Old Friend Reaches End of Road

Ending the 15-year affair took less than five minutes.

The man in the cramped office at the Ventura County Rescue Mission was brisk: Car? Model? Year? Mileage? Condition?

“Honda,” I replied just as briskly. “Accord. ’84. 163,000 miles. Drivable.”

OK, then. I signed a paper or two. To figure how much I could write off on my taxes, I was given a range of values from the Kelley Blue Book.

And that was that. My faithful old Honda--my trusted mount, the Trigger to my Roy Rogers--was gone, donated to a fine cause. Nobody test-drove it. Nobody even looked at it. Even though I’d already bought a fancy-pants newish SUV, I felt awful; for a lousy tax break, I’d abandoned a piece of myself.

“Let’s go,” said my wife.

“Wait! What about saying goodbye to it?”

Jane said she’d rather say goodbye to a dirty hypodermic needle.

It had been a while since she’d appreciated my car’s unique attributes. The advancing rust, the cheeseburger-sized mounds of Bond-o at each corner of the roof, the torn upholstery, the mulch embedded in the back seat--from which an actual mushroom had once emerged--the caved-in front door: None of these won her over.

And, in truth, even I was tiring of it. When you’re over 50, it’s unseemly to access your vehicle through the driver’s side window. It isn’t done.

So we wound up here. The Rescue Mission people told me they’d fix the car up for sale, if they could. They said 100% of the proceeds would go toward helping the homeless; some car-donation places are little more than fronts for used-car dealers, but this isn’t one of them.

Joe Thomas, the Rescue Mission’s operations manager, assured me of that with the confidence of a true insider.

Ten years ago, he was homeless himself, a boozer and a heroin addict. He lost his wife, his house, and his job of 20-odd years as service manager for an auto dealer in Thousand Oaks. Penniless, suffering from the DTs, he was dragged from a motel before the Rescue Mission took him in for its yearlong sobriety program.

“Little by little, I worked my way up,” he said.

Today, Thomas oversees the Rescue Mission’s thrift store and its auto operation, which takes in at least 100 cars a month.

About a third are so down-and-out they’re hauled to the junkyard and sold for scrap. Others are sold to outfits like Movie World, which provides them to producers who need vehicles to toss off cliffs.

Those that can do with a paint job or engine repairs receive treatment under the supervision of a chaplain-mechanic at the Rescue Mission’s Santa Paula shop. Then they’re taken to the car lot beside the railroad tracks in La Colonia.

Jane and I strolled past a row of tired-looking vehicles there. Some sell for under $1,000; a battered ’84 VW Jetta had 333,257 miles on it and was going for $695. Over the next six weeks, Thomas said, a legion of higher-tone cars will be driven in for year-end tax write-offs.

Already, the Rescue Mission has lovingly restored a ’61 Thunderbird, and is about to finish an ’80 Corvette.

“It’s a great feeling for the guys,” Thomas said. “Some of them come from the street, some come from prison, and now they can say: ‘Look at this! I was part of this!’ ”

There were no showpieces on the lot this weekend. Most of the cars were good reflections of the motto emblazoned on the Rescue Mission’s trucks: “I was a stranger, and Ye took me in.”

When we reached my Honda, I didn’t have much to say.

“‘Farewell, old pal,” I began.

Jane rolled her eyes.

“This car has a lot of history,” I said. “Don’t you remember when we brought Kate home from the hospital in it?”

“That was the gray wagon,” she said, evidencing her flair for nit-picking.

I reminded her that just five months ago, this was the car I selflessly offered our county supervisors, free and clear, in an effort to help them save tax dollars.

“They never did respond,” I said.

“They’ve got my vote,” she said.

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.