Gentle On My Mind

Yesterday I took Beauty, or, rather, she took me, to the City for the first time since we've been together. Jack's city, San Francisco, that is.


It's not that we haven't been together, Beauty and I, in and out of, and all over, San Francisco. It's just that I used to be in the passenger's seat. It still seems strange, sometimes, to be driving her without Jack. To remember that we'll be ending our trip in San Jose, instead of Pacific Heights. It feels wrong, but at the same time, it feels absolutely right. Jack wanted us to be together.

We both miss him awfully.

I was a little nervous about driving her in the City, because Beauty is a 5-speed, and, well, you may have heard about the insanely steep hills for which San Francisco is famous. I can drive a stick, don't worry. Before Beauty, all my cars were Volkswagens. I don't even know how to drive an automatic. It's the people who might be behind me at a red light that I'm concerned about. The people who pull up too close, never thinking that a German car might need a little rollback room!

My strategy, therefore, was to race up Van Ness, burning the first few yellow lights on the up side, so that I could make it to the peak without having anyone behind me. It worked, and we coasted over the top and down toward Union Street without incident.

We were going to The Black Horse. Jack's pub.


The charm of The Black Horse lies in the feeling that you're not so much in a public bar, but in a friend's home. You might be asked to run to the corner store for some ice, for example, or to wash a few glasses. If you're standing at the back by the storeroom, you probably already know that you'll be required to haul some beer to the bathtub, which serves as the fridge. Drink there frequently enough and you'll end up tending bar.

The Black Horse is the smallest bar in San Francisco. A dozen patrons make it crowded. This is also part of its charm; part of the reason why Jack loved it so, and why I loved going there with him. You can't help but meet everyone.

James, the regular bartender and owner of the pub, is another reason why I love it there. He's a charming Irishman with literary sensibilities, who posts pithy quotes on the tiny blackboard behind the bar for patrons to guess at. The first time I went to The Black Horse with Jack, on the way home, walking up the hill, he said to me, "You love him, don't you? James, I mean." And I had to admit it was true.

Last night, I asked if I might write on the board, and James allowed me to. This is what I wrote:

Death cannot stop true love. It can only delay it for a while.

Constant Craving

I promised you this story a while ago, Gentle Reader, the story of Beauty's license plate.

I ordered it from the DMV in San Mateo, because that was Beauty's home for years, and that's where her car doctor is. After I picked it up today, I dropped in for a visit, because I hadn't seen him since last summer's drama ended, the day I brought Beauty home.

I figured he missed me.

(He did.)

We went outside, where Beauty was waiting in the beautiful California sunshine, and smiled at her, and he said, "Wow, that's really a beautiful car. She doesn't look anything like the car I picked up for you at the auction house."

I blushed on behalf of Beauty, who can't. Then I told him how I'd visited Jack's father over the Christmas holidays, and how we'd agreed to blame the Awful Events on the incompetence of the administrators of Jack's estate, so that we could go on. I didn't tell him that, even though there was a great deal of incompetence on that front, I know in my heart that it was Jason, Jack's brother, who kept me from Beauty. But it's all in the past now, there was a happy ending, Beauty is with me, and I'm going to keep my promise to Jack, to look after her. Forever.

Besides, Jack's father let me play the storied Fender Stratocaster. And he let me put on Jack's old leather flight jacket.

When Jack bought Beauty, back in the homeland in 1996, her license plate was 105 YZT. That's how plates were doled out back then: three numbers, followed by three letters. It's different now. That was a long time ago.

When he moved to California in 1998 Jack flew, and Beauty took the train. Jack told me he planned to get the same license plate for her in California as she had at home. Just because he could.

Except he couldn't.

There was some sort of rule about choosing a vanity plate that was too similar to a regular, randomly assigned plate. It's a stupid rule, but such is the nature of bureaucracy. So he got 1O5YZTA instead.


The astute Gentle Reader who is also a Star Trek fan might take a moment to examine the plates in the two pictures above, and smile. For everyone else, I shall explain:

The registration number of the first starship Enterprise, the one we know from the original Star Trek series, was NCC-1701. That Enterprise is destroyed in the movie, The Search For Spock, and in subsequent movies the new Enterprise is NCC-1701A. Captain Picard's Enterprise is NCC-1701C.

When Beauty finally came to me, her plates had been removed. My first impulse, because I knew the meaning of the plates Jack assigned to her, was to get hers back. But then I got a better idea.

I got 1O5YZTB.


Do you remember the episode of Lost when Desmond gets stuck in a time warp, and Daniel Faraday tells him he needs to find a constant, something that was important to him in the past, and the present, and Desmond chooses Penelope?

Well, Beauty was Jack's constant. And now she's mine.

I Can't Drive 55

"Do you like my new car?" I asked Rochester, in the chat window alongside our online Scrabble game. He doesn't know the saga of Jack and Beauty, but he'd noticed my latest Facebook profile picture (the same one I posted here), and the congratulatory comments that were pouring in from my RL friends.

"Couldn't find a Bricklin, eh?" he replied. One of the things I like about Rochester is that he knows a lot about Canada.

"Nice catch, showoff. But it's not like that's the only car ever built in Canada. Did you know that all the Toyota Corollas you see on the road here were built there? And the Matrix. And the Lexus RX330." I knew all this because I'd just finished working on chapter 8 of my Canadian marketing textbook.

"I had a Mazda RX-7 for 18 years. Now I drive a Porsche that was made in Finland."

I gulped, silently. Not that Rochester could hear me at the other end of Facebook. "You have a Porsche?" I typed. Of course he had no way of knowing how that word, Porsche, affects me. Or how learning that he had a car — any car — for 18 years makes me feel. That he would understand about Beauty.

"Well, a Boxster," he replied.

"Remember the other day when I joked that you weren't necessarily cooler than JB? Well, I take that back," I said, then added, "and you get bonus points for modesty."

He played his tiles; COULISSE, 61 points, then wrote: "It's not an S, though. I test-drove that, and decided I could get enough speeding tickets without going 80 mph in second gear."

I pondered his Porsche, then wrote, "Triple bonus points if it's a stick."

"Do they make them without a stick?" he asked. Disingenuously, charmingly.

"Quadruple bonus points!"

Friday I'm In Love

You can understand, can't you, Gentle Reader, why Jack loved Beauty?

Soon, I'll tell you the story about the license plate. I think you'll find it amusing. Jack would have loved it.

Do Wah Diddy Diddy

Well I'm hers! (I'm hers)

She's mine! (she's mine)



Finally, Gentle Reader, Beauty is where she belongs. With her Auntie Sass, where Jack wanted her to be.

And all it took was nine weeks of sleepless nights, one private investigator, one skeezy auction house, two bartenders, two incompetent case investigators, one friendly landlady, one sympathetic neighbour, six incredible friends, $5,000 in cash, one lawyer, one awesome BMW broker, a really swell guy named Aaron (at the skeezy auction house), three understanding colleagues, one sympathetic sound designer (oddly enough), and a truckload of Internet karma — to defeat one evil bastard son of a bitch asshole brother.

At least now I understand why Jack moved so far away from his family, and why he never wanted me to get close to them.

Just look at the indignity they suffered upon his most prized and beloved possession.

It pains me to show you that photo, Gentle Reader, but I wanted you to understand what she's been through. But she's safe, now. Beauty is safe. She just arrived at her new car doctor's, in San Mateo. She'll need to spend a few days there, kind of like a visit to the spa. And when she's recovered, we're going to ride off into the empyrean sunset together, toward Half Moon Bay.

And Venus was her name

She's got it, ooh baby, she's got it. She's so beautiful, that's why Jack named her Black Beauty, or Beauty for short. She was always his best girl, and I was his second, and the three of us, well, we had quite a ride these last thirteen years.

Next week, she'll be coming to live with her Auntie Sass in San Jose. And one day, we'll go home together, for good.

Little did Postmodern Sass realize that Jack's Evil Brother was hatching an evil plan to break her heart all over again.

My Best Friend's Girl

Jack's not really my best friend, not the way Kay is — he's a guy, after all — but we've known each other since the first George Bush sent bombers to the Gulf. I know most of his secrets, and he knows most of mine, which has gotta count for something. I think it counts for a lot, actually.

Jack is the person who named me Sass, and the only one who calls me that offline. His name isn't Jack, either, but that's what I've always called him. It suits him.

I like Jack because he not only loves cars, he loves the kind of cars I love: fast, sexy, and German. And he loves music. Plus, he has what all 5'11" of me considers a terrific bonus: he's 6'3".

Besides, I kinda like the way, I like the way he dips.

I'm not his girlfriend, but then, he doesn't have one. His best girl is his 1992 BMW 525i. He calls her Beauty, and he dotes on her the way Nero Wolfe dotes on his orchids. She was quite the hot babe when he first started going out with her in 1995. A technie geek girl, too: she had a car phone installed in between the two front seats.

(You have to remember, this was at a time when cell phones were the size of toasters, and even the most up-to-date technorati were carrying Cantel flip phones — in their briefcases.)

Beauty is, well, beautiful. Elegant. And she looks great in black leather. She's perfect for Jack.

She's very yar.

The last time I saw Beauty I couldn't help but notice she had a few beauty spots. Her windshield was cracked, and her door had been dinged, and someone, some abominable asshole who ought to be strung from the gaff by his balls, had keyed her. Her suspension was shot, and her bum wiggled. Jack's financial circumstances at the time didn't allow for him to take proper care of her, and that just about killed him.

Jack's always taken good care of Beauty. Not like her previous owner, who loved her while she was shiny and new, but as soon as things started to go wrong abandoned her with never a backward glance to the BMW dealer.

Beauty can be willful. Impulsive, even. Difficult to handle. Jack told me that when he first got her, she scared the crap out of him. I knew he loved her, though, when I watched him wash and wax her for hours, in the dead of February, in an airplane hanger at the regional airport where his stepfather works.

That was when Jack and Beauty lived here. Jack moved to California in 1998, and he didn't take Beauty with him then, but eventually he sent for her.

Much of her life in California has been one of luxurious leisure, as befits a classy dame like her. Jack would dress her up and take her out from time to time, when the weather was fine, but for the daily drugery of work he had a BMW M5. When the temporary financial setback occurred, Jack sold the M5 without a second thought, but was in agony at the possibility of losing Beauty. Fortunately, it didn't come to that, but as Jack's only girl she did get more of a workout than she had become accustomed to, and she wasn't at all pleased about aging.

Jack has owned other cars. A Porsche Carrera. The M5. When he compares them to Beauty he calls them bagels. (A private joke, Gentle Reader, which I simply won't share with you.) And Beauty's been driven by other men. She's even been driven by me.

Once, Jack went six years without driving Beauty. They always end up together, eventually, though.

She's learned to be patient, though it's not in her nature. She knows she has to be, if she wants Jack to keep her. He tells me he'll be getting a new M6 when they come out next fall, and I can't wait for him to take me for a ride in it. More than that, though, I hope I'll ride in Beauty again some day. I know he'll always keep her.

Last summer Jack had a diabetic episode while he was on the highway with Beauty. It was an unusually bad one; a sugar crash that came on abruptly and inconveniently, while he was speeding down the 101, with no Coke or Werther's or Life Savers handy. He called me the next day to tell me about it. His voice and demeanor were off; I knew something was terribly wrong.

As he talked he paced in his apartment, getting his bearings. He had just woken up. He assessed the situation and reported it to me, three thousand miles away: His hand was bloodied, and there was gravel embedded in his palm. There were smears of blood on his sheets. His knees were banged up. But his clothes were in a pile on the floor, and weren't damaged. He couldn't remember anything about the day before.

I asked if he could see Beauty. He looked out the window and said yes, she's there, in her spot, right where she's supposed to be.

Jack, I said, put down the phone, and go outside and check on her. See if she's OK. Look inside; maybe she has a clue about what happened to you.

He did, but she didn't.

He could only remember that somehow, somehow he made it to an exit, and then to a convenience store, where he sat for two hours drinking Coke, trying to get his sugar balance back. He had a receipt from the store in his pocket. But he didn't remember driving to the store, and had no idea how he got home, or how his injuries had been sustained.

I think Beauty saved him. But Jack hasn't been the same since.

He refused to drive Beauty after that. He didn't trust himself with her. He was afraid he'd hurt her. Don't misunderstand: he's not afraid of driving. He still drives. He just doesn't drive Beauty, he's that afraid of what he might do to her.

Jack once told me that men who are captivated by beautiful women are dangerous. And captivated is a most apropos word to describe his feelings toward Beauty.

He's stubborn: When he gets an idea in his head, there's no swaying him. He might come 'round, eventually, but it'll be on his own terms, and no amount of well-intended cajolling or persuasive words will shake him.

The thing is, if you knew him, if you'd ever seen him with Beauty, you'd understand immediately that he'd rather die than hurt her. He'd very likely kill anyone else who tried.

Jack would slay a dragon for Beauty.

Last week, Jack's financial reversals were reversed, and he's back on top again. He sent Beauty to the BMW spa (to be pampered by men undoubtedly named Karl-Heinz and Jürgen), and now she's back to her stunning old self. To celebrate, Jack took her to Santa Barbara, the most beautiful place in all of California, if not the world. And he sent me this picture of her on the pier:



See, I told you she was gorgeous.

She's no bagel.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can picture them, riding off into the empyrean sunset together, toward Half Moon Bay.

* * *
In the next story, Sass remembers her grandfather. In February, she'll tell you the story of Jack and Diane, which explains how she got the nickname Sassafras. And next summer you'll meet Jack's best human friend.