited that adventure. One of the Suzuki slogans at that time predicted: It’s a way of life. I sometimes wonder if a horse and cart might be a better way of life from then on. After all, Lillooet’s Main St. was built wide enough to turn oxcarts around.
fin