The other morning I woke from a bad dream in which I had stupidly allowed an ex-coworker to drive my car and he totaled it.

Let me officially go on record here for those who may not know me well that in the past, in what I might in the future refer to as my ancient times, I occasionally allowed people to drive my vehicles. It usually had something to do with varying sums of money exchanging hands or promises to be forever in my debt (Yeah, if I had a dime for everything I heard that!). On the last occurrence however, back in the early '80's, I thought I really knew the guy and he wanted to take his girlfriend, a very nice young lady, to her senior prom in style. Promises of filling the gas tank before returning my car, pinkie swears that he'd not go over the speed limit, crank the stereo too loud, etc, etc, etc. Yeah, yeah, okay, here's the key, be careful, have fun, stop bothering me, yada, yada, yada.

What was returned to my apartment's parking lot the following morning was a mangled hunk of metal and fiberglass that only resembled my car in that it was mostly the same color as when it had left. The least of what would soon turn into a nightmare getting any of it fixed was finding a fourth wheel so I could maneuver the thing out of the wrong slot of an irate neighbor and into MY space. Yes, one of the rear wheels was missing as was the tire, brake drum and half the axle. Probably the worse of it all was that there was no note or anything left on my apartment door or on the car explaining anything. I had no way of knowing if my friend and his girlfriend had been injured or killed or had been car-jacked or something. There was no blood in the interior but the windshield was cracked, both high-backed, leather upholstered race seats were shredded and had been ripped from their tracks, the steering wheel was badly bent, and the stereo, a nice one in the day, was dangling from the dashboard by the wiring harness. You wouldn't believe the sad state of affairs the engine was in but was obvious was that it would never run again. Who knew four six-inch machined aluminum velocity stacks could implode themselves into a small enough package so as to get sucked through what was left of the once beefy carburetors and wind up as bits embedded into the piston heads?

After a day of dodging my phone calls (he later claimed he was sleeping), I had some good buddies track him down and 'kidnap' him from his job so he could 'fess up.

He said he was 'goaded' into racing a rival buddy and since everyone knew my car was fast but no one knew how fast, he felt obligated to put on a little 'show' in a grocery store parking lot. He said he gunned it and the back end of the car came around. In trying to correct it, he hit the concrete barrier surrounding a light post. I remember asking him how many times he hit it. Looked to me like more than once, many more times than twice. He admitted he couldn't, for whatever reason, take his foot off the gas pedal and the car whipped around a few times. He claimed to not realize he had hit the barrier 'that hard' until the sheared off rear wheel flew up over the roof, barely missed the windshield, and bounced squarely off the middle of the hood. That was when the car 'drove itself' into the barrier the final few times.

And then he said he was mad at me for letting him drive a 'death trap' as he called it. He seems to forget he had begged me every weekend for three months prior. And so, because I had let him, he wouldn't pay one red cent for damages. He didn't either. A month later, after I removed everything from the car that wasn't damaged, approximately enough usable parts to fill two milk crates, I paid to have it towed to a junk yard across town. I could have had it dumped at the junk yard right up the street for free but I didn't want to chance seeing it everyday on my walk to and from work.

This guy who I thought I knew turned out to be what I considered an asshole. Wasn't the first nor the last to cross my path. So when I dreamed that one of my ex-coworkers, a guy whom everyone at the time, my boss included, referred to as a royal pain in the ass, rolled my car off an embankment while I watched, I woke in a sweat (non-menopausal related). But after a minute, I felt good, almost happy even because while I dream about cars often, it's not often I dream of cars AND assholes at the same time and that only means one thing: The Car Novel, that just happens to contain a couple of asshole characters (because the car world is full of them -- trust me on this) isn't just calling to me; it's jumping up and down, waving it's arms, and hollering my name loud and clear. Oddly, I feel like I'm coming home and it feels good.