stolen car - Urban Scrawl

stolen car

Wednesday 3 April, 2002 at 6:24PM (Nereus) :: permalink :: comments (0)

There was a story I was meaning to tell you a while ago, but I obviously forgot to, then I remembered, then I forgot again, and just now I remembered and happened to be in a position to tell it. Yay me. ..maybe I already did tell it. hmmm. Too bad, I'll tell it again.

Early one morning at about 5am quite some time ago I awoke to the sound of screeching tyres outside. So what? ..yep, fair enough, you need a bit of background to help you realize what this means. Firstly, we are on the sixth floor of an apartment building and the windows are all double glazed, despite the fact that we face a street which is relatively quiet ...usually. The street is also a good hundred meters away, with our swimming pool and a two-storey private residence inbetween. Also any attempt to wake a weasel at five in the morning is in most cases totally futile. Now do you realize that waking at 5am to screeching tyres outside is an achievement in itself? Good. On with the story.

The screeching went on for quite a while, so I took a look out the window to see what was up. It appeared that some winner was driving a car round and round the block, hanging it out and giving the car death, as ya do. You gotta understand that we live in a pretty good neighborhood, even if it is New York, so this kind of thing doesn't happen often around here. Until now.

The driver must have done at least ten laps giving it heaps - hand-braking, slides, burn-outs, the whole nine yards. I was kind of amused for a short while, and then started to think that the car was probably stolen, my reasoning being that if it was just a drunk boy-racer he would've crashed it by now. Well, no sooner did I think it than the driver slammed into a parked van outside the building next to us. Nice one. 'Game over' I thought, wrongly.

About thirty seconds later (which is quite a long time if you sit there and count it out) the driver pops the car into reverse, manages to disengage his car from the van he had smashed into, and shoots off down the road again with the sound of one of the car panels rubbing against the tyre. Another big handbrake at the end of the road and he's gone. Who was that masked man?

Well, that was exciting wasn't it. A few minutes later I see some guy come staggering out of a nearby house in a robe and just stand there looking dumbly at what was presumably his van and blinking a few times in confusion like a stunned mullet. I don't think he was awake yet.

I thought it worth mentioning, as it's not the kind of thing I'm used to seeing. Another day in New York I guess, I'm adjusting though - I don't smile and say hello to random strangers on the street anymore (if you do that here they think you're going to either ask them for money or else mug them and take the money anyway). My wardrobe has changed too - most of my clothes are black now, compared to the white t-shirts with bright logos on them I wore when I first arrived here, but I'm not turning goth or anything like that, maybe it's just a winter thing.