One of the worst things about fixing cars is THE CALLBACK.
I've spent hours pulling the damn car apart, putting it back together and that evening the phone rings. "Veda, my car won't start!" Ah! that old sick feeling in the stomach, tension in the neck and clenching of the jaw!
And you wonder why I never answer the phone.
Well, this is a tale of just such an occasion.

Goldie.
At the time of this tale she was Rahimo's little Toyota Tercel. Before that she was Praveeta's car and now Misa drives her. She was made in 1986 and painted gold, hence her name. I'd done a simple tune up, tweaked this and turned that. Most '83 - '86 Tercels have a stalling problem at stoplights and intersections that I don't know how to fix, so I mess around and sometimes I get lucky. No, car repair is not a science.

Usually not much can go wrong with a tune-up. Worst case scenario is a stripped sparkplug thread, which we won't even think about and once I forgot to tighten the oil pan drain bolt on a car but we won't go into that here. So I was surprised when Rahimo called me at seven o'clock the next morning saying those words I hate to hear. "Veda, my car won't start!"

Rahimo's day is ruined too. She cancels massages that she had scheduled in Ka'anapali at the hotel. It's a long drive from Kula to Huelo, plenty of time to think of the terrible possibilities as well as the quick fixes. The mind. Driving down the dirt road to her house I can hear a soundtrack playing in my head. It's a mixture of the arrival of the US cavalry and the circling of the Great White Shark in Jaws. Am I the conquering hero or the next bloody victim? More mind. The crunch of gravel under the wheels, the groan of my car door opening and it's QUIET ON THE SET! ACTION!

There's a note on the car. Rahimo has found a ride to work and wishes me luck. First step is to look in the engine and see if there's anything visibly amiss. Nope, all the bits are there. Second step, try to start the car. Ooooh! Almost. It really wants to start but it just can't quite do it. Third step, tools.

Well, Pandora's box is a cookie jar compared to the trunk of my car. Especially at the end of the week when everything has been jumbled up and for some strange reason (scientists call it entropy) things won't go where they belong unless I put them there. What I'm looking for is the timing light. It looks like a radar gun and has three long wires coming out of its butt. The wires, of course, are wrapped around the C-clamp, the jumper cables and the hammer and doing their best to be tied-up shoelaces at the same time. More entropy.

The timing light is then attached to the battery and the #1 plug wire and the engine cranked. There is spark. #2 plug wire, spark. #3 , no spark. #4, no spark. Very strange. The wires themselves look fine so the distributor must somehow be acting up. The distributor cap is held on by three bolts, one of which can only be removed with a precise selection of ratchet extensions and an 8mm socket that are buried in the bottom of the trunk. To cut a long story short I found them, undid the bolt and removed the cap. There, inside, I saw a six inch centipede blocking the #3 and #4 terminals and looking very sick. Each time the car had been started he had absorbed the electric pulse destined for the spark plugs, something like 25,000 volts eight times a second multiplied by two. Shocking stuff.

I don't know if he was really alive or just kept that way on a cruel artificial life support system that subjected him to a lethal, repetitive cycle of electric shocks that killed him only to jump-start him back to life again. However, once removed from this unnatural environment, he wasted no time in dying. Goldie on the other hand came back to life.

But Goldie was not finished with her unique adventures yet.
A while later, maybe two or three months, Rahimo called me again. Goldie wouldn't start. I made the long drive down the hill and discovered she was out of gas, something that could happen easily since the gas gauge didn't work.
"No!" said Rahimo, "That's not possible, I filled her up yesterday."

I siphoned a little gas out of my tank, put it into Goldie and after some gentle coaxing she started right up. We drove to Hanzawas to fill up but the delivery nozzle would click off after a second, as if she was full, but a quick bang on the underside of the gas tank produced a hollow, empty sound.

We moved Goldie to the parking lot for investigative surgery. I poked a long piece of wire down into the tank and it met no blockage. I disconnected the hose from the filler cap to the tank and it was clear. I took the gas gauge sending unit out of the top of the tank and shone my flashlight in there. All seemed as it should be and it was definitely out of gas. Going back under the car I stuck my fingers into the tank's filler hole. At the very end, after stretching my fingers I felt something but I couldn't grab hold of it. One more visit to the trunk of my car produced (eventually) a long, sharp, hooked dental tool and I began to poke around. After a few seconds fishing I got hold of it and between my fingers and the pick I pulled out a wine cork. Rahimo was not aware of Goldie's drinking problem so I took her aside and suggested maybe she should enroll Goldie into AA instead of Triple A.

Goldie still runs and I'm still fixing her. Who knows what other strange adventures lie ahead for both of us, but this I can say, with much admiration: no other car I have ever met has broken down with such creativity.