Three Lefts Make It All Right

You can’t live in Los Angeles and not have a car!! 

This might as well be L.A.’s official anthem, people chant it so often. The truth is, you can live in this city without a car; you just can’t go anywhere. Kidding. L.A. Public Transit may not be the award-winning transportation system it’s cracked up to be (well of course it’s ranked #1 when there’s no other public transit system to compete against), but it does exist and it can be useful. 

Having said that, however, I did not choose to be without a car. Rather, being without a car chose me. In March of this year my beloved Altima died of natural causes and I did not have the cash to buy another car. I also choose not to carry debt, even of the secured kind, so making car payments is not an option for me (I know – what era am I from, right?). I have to admit, though, when people ask, I usually mumble something about saving the environment and all. I still have a smidgeon of pride left.

When I’m standing on a jam-packed bus for one hour or waiting for a tardy bus at 10 p.m., I like to remind myself that having a car was not all that it was cracked up to be. My Altima was a ’95 and, frankly, was starting to show its age. One time while my car was parked, someone drove into the front right side of it, leaving it with a large dent and the inability to turn right. The anonymous perpetrator did not leave a note, apparently subscribing to the belief that if you don’t get caught, you’re not guilty. My mechanic said it would cost in the neighborhood of $1000 to fix it, since the dent had messed with the alignment, and being about $999 short, I declined the repair. Being the martyr* that I am, I figured, what the hell, turning right was overrated anyway. So everywhere I went, if I needed to go right, I would make three lefts instead. 

Tolerating this kind of nonsense seems normal when you’re alone. After all, no one ever needs to impress themselves. But when someone else was sitting in my passenger seat, suddenly I saw the craziness of my behavior and would make up excuses like, “Oh, right? I thought you said left. No matter, I’ll just make three lefts here and we’ll get back on track lickety-split.” I could feel my pride slipping through my fingers like sand.

Also, my rear speakers had shorted out a while back, so once every two or three songs the speakers would pop. And by pop, I mean sound like a firecracker going off. It was disconcerting to anyone else in the car – “Oh my god, we’re being shot at!” – but I just kept bopping in my seat, pretending it was part of the song. 

In addition, my car alarm had a mind of its own and would go off whenever I locked the front driver’s side door.  Having taken Logic 101 in college, I decided that if the alarm went off when I locked the door, I just wouldn’t lock it anymore. For three years that door remained unlocked, and not once did anyone break into or steal it (I’ve had previous – locked – cars broken into a total of ten times. Just sayin’…).

So now picture this: I pull up in my ’95 Altima to the Beverly Hilton Hotel to cover an event. I hand my keys to the valet guy and say, “Ok, don’t lock the door or the alarm will go off, you can’t turn right in this thing, and no one’s shooting at you, it’s just the radio shorting out.” I then turn and run away so as not to see his look of despair that he didn’t approach the Jag behind me.

So three wrongs may not make a right, but three lefts sure do.

* martyr: a person who undergoes severe or constant suffering