Automobile Tales: Sideswiping the German

The Wife and I were driving home from work last night when suddenly I realized we were out PBR.

“Honey, we have one beer left in the ‘fridge. This isn’t happening.” I swerved across two lanes of traffic and pulled into the darkest, shadiest convenience mart you’ve ever seen. I leapt from the car, darted inside and grabbed a case of beer with all the feline grace you’d expect from a man who spends all day making pretty on the computer.

An unmentionable sea hag with kelp-brown hair came shambling into the store and asked the clerk if he had any matches. “No, I don’t have any,” replied the predictably Asian man. He gave her a healthy dose of stink eye as she left. In fact, he seemed unable to look away at all. Jesus man, I thought to myself. She’s just an unruly ocean troll; it’s not like she tried to steal your horde of magic seashells.

I paid for the beer, turned to leave and that’s when I saw it; my wife, having exited our car with the passenger door open and the engine still running, using her supple German body to block a huge van from exiting the parking lot. The clerk hadn’t been staring at that hideous tide nymph at all — he was watching a massive camper van sideswipe my car.

The Wife was visibly shaken — a deadly mix of fear and anger upon her visage — while the two young girls inside the van were truly stunned. I would find out later they’d tried to drive away without being caught; my wife jumped out of the car and blocked their path, exclaiming, “Stop! You have to stay here until my husband comes back!” Of course, when I replay this in my head, she’s dressed like the Baroness from G.I. Joe, menacing a couple of bikini-clad teenagers with a leather riding crop, bellowing, “HALT! You vill remayne oontil mine hüzbint unt hiz pendulous nutsack reemerge from ze store.”

Though fearful, the girls were quick to profess their helplessness. “We don’t have any money,” stated the driver. “We’re from Lebanon.” And yes, I paused for a moment to wonder if she meant the Lebanon which borders Syria, rather than the Lebanon outside of Salem, Oregon, but I recovered and asked for her insurance information.

“We don’t have that,” came her reply. “What do we do now?”

“We call the cops,” I replied, snapping a picture of her license plate. That was right about when they produced some semblance of insurance coverage; a receipt for an auto insurance payment made by their stepfather last year. I took down all of the information, waved goodbye and asked them to drive carefully.

Turning back to my car, I saw the aforementioned sea hag peering closely at the scrape running the length of my driver side door. “Oh, you can probably buff that out,” she said in her ancient maritime tongue, poking at the paint.

“Don’t touch that!” cried my wife, slapping away her horrible webbed fingers.

“We’ve got this under control,” I chimed.

The Wife and I proceeded home, vowing never to return to that convenience mart, with its abundance of sea people and delicious Pabst Blue Ribbon, for surely thar be Pabst in fresher waters. Yarr.

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