Pimp my ride

I realized today that I never resolved the “what happened to Lunchboy’s car?” question that I posed here a few weeks ago. Well, we still don’t know. The police never found anything (surprise—I’d be amazed if they actually looked in the first place). Thankfully, our insurance company declared it a loss right away, which saved a lot of paperwork and frustration. They gifted us with a rental, a lavender Chevy Malibu that reeked of cigarette smoke that gave us about three weeks worth of lines such as, “we’re rockin’ the Malibu!” Lunchboy drove the ‘Bu gratefully but with increasing aggravation—ironically, the door locks were unreliable, for example—and a few days before we had to return it we went car shopping.

At first we wanted to be responsible urban citizens and get a compact hybrid. But when we went to the Toyota dealership in Brighton, plans changed. First of all, who puts a car dealership in BRIGHTON, a place where going for a test drive means entering into an extended, elaborate exercise in road rage? Yet there it was. Then we got an incompetent salesman who could not have turned us off more. On a superficial note, he couldn’t pronounce Prius and because we are infants we couldn’t stop giggling after the 40th time he said “Preebit.” The giggling helped us from venting our road rage onto him after he persisted in trying to sell us a Camry that we had made clear we did not want. As soon as humanly possible, we got out of there and went to the dealership where Lunchboy had bought his old (stolen) car and leased the 2008 model of the car he’d had. Though it’s not an SUV or a gas guzzler by any means, we rationalized it by acknowledging that he drives his car so little that he only has to fill up the gas tank every other month or so. I do, however, understand why people say “screw Earth!” when they buy cars because I was sold on the not-Prius when I learned it had heated seats. I am a sucker for heated seats. It’s a weakness, I know.