Some Thoughts Before Dying

There is nothing more incredibly useless than a car that won’t run. It sits at the side of the road like a dead animal waiting for someone to scrape it off the pavement, its vital signs gone, its heartbeat flat-lined.

The sight remains one of the bleakest of the post-industrial era, but sadder still is the person who sits in the car, his faith in the vehicle terminated, that bond between man and metal shattered.

On the day El Nino roared ashore, the person in the dead vehicle was me.

I am actually on vacation, if you can call it that, but linkage to this page allows no escape, so I am compelled to write for Fridays wherever I am, even if it is somewhere beyond the grave.

The reason I am taking time off is not to bask in the sun of warmer climes, or even to lie around the house bitching and reading, but to work on a book.

It will be a modest expose with a plot line somewhat below the level of lust contained in the book Monica Lewinsky will no doubt write, if she can spare the time away from her more whimsical pursuits.

But whenever I sit down to create I am invariably dragged away by a domestic disaster that cries for attention. On Tuesday, for instance, the water heater stopped working, a television set broke down, a toilet overflowed and finally my car suddenly went zappo. All in one day.

Even my wife, Cinelli, stopped working due to a cold, but, sport that she is, she began functioning again almost immediately.

*

The first order of business in a household disaster is to blame one’s mate. A suspicious “What did you do to it?” is the standard working response to maladies ranging from a faucet that drips to a stove that explodes.

That seemed somehow inappropriate, however, when my car died. I had known it was sick and waited too long to have it looked at. The red battery light on the dashboard had glared at me for several days, but red lights have lied to me before and I didn’t believe it until the car expired on a lonely canyon road with no homes in sight.

It was the Day of El Nino. Thunder rolled over the vehicle like the drums of doomsday, and sheets of rain swallowed me like a shark devouring a minnow. I may have mixed some metaphors there, but it was a very emotional time.

Thankfully, I am an L.A.-type person and my cell phone is never far away. I called AAA immediately. They, of course, wanted to know where I was stranded. I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know.

It is impossible to give accurate directions in a city where west is south. I was either south or west of Mulholland and maybe two or three miles east or north of a street I passed three minutes ago whose name I missed.

“You don’t know where you are?” the AAA dispatcher said. I assured her I did not. “Well, never mind,” she said, “We’ll probably find you.”

Then I called Cinelli to say goodbye and tell her to take good care of the dog. I felt like the climber dying on Mt. Everest who cell-phoned his wife to say farewell. I don’t know what she said, but mine said, “You don’t care about the dog. I’ll take good care of your computer.”

*

The storm intensified and I knew for certain I would perish just south or west of Mulholland, lost forever in the blinding rain and fog.

Rescue workers would ask Cinelli where I could have gone. “Who knows,” she’d say, “he was always wandering off somewhere.”

“Did he have any last words?”

She would think for a moment and reply, “He said, ‘Take good care of the dog,’ but he didn’t mean it.”

“That’s all he could come up with? ‘Take good care of the dog?’ ” They’d laugh to think I had spent my whole life writing and had blown the ending.

“His brain had a tendency to shut down when he thought he was dying,” she’d explain. “Goodness, where are my manners? Would anyone like a beer? I’ll put on some music and we can dance.”

Four mattress trucks passed at wide intervals as I sat in the car just south or west of Mulholland. The storm was like a wild beast, thrashing and roaring and challenging anything that moved, but there went those damned mattress trucks, picking their way through the calamity.

My wife called. “You still alive, dear?”

“I just saw four mattress trucks pass! What in the hell are mattress trucks doing out in weather like this? Who needs mattresses so badly they’d demand them delivered in a storm?”

“Oh, good,” she said, “you’re angry! You always feel better when you’re in a rage. Have you come up with any Famous Last Words?”

“I’m hungry.”

“I’ll write that down.”

“All I have in the car is bottled water. I’ll starve.”

“Then it’ll be a slow death,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll enjoy that!”

A tow truck came after two hours, emerging through the rain and fog like a vision of the Virgin Mary. I was saved. It was as I sat in the cab of the truck next to the driver that I thought of my Famous Last Words.

“You know, Bill,” I said, “life is sure a pain in the ass sometimes.”

Write that down.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com