Authors: Fay Jacobs
Fried & True (13 page)
July 2004
LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH
Apparently, my choice of a new car means I'm actually a gay man.
And the strange thing is this is not the first time my lesbian credentials have been questioned. In several episodes from my past, people have gingerly asked, and in one incident actually shouted “are you sure you're not a gay man????”
Now don't go queasy on me. It's not like the plot of
The Crying Game
(Surprise!!!) or anything. It's just that sociologically I seem to exhibit some fairly stereotypical gay male behavior.
For one thing, I'm a musical comedy queen. I know the lyrics to every obscure song in the whole Broadway cannon. I can actually sing all the words to “Shipoopi” from
The Music Man
and everything from Liza Minelli's
Flora the Red Menace
. The Liza thing is a ten-pointer on the poofter scale.
I may have been the only lesbian at Follies to recognize a song from 1947's
Finian's Rainbow
.
And a few years ago, when my sister and I were nostalgically recalling those controlled-substance-filled 1960s, she admitted that while she was in a haze with Jefferson Airplane and
White Rabbit
, I was the only person she knew to puff on weed and go over the rainbow listening to Judy Garland recordsâhow gay is that?????
More recently than Haight Ashbury, when I was looking to purchase my Rehoboth home, my adored realtor ferried us around extolling the virtues of square footage and environmentally friendly heating systems. All I focused on was curb appeal.
“I love those columns!!!!” I squealed.
“Are you sure you're not a gay man???” he shouted.
Okay, so I have tendencies.
But apparently the new car sealed it. According to a web site
listing official auto choices for gay men and lesbians (yes, really), my old car was the official lesbian car, the Subaru Outback. But my new car, a diesel powered VW Jetta was listed as the number one choice of gay men. My garage has had a sex change.
How could that be? I thought my choice of a diesel car made me (all together now) a Diesel Dyke.
Not only was I stung by the accusation that I had purchased the wrong car for my sexual orientation, but I was still smarting over the unfortunate premature demise of the Subaru. It only had 120,000 miles on it, which, ask any lesbian, is mere puppyhood.
Only last week, Bonnie and I discussed getting a new car. Hell, we could get $3000 in trade for the Lesbaru. While the thought of a new car was appealing, the words “paid-off” were far more attractive. Uncharacteristically we decided to do the prudent and practical thing and hang onto the car for another year or so.
Woman plans; God laughs and then blows your car up.
Last Saturday on Route One, right in the middle of rental rush hour, the Subaru's engine ignited like a Weber kettle grill. I pulled off onto the service road by Coastal Gallery and asked the proprietors if I could leave a large smoldering metal sculpture in their parking lot. Bonnie came to collect me.
Later, we learned that the Subaru had blown a head gasketâwhich sounds really awful unless you saw the gasket I blew learning that my $3000 Subaru was now worth bupkus. Nada. Nothing. Toast.
And while this was a terrible blow, I stood there and laughed like the village idiot. It reminded me of the last time I had an automotive asset one minute and a steaming pile of liability the next.
It was back in 1978, with my woozy Judy Garland days behind me, but my non-lesbo musical comedy obsession still flowering. I was on my way to a rehearsal for
Gypsy
(how gay is that!) in Annapolis, Maryland when my elderly 1964 Corvette
suddenly lurched and left me with some kind of car part dragging the pavement beneath my wheels.
With the metal scraping the street, I produced hideous noise and sparks.
“If I can only get two more blocks to the theater,” I thought.
Unbeknownst to me, just ahead, on a narrow one-way street was a freshly poured speed bump. By this time, the dragging metal on my undercarriage was red hot from being scraped along the road.
My car went over the speed bump with its front wheels, but when the sizzling car part hit the brand new asphalt it sunk into the speed bump like a sack of anvils into a loaf of Wonder Bread, welding me to the street.
Jeesh. No matter how I tried, the car would not move forward one more inch. Traffic backed up behind me, with people finally getting out of their cars to look and laugh. Grown men knelt down on their hands and knees, peeked under the car and howled.
Suffice it to say that when a flat bed truck backed up the street in front of me and tried to dislodge my vintage sports car from the road, the rear axle fell off, turning my pride and joy into a pile of antique rubble.
Meanwhile, it turned out that the culprit in this tale was a dangling leaf spring, which, more like a stereotypical gay man and unlike most lesbians I know, was an item I had never even heard of.
But now, finally, I may have found a way to dispel this long-held notion of my unnatural kinship with the G rather than the L in GLBT.
Since the diesel car gets great fuel mileage, Bonnie has chosen to use it for her business, leaving me with the other family vehicle. Of course, like most of my men friends, I long to drive a Lexus, Cadillac CTS, or the Guppie-approved Jetta. Give me a luxury car with On Star any day.
But no. I got my lesbian cred back. You'll now find me riding around in a four wheel drive mini SUV Chevy Tracker, complete
with surf fishing license tag. A personal butchmobile.
Although, if I pull up beside you, windows open, CD player cranked up, it won't be hip-hop. It will be
Hello, Dolly
.
August 2004
LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH
Not only is Big Brother watching, but he knows where you are going and how fast you get there.
Yes, folks, two decades past the infamous 1984 that Orwell warned us about, the truth is far worse than we feared. And the culprit is E-ZPass.
Don't get me wrong. I love zipping through toll booths, without wrestling with quarters and dimes. I adore shooting right through the express lanes while hapless motorists fiddle with electric windows and lollygagging toll payers. I'm positively giddy about getting tolls deducted from my debit account and never worrying about a fist full of silver sliding into my gearshift to screw up my transmission.
But holy moly, don't ever run afoul of the bureaucrats who monitor the whole East Coast E-ZPass Grid. It's an army of public servants like you've never encountered before.
I fear I am forever doomed to be an E-ZPass scofflaw, evermore labeled an E-ZPass reprobate, possibly with my name and tag number emblazoned on a web site akin to the ubiquitous sex offender warnings.
And it's all over 35 cents.
Imagine my surprise one day, when I opened the mail to find a “Notice of Enforcement Action for delinquent toll payment” from my friends at New Jersey E-ZPass. There it was, a crisp, clear photo of my late lamented Subaru's rear end, with its clearly visible RB sticker, luggage, license plate and yapping Schnauzers.
Holy Batman! They got us on Candid Camera. And I owed thirty-five cents and a twenty-five dollar payoff, erâ¦administrative fee.
I did kind of recall one instance on a recent return trip from New York when I zipped through the E-ZPass lane on the Jersey
Turnpike and thought I heard bells go off. It couldn't have been for me, I was an E-ZPass member in good standing.
Or so I thought.
I immediately called New Jersey E-ZPass, which, after a mind-numbing selection of numerical menu choices, finally allowed me to speak with a cousin of Lily Tomlin's Ernestine the phone operator. I explained my receipt of the violation notice and got bounced around to several disinterested parties before I was finally told to call Delaware where I belonged.
Ladies and gentlemen, our own E-ZPass squad was not significantly better. They officiously explained that my account balance had ebbed to zero and they were unable to retrieve more moola from my bank.
Oh really? Why? What went wrong to turn me into a moving violation? I confirmed my debit card number with the customer disservice operator and oops, Delaware E-ZPass had that silly little expiration date written down wrong.
“Our fault,” said the clerk. “I'll correct it.”
“Okay, but can you call New Jersey and keep them from putting out an all points bulletin for me? Can you get me off the wanted list? Take my photo out of the Cranbury New Jersey Post Office?”
No, their supervisors did not permit them to call New Jersey. While I could see why they didn't want to, I couldn't understand why I had to be the one to expunge my record and clear my own name. After all, Delaware goofed.
Needless to say, it took about eleven phone calls to the Garden State to clear up the matter and ended with me sending E-ZPass a checkâa check!âfor thirty-five cents.
Days later, that Subaru went to the great turnpike in the sky, but not before I unnapped the Velcro and snapped the E-ZPass transponder (“Beam me up, Scotty”) off the windshield.
As we had occasion to travel back and forth to Wilmington several times over the past two weeks in our new car, I could be found approaching all toll booths by holding the transponder aloft like the Statue of Liberty's torch and hoping Big Brother
could validate me.
At one point, Bonnie failed to wave the transponder at the right moment. She did not have to ask for whom the toll belled, it belled for thee.
Envisioning her spouse spending long days journeys into nights bouncing around the SleazyPass phone system while being entertained by Muzak, she knew she was in trouble. She pulled over and went directly to the toll booth staff and turned herself in.
They let her pay the toll in cash (imagine that!), seconds, I'm sure, before that GreedyPass administrative fee would have kicked in.
When the officer saw our temporary tags, he went pale, realizing we were in real jeopardy and immediately entered our new car into the system. I can't imagine what the E-ZPass forensic team would have done with a photo of a violating VW using the transponder from a deceased Subaru. I think the officer saved us from death by hanging. Or at least hanging onto the phone until we wanted to die.
So that, I thought, was the saga of E-ZPass. Until today, when I retrieved my mail and found a Second Notice of Enforcement Action from the State of New Jersey. Apparently, they'd processed my thirty-five cent check, but forgot they forgave the wretched administrative fee.
With phrases like “Delinquent Toll payment,” and “Civil Penalty and $200 fine,” staring up at me from my violation notice, I am sending New Jersey the damned $25.
I obviously do not have the required inter-state negotiating skills to get this thing cleared up any other way. I doubt that the entire Delaware River and Bay Authority could straighten this thing out. I'm sure the Boss, Bruce Springsteen himself, couldn't use his Jersey influence here. Frankly, I'd call the Governor of New Jersey for help, but McGreevy has his own problemsâ¦.
E-Z? My ass.
