Requiem for a Prius
I remember the first time I was ever the victim of a crime. I was around 14. I had forgotten to bring a lock to the rec center that day. As usual I was swimming with a bunch of girls (my sisters) so I had nobody to share a locker with. I trusted that my locker would be lost in the mass of closed unoccupied lockers and left my stuff unlocked. When I returned wet and shivering, my wallet had been clearly pawed through. Something like 40 dollars of cash was missing, and all of my cards had been pulled out of their slots, stacked, and stuffed into the cash pocket. Of course I was upset to lose the cash (I was too young to start working yet!) but what really disturbed me was the cards. None of them had been taken as I was too young to have anything of value. Nevertheless, I had a very visceral reaction to the imagined scene of a perfect stranger methodically pulling out my student ID, my amateur radio operator license, my Eagle Scout card, my temple recommend, my haircut rewards punch card, scanning each with his beady black rodent eyes, and then adding it to the stack to be unceremoniously stuffed back in. In a lot of ways those cards represented a embarrassingly large portion of the sum total of my accomplishments and identity up to that point, and he put his grubby hands all over them, my cards. I felt violated!
Not two weeks later, while popping into a takeout restaurant with my sister to grab food for our family, I returned to the car to find my backpack unzipped. I was a pure soul that did not realize how tantalizing a closed backpack sitting in the passenger seat could be. Luckily I was just a high schooler with no e-devices to speak of, so nothing was stolen this time. But once again, seeing my notebooks and binders jammed in the wrong pockets I felt this sickening sensation of having been violated. It was a little better than the last time because the attempted thief had no reason read any of the papers (their loss, I had some thrilling and incredibly derivative fantasy writing in there) but I still went as far as confessing how I was really feeling to my sister (something I do not do often). In a bid to cheer me up she declared that the two incidents were perpetrated by the same guy—a stalker or nemesis if you will—and his name was “Hairold Creeperson”. I laughed as I imagined him looking something like the dad from don’t hug me im scared.
hnnnnnnnngggggg
That helped take the edge off. Also, an underrated benefit of giving a kid with an overactive imagination an anthropomorphized omnipresent threat of property crime is that I stopped being so spacey about where I was leaving things and I managed to make it to adulthood without being stolen from again.
In the first month of my mission I got a hand-me-down bicycle since I didn’t have a budget to buy one for myself. It was a nice 21-speed with disc brakes. A couple months later I had to run into my apartment to grab something (and sneak a quick snack) so I left it propped against the door with the door slightly ajar. I couldn’t have been in there more than 5 minutes, but when I came back outside the bike was gone. The feeling of violation was muted this time. The bike was never really mine to begin with. Still, I frantically jogged around the spiderweb of walkways in the apartment complex, not knowing what I would do if I caught the thief. We never did. Luckily the missionary who loaned it to me was chill about it disappearing and I wasn’t on the hook for any money. I hope that bike is still bringing joy to some hooligan in Fremont.
This is not actually how I felt at the time
Anyway I had to fall back to whatever detritus had been left behind by previous missionaries. There was only this piece of junk fixie whose rims were so busted up that it would pop its own tires every couple weeks. But I poured a lot of sweat into getting that bike running, I started slapping any stickers I could find on it, and it ended up being the bike on which I finally learned how ride and steer for miles without touching the handlebars. It became a very treasured object of mine. When I moved to an area with a car and passed it on to the next guy, I would shed a tear whenever I would see some random stranger in the same shirt and tie as myself riding my beloved bike. I would have really been shattered if this one got stolen, but luckily it wasn't a very attractive target.
Pictured in my second most cockroach-infested apartment
I also got into my first two car accidents on that mission (both as a backseat passenger, I’m a great driver thank you very much), the first of which saw us get rammed from behind on an exit ramp on the 580 and the second saw us ramming someone else on an exit ramp on the 880. The first one genuinely traumatized me. The second one was probably the closest I’ve ever been to straight up dying but I wasn’t as bothered by it, maybe because car accidents were old hat to me by now (it might have also had something to do with being the rammed rather than the rammer). That feeling of violation returned, an embodied, physical form of it. I couldn’t care less about the car since it was owned by the church, but the realization that somebody could penetrate my personal bubble at any time at any speed was psychologically unpleasant to say the least for someone who had a peaceful childhood (I still have never broken a bone!).
Why am I recounting every time I felt victimized, giving my opps fodder for when they need to prove I’m a little beta cuck weakling? Well, something has been happening to me in San Francisco. In the year and a half I’ve lived here, the city has been living up to its reputation for vehicular property crime.
My car was broken into twice through the passenger window. The first time was a classic smash and grab—“bipping” in the local parlance. But we’re too smart to leave anything in our car so there was nothing to take. Of course they still have to open up our glovebox and console and throw all of our spare napkins and hidden trash everywhere. There was that feeling of violation again. The second time they managed to pry off the little Nevada-shaped window on the passenger side entirely intact. Not sure how they did that (suction cup?) but it was cheaper to repair so thanks I guess (you may not be surprised to learn that SF has highly developed window repair infrastructure). There were more bizarre details: they opened up the boot of the car and reorganized the pieces of the disassembled jack out of their molded spots in the foam so the floor of the back wouldn’t lay flat. They also pulled off the back right hubcap and left it in our backseat. Were they going to steal our tires maybe? Anyway, it was around this time I started feeling like everyone was getting a little too comfortable breaking into my car. It was just a plain old black Prius with nothing indicating it held precious treasures within. What was the big deal?? Just leave me alone!
The beckoning vibe of the car wasn’t relevant for much longer because we got t-boned by a nice Canadian guy running a red a light while we were looking for parking in the Richmond two months ago.
RIP Jake the Car
Ok so I guess hitting someone’s car with your car on accident isn’t a technically a crime, but it feels like maybe it should be! I had to put on a brave face and sort out all the insurance and towing stuff but it was once again just a little traumatic to watch a car ram into us in what felt like slow motion and realize my wife’s life was spared by a few millimeters of aluminum and some airbags.
This car is no rust bucket but it has seen us through a lot of meaningful moments in our relationship, from our senior years in college to our wedding night and several interstate moves through perilous weather. It had carried my wife to her first year of shoots in her photography business, and carried me home in the passenger seat while high from wisdom teeth extraction. It was probably going to have a car seat in the back for our first child and last us until they graduated to booster seats. But it’s just a car, right? Cars can be replaced, wives cannot, so just count your blessings.
I spent twenty minutes sitting in the front seat in the junkyard after reclaiming our belongings from the glovebox that had so recently been rapaciously shoveled through by bipsters. It was just a car, but it was also a focal character in so many stories, and the reason for standing in so many long dmv lines and sitting in so many grungy waiting rooms at mechanics waiting for repairs. I had nourished it weekly with petroleum like a baby with a bottle of milk. I had given him a name!
So I bid my final farewell and now Jake is probably a cube of black metal and glass waiting to be reborn in a new vessel. We used the insurance payout to get the exact same black Prius (but newer) to try to preserve some sense of continuity in our lives and pressed forward.
The newer Priuses look pretty sick tho. Here's hoping this one doesn't get bipped or totaled.
The other vehicle that has been with us since before we were even married was Finn the Moped. I skrimped together scholarship money and my entire savings when I was a broke college student to get the vehicle I had been dreaming of for years: a Genuine Buddy 170i in Oxford Green. It was also present for a lot of treasured memories:
RIP Finn the Moped
And some bad memories too:
Once again, not my fault! They swerved in front of me and I had to lay it down to avoid hitting them.
Maybe if I was a better driver I could have avoided this one upright and let the epidermis on my left arm and leg stay put, but I definitely did not initiate the accident. I also stupidly wasn't wearing a helmet but luckily didn't leave my brains on the road that day. I managed to escape this one untraumatized because my therapist mom made me do some weird intervention where I had to hold these vibrating eggs and relive the experience, idk ask her. Scrubbing the pieces of asphalt out of my arm in the shower was the most painful experience of my life, way worse than the actual accident. Shoutout to my brother too for doing first aid on me so I could skip the hospital bill and not die of sepsis. Shoutout to the Scooter Lounge for getting Finn running again, though it definitely hurt me in my svelte student budget.
It was a bit of a piece of junk after I left it outside for a whole Utah winter and it wouldn't even start once we moved to San Francisco. I spent somewhere around 20% of the entire value of the scooter getting it running again so I could start riding it to the bus stop. But on Thursday, June 5th, I walked to my usual parking spot near the bus stop after work to find my beloved scooter was just… gone. After calling around to make sure it hadn’t been impounded, I had to admit to myself it had been stolen.
Of all the wacky crimes I’ve been subjected to, this one was the most bizarre. The steering column was locked, the scooter is still in a state of disrepair with visible rust and peeling paint, and it was parked next to several other scooters on the same street! What are they gonna do, hotwire it? Chop it for parts? Do they just prowl around Noe Valley looking for scooters to stuff in their pickup bed? It just doesn’t make sense to me as a profitable use of time and effort.
I’m also starting to feel a little bit of anger and despair. These last two months have been erasing our net worth faster than we can earn it, and disappearing our keepsakes faster than we can make new ones. I have always tried to be an honest person. I haven’t always succeeded: sometimes I’ve taken more than my fair share, not told the whole truth. But it would never even occur to me to start boosting people’s belongings. I know property crimes are not as serious as a crime against one’s person. But I’m starting to feel like property is a near approximation to an extension of myself.
In an attempt to derive natural laws from a primitive state of nature, John Locke reasoned that individuals had rights over their own labor, and therefore any natural resources they invested their labor in to create a new unique Thing would transform it into their own personal property. He didn’t go as far as to say there’s a spiritual dimension to property, but you must agree that something you have invested time into now holds a portion of your life you’re never going to get back. I didn’t manufacture my moped or car, but I did work to keep them in an operable state, and worked to earn the money to purchase and maintain them. For someone to rip that all away from me in an instant feels antithetical to everything I’m trying to do for 8+ hours a day. Not only am I working to fund someone else, it’s some individual clearly lacking in virtue and a sense of justice.
I know there are desperate circumstances that drive people to these actions. I also know there are less sympathetic motives, like plain old greed or funding a drug habit. My gut tells me it's the latter, though maybe that's just convenient for me to believe from my position of relative economic prosperity. I'd be happy to transfer an equivalent (or even greater!) amount of wealth to needy people in a way that would be distributed responsibly if it would make the thefts stop, but that's not going to happen. Maybe I'll just have to accept these losses as a Robin Hood tax. But it's sure sending me into a malaise having to reconfigure my life around a missing vehicle twice in two months.
Sorry for the meandering post. I'm in my feels rn.