New taillights! Yes! I am the best, with my new, un-cracked rear indicators. Take that, Tercel! I will eventually fix all your broken parts, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me (beyond, of course, breaking at a faster rate than I can fix).

The rear lights (brake and signal) have been broken even since my sister backed the car out of my parent’s garage and into the garage across the alley. Unfortunately the door of the garage across the street was closed.

She backed out too fast, basically.

OK, so that was about four years ago. Since then the shattered plastic light coverings have become receptacles for rainwater, bird poop and (I can only assume) the fluid waste of confused/drunk passers-by. Whether all that impaired my ability to warn trailing cars of impending stops and turns is uncertain. The most probable answer is: probably.

So today after work I made my way over to ACE Auto Parts and Salvage on Rice Street just north of University. This is a neighborhood that is known for its auto salvage places and, literally, its junk yards (as in front and back yards with junk in them).

Ace Auto Parts and Salvage on Rice Street is the craziest place you’ll ever go to, or if you don’t go, the craziest place you’ll ever not go to. When you walk in the door to the lobby – especially if you are just coming from your job as a communications intern, and are wearing a pressed Polo shirt and khakis – you’re shocked by how dirty things are. Behind a counter in front of computer screens stand seven or eight of the least clean men to even work at a computer.

The computers are the miracle that puts order to the chaos that is the junkyard. In the junkyard there are rows upon rows or ridiculously destroyed cars. It wouldn’t do to say it’s as chaotic as a BLANK, because it’s a junkyard, and the best word to go in the BLANK is “junkyard.” So it’s as chaotic as itself, which is a lot. Just imagine a car dealership that has exploded. Even the dirt paths between the car stacks are encrusted with broken shards of plastic and auto parts.

The computers know about everything in the yard (as it is called by a hand-scrawled sign above the door behind the counter that leads to it), including the bits of plastic on the pathways. I can’t say how junkyards were run before the ascent of desktop computing technology. It must have been confusing.

No longer! I wanted a replacement driver’s side door handle for my 1994 two-door Toyota Tercel, and my customer service representative (a.k.a. guy in grease-stained jeans) knew exactly where to find one. At least, that’s what he said, between answering three telephone lines, yelling instructions at three or four ‘pickers’ (the vultures who collect parts from the dead, decaying cars) and ringing up another customer.

The thing is, the place was packed. At 4:30 in the afternoon on a weekday, an hour before close, I had to wait twenty minutes just to speak to someone with access to the all-knowing computers. Otherwise, there were plenty of waiting customers to talk to – lots of Mexican and Hmong guys – but I felt overdressed.

So many people buying spare parts for their automobiles! Had they all purchased cheaply built Tercels (and then crashed them into neighboring garages) like myself? As it turned out, no. Many of the other customers were just waiting to buy tricked-out 16-inch rims with which to pimp their own rides.

I’ll look into that stuff later (I could really see myself rollin’ on twenty-twos). Today I was just interested in the door handle, which I’ve been without since winter, when it snapped off. After locating the part in the computer, Don (greasy-jeans) yelled out to Danny (greasy-belly) to bring me back to the yard. I was surprised they’d even let me back there; I’d have thought it’d be a liability. But they trusted me. So back I went, behind the laconic Danny, who answered my questions about the functioning of the yard in short bursts.

“How long does a car usually last in the yard before it’s sent to the crusher?”

“Depends.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Long time.”

And so on. He was friendly, though, and we bonded, sort of, when I told him how my car’s handle had broken off.

“They all do that.”

Yes. Yes they do.

The half-demolished red Tercel we were looking at had a perfectly good driver’s side handle, so I told Danny I’d take it. Then, on a whim, I looked at the rear lights, saw they were in good condition, and decided to take those too.

This was OK by Danny, but turned out to be a mistake. It seems, in a junkyard, that you should never offer to buy something before you know how much it costs. This is probably true in any retail endeavor, I now realize. But I was excited, and also naïve.

Each taillight cost $45 dollars, a number Don (we were back inside now) pretended to take from the computer but which, in truth, he invented on the spot. I wavered for four seconds, and he knocked ten bucks off the price. I probably should’ve wavered some more, but again, I was excited and also naïve.

So I had a $90 set of taillights with exceptionally bad collision karma. But the door handle would have to wait; it was harder to get off the donor vehicle, and Don said he’d have it for me the next day.

Still, I was happy. Repairing your own automobile is not necessarily cheap and not necessarily safe, but it leaves you feeling useful, like your pressed shirt doesn’t exclude you from the world of dirty fingernails and disorganized yelling. And so it’s not without excitement that I wait to go back tomorrow to stand in line for my door handle. Soon, my ride will be pimped, my hands will be dirty, and I’ll be a little less naïve.

And next time, when Danny and I are making our way out through the yard, we’ll have a little more to talk about.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 8th, 2004 at 8:42 am and is filed under Minnesota, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.