Wheels of Misfortune : Abandon All Hope Ye Who Sit in the Driver’s Seat

THERE IS NO escaping Car Hell. The other day I walked out to my parking space expecting to drive to the gym. A behemoth van was parked 3 centimeters away from the driver’s side of my Mazda and I couldn’t get in. No problem, I thought, as I circled to the passenger’s side and inserted my key in the lock.

But there was a problem. With a car there is always a problem. The passenger door wouldn’t open. I trudged back to the house and informed my husband that I was in the midst of yet another automotive crisis.

“The lock’s just jammed,” said Duke, who understands cars. “I can fix that.”

“Don’t bother,” I replied. “It’s better this way.” If I can’t get in my car, then I don’t have to drive it. As far as I’m concerned, the only good thing about driving in Los Angeles is that it saves you from taking the bus.

Dante with prescience structured his hell very much in the architecture of a contemporary subterranean parking structure (“remember your color and level”). Car Hell is the psychological equivalent of Dante’s “Inferno,” a vast, multileveled, bottomless pit of increasingly unpleasant, increasingly expensive, car-related experiences. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a pleasant car-related experience in Los Angeles; Car Hell, like death and gridlock, is inevitable.

The Department of Motor Vehicles reports that in 1987 in Los Angeles County there were 6,057,648 registered cars and 5,404,200 licensed drivers. On any given day, at any time, many of these drivers will find themselves in Car Hell. Some will have flat tires, some will pay $5 to stack-park at the Hollywood Bowl, some will try to get financing for a new car, some will have to go to traffic school and some will be rear-ended at a red light while they are putting on their makeup. But none will be very happy.

“When I look at my checkbook ledger, every single expense is car-related,” my friend Wendy says. “I have come to the realization that all of my problems seem to be manifested in cars. They say that people live for their cars in this city because they have such high payments, but I have two junk heaps.”

It doesn’t really matter what you drive. The road to Car Hell is paved with BMW owners begging their insurance companies to pay for their fourth stolen Blaupunkt and Mercedes owners on the verge of a nervous breakdown because still another runaway grocery cart dinged their car door, necessitating still another $600 Glasurit paint job. True, it may be less stressful to be stuck in rush-hour traffic on the 405 Freeway in a $185,000 Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, but consider the stress of finding a safe place to park it.

“People only live in Car Hell because they believe that they are what they drive,” argues Doug, who drives a Honda. “All this tension in traffic is caused because people think the car is an extension of them. You’re in stop-and-go traffic and you’re terrified to make a turn. You don’t want to get hit.”

Of course you don’t want to get hit. A collision automatically sentences you to the depths of Car Hell: Body-Shop Hell and worse, Insurance Hell. Insurance premiums are now so high that when someone smashes into you, the big concern is no longer, “Are you hurt?” but rather “Do you promise that you won’t report this to my insurance company?” And even if the state Supreme Court upholds Prop. 103 and approves the 20% rate rollback, you will still have to find a company left in California that will condescend to write you a policy.

There’s always something to worry about when you own a car. If the car works, you worry about how it is working. And if it doesn’t work, then you worry about how you’re going to fix it.

“You ask 20 people what’s wrong with the car and you get 20 different answers,” Wendy says. “You look in their eyes and you search for truth. But I don’t think that truth and auto mechanics go together.”

This is especially true if you’re a woman. I realize that there are women who can and do rebuild carburetors, but I am not one of them. (In my opinion, lying under a car covered with grease is simply another form of Car Hell.) Last month, my car wouldn’t start. I called in my first-string automotive trouble-shooter: my husband. He tried to give it a jump. The car still wouldn’t start. He diagnosed that the car needed a new starter and made me an appointment with Morales Auto Electric, whose estimate for the job came in $150 cheaper than the one from my second-string automotive trouble-shooter: the Mazda dealer.

So, I called my third-string automotive trouble-shooter: the Auto Club. Its tow truck arrived an hour later. A brute splattered with oil and tattoos insisted that the car just needed a jump. “My husband already tried that,” I said.

“My cables are bigger than your husband’s,” the brute said.

I knew better than to argue about that. I let him put his cables on my terminals. The car still wouldn’t start. So, I told him where he should tow it.

“If you’re smart,” he sneered, “you’ll let me tow it to my garage.”

If I were smart, I would have insisted that my husband stay home and deal with this creep. Instead I did the next best thing. “My husband won’t let me take it to anyone but Morales,” I said. It was not this liberated woman’s proudest moment, but it worked.

“When I left my husband, I lost everything,” Wendy says. “He was a Volvo mechanic.”

But even the most mechanically skilled person cannot avoid the fiery pit of Car Hell--the Department of Motor Vehicles. I do not understand why we even bother to elect government officials to run this state. The Department of Motor Vehicles runs California.

Recently, I had to renew my driver’s license. I called the Department of Motor Vehicles to make an appointment. I was put on hold. Twenty-two minutes later, an operator came on the line and begrudgingly scheduled me in.

I arrived on time at the DMV in Santa Monica. I waited in the “Appointments Only No Wait” line for 10 minutes only to learn that I was not on the schedule. “You can wait in the regular line if you want,” the clerk said.

The regular line was the length of the Space Mountain line at Disneyland. I assertively insisted that they honor my appointment. And what was my reward? The surly clerk punched up my driver’s license number into the computer and declared that he couldn’t renew my license because there was a warrant out for my arrest.

“How can there be a warrant?” I asked. “I haven’t even gotten a ticket.”

“The computer says that you committed a moving violation five years ago,” the clerk insisted.

I could not believe that I might be arrested at any moment because I was alone in the Diamond Lane at 3:05 p.m. in 1983. I remember paying the ticket, but I couldn’t prove it to the DMV because I don’t save 5-year-old canceled checks. Still, all that it took to clear my record was a drive downtown to Traffic Court, a two-hour wait in the warrant line behind a mob of misdemeanants who looked like the lineup for the Freeway Killer, and $174.

Fortunately, the DMV will take a check. In fact, they don’t even bother to make sure it’s good. They always know where they can find you.

Does anybody have anything good to say about the DMV? “I think that our image has improved drastically over the past three years,” says Bill Gengler, DMV spokesman. “We’re making very positive steps.”

What positive steps? He tells me that the department now has a computer that keeps track of licenses and registration (somehow I find this more frightening than comforting), that employees go to school to “learn things like customer relations” and that the driver’s test is now given in 23 languages.

“If they call for an appointment, then we will go and find an interpreter to give them an oral test,” Gengler says. “And incidentally, we do the same thing for English-speaking people too, if they’re illiterate.”

How many drivers are illiterate? “We’re probably talking 3% to 5%,” he tells me. I begin to sweat. Then he says, “Just because someone can’t read doesn’t mean that they can’t drive.”

There is no escaping Car Hell.