... notable events : My friend's death-trap on wheels

It was a cold and chilly day. Winter still gripped the land and black ice was the lurking danger on Vancouver roads. But, it was Valentine's day, and a man's got to do, what a man's got to do.

I had planned it for weeks and it was to be a surprise. I wanted to impress and having seen one too many hollywood movie, I got all the elements of the surprise in place. Balloons, flowers, appropriately mushy writings on an appropriately mushy card, and of course I was dressed to the nines, in coat and tie. The only thing I needed now was my apartment-mate's car.

My apartment-mate was a Singaporean who had come to Vancouver to do this Grade 13 and was now in the faculty of Commerce at UBC. He was a strange one, always sitting with his back to the walls, eyes darting to the windows and to the doors. His room was filled with interesting things, from throwing knives to nunchuks. He used to run with the gangs in Singapore according to him. They sold little goblins to superstitious businessmen who couldn't afford not to buy them for fear of having them run loose in their stores. He'd often regal us with tales of the things he'd seen and the things he'd done as well as the battle-scars he'd accumulated as a youngster in the shadowy world of streetgangs in Singapore. We would listen with bright-eyes and breathless anticipation. He said he was lucky that his Tai-kor let him go when his father yanked him out of the gang and to try and wean him off the gang, sent him to the other side of the world from Singapore.

When he arrived in Canada, the first thing he did was to buy himself a car with his father's allowance money. CDN$2000, he told us proudly, for a second hand American make hatch-back. Now, another 3 years older, this was the car I borrowed to woo fair maiden.

It started simply enough. He'd flung me his car keys without a second glance. Burdened with countless numbers of bulging balloons and a dozen roses, I had taken the lift down to the basement. It was late evening but frost already covered the ground and the coming night looked to be colder than usual for late February. Crunching my way to the car parked just outside the basement, I fumbled for the carkeys to open the door.

"What the..." I cursed as the driver-side door refused to open. Jammed probably from the frost and cold. The other side then. Still manhandling my flowers and balloons, I walked over and fumbled some more the keys. This time, the key didn't want to go into the groove. Peering over the things in my arms, I bent down to see what the problem was in the dim streetlamp light. "Damn!" the whole groove apparently was frozen solid with ice. This being a hatch-back, 2 doors was simply the limit on this car.

Sighing heavily, and watching my breath fogging in front of me, I headed for the rear. Last chance to enter the car. After more fumbling with the keys, I was somewhat relieved to find no problems with this lock. I dumped all my things into the car, squeezing balloon after balloon into the back seat until it filled the whole rear space. Only then did I belatedly realise that I too needed to get into the car.

Feeling extremely sheepish and not a little self-conscious, I parted the balloons and ingloriously crawled into the boot of the car from the rear hatch-back door, suit, tie and all and nose-dived into the backseat. I must have mashed some of the flowers in my hand but at least I was in! After that it was a simple matter of opening the car door from the inside to exit and slam shut the rear door. Ok, now I was good to go.

Thinking the worst behind me, I had calmly backed out of the parking lot and began the drive to Burnaby, the town just east of Vancouver. Traffic was light that evening and thankfully so because I soon realised that the car had a dangerous tendency to slip and slid on occasion. A quick stop by the side of the road to check the tires soon told me why. Every single tire was bald. If there used to be friction patterns on the tires, I couldn't tell what or how they used to run because they were literally bald. How my friend could continue to drive with such tires was beyond me. Gingerly I eased the gear-shift back and very slowly continued my journey. Black ice on the road was an even more dangerous threat now since I not only didn't have either snow-thread tires or chain-tied tires, I didn't even have normal threaded tires!

The drive down the hill from the university went blessedly uneventful, until I reached the trafficlights at the bottom of the hill. The lights were green so I eased the brake gently to slow down just sufficiently to turn. That was when the car's engine decided to quit on me. It literally stalled halfway in the junction as I was turning. Undeterred and pretty much resigned to expect the worse from this car, I very calmly freed the gears, restarted the ignition, all while using the momentum of the hill to turn right onto 10th Avenue, yet worried that that the tires would slid. Thankfully the engine caught on the second ignition try, and I was able to re-engage the gears and continue on my merry way.

It still did it's darnest to slip and slid but I think I got the hang of the beast after awhile, and the rest of the journey was uneventful and I made my Valentine's day surprise. The car, probably having said it's piece, decided that it had said enough since I had by then built up a healthy respect for it and it's quirks. Later that night when I returned the car to my friend, I asked him about his tires and his engine. He shrugged his shoulders and rather non-chalantly said, "Yeah, but it's a good car."

Well...