With my truck intermittently behaving like a mechanical bull, I decided I better go diving one more time before it constantly worked like a mechanical bull and had to go to the mechanic. My longest breath-hold of the day was while pulling my boat back over the H-3. Despite gyrating like a Pentecostal being healed, my truck climbed the mountain and brought us back safely.
I called Lloyd, a mechanic who I had spoken with the day before about getting my truck fixed. At least that's who I tried to call. The garage I actually called said no one by the name of Lloyd worked there. I wasn't sure how I made this mix-up (I could just be prone to them, like allergies), but no big deal. My car needed to be fixed, and not necessarily by Lloyd, so I asked if I could bring it to whoever I was talking to. We were making progress, until I found out he was all the way down at University. As the crow flies that's not too far, but crows don't sit in traffic. And I would have to pass by quite a number, dozens even, pant loads maybe, of mechanics to get there.
So I opted to call a place in Mapunapuna, which is much nearer and also adjacent to a Wendy's in case the need for a Frosty should arise. They said bring it on in, but not until after 1, because they were about to take lunch (darn that Wendy's!). That was fine though, it fit in our schedule perfectly. Mike and I had to go down to Chinatown to hold a Pizza Lover's Club Meeting anyway, so we would just leave his car at the mechanic's place and take my truck to lunch, then we could swap out after 1. In retrospect, we should have left the broken vehicle and taken the working one.
But at the time it seemed like a good idea. We fortuitously found a parking space where he was able to parallel park right in front of the garage. And our club meeting went well too. It was the cheapest one yet, because we went that (fairly) new bakery on Maunakea Street. Good pizza rolls, excellent taro manju (twice again as good as McDonald's taro pie), only the chrysanthemum juice was a mistake. It wasn't until we were around HCC, where Mike was talking about how he heard of someone getting stabbed in the area that my truck really started hurting.
Where it used to shake, it was now tremoring. Where it used to click, it now banged. Where it used to crawl forward, in now sat immobilized. Mike got out and started to push us off the road. I found it a little difficult to steer my F-150 without power steering, but I decided not to complain when I looked in the rearview and saw Mike's red face gasping for oxygen as he pushed my 4,500 pound truck. I even made some perfunctory effort by cracking the door and kicking along with one leg. Kind of like running out a ground ball even though you know you're out.
We made it to the entrance of a parking lot, which looked like a better place to block than Dillingham Street. Across the river was a street with a mechanic my F-150 had patronized before. But to get to that street would require another foray on Dillingham. Either that or ford the river, but I played Oregon Trail enough as a kid to know the risk in that. We planned to push it, but only made it about far enough to block a couple more lanes of traffic before giving up.
We decided we would just have to try to start it, which was not an easy task. Mike had to bang on the solenoid with the end of a socket wrench while I turned the car over in order to get it to work. Finally it started, and off we shook at 4 mph, to the mechanic or bust.
The voyage was as harrowing as anything Magellan or Capt. Cook ever did, but I was able to pilot my F-150 to that mechanic, fueled largely by my love for its customized dashboard cover that says "Candy & Crystal." I'm not making that up, I'll get a photo of that in the morning and my Yosemite Sam floor mats, too.
Anyway, what's important here is that we made it. I then got to try to imitate every noise and symptom my truck was making. I tried my best to remember them all, even though it was hard to get my mind past the obvious problem of it shaking and going only 4 mph, if it will turn on at all. He said we could leave it, which was fortunate, since it was having a hard time moving, but we had to take the cooler in the back, because it stank from fish.
So Mike, the cooler, and I set off on foot toward Mapunapuna. Right around the corner was a Goodwill store, so I thought maybe I could go in, get some cheap Huffy or some kids bike, and ride to the car. They didn't have any bikes, which was fortunate, because I don't know if I would have been comfortable touching anything in that place anyway. It looked a lot like something Mike and I would cross later in our travels- the Keehi Transfer Station. So I wasn't impressed with this Goodwill store, but when I came out of the store a bus stopped; not even Mike, the cooler, and I could fail to see what an opportunity this was.
It said it was going towards Pearlridge. Mike asked how familiar I was with the bus system. I told him I haven't ridden it in about 6 years. We weren't even sure how much it cost, and by the time I started sorting through my change the bus was already leaving. No problem, we would just get prepared and wait for the next bus.
The next one was Rt. 52- Wahiawa/Circle Island. Mike hurried to get on the bus. I wasn't so sure. We only needed to go a few miles down the Nimitz. A 20-mile trip up the H-2 wasn't really going to aid us in our journey. But Mike just looked at me like he couldn't believe he and the cooler had to travel with someone with so little street smarts as me. "Derek," he instructed, "you can stop wherever you want. Only Express busses use the freeway, this is a regular bus." With that Mike popped his coins into the meter, and I was satisfied with the explanation from the seasoned, street-hardened carrier of the cooler.
We stood on the crowded bus, setting the cooler right in the face of some unfortunate passengers as the bus quickly accelerated. Though we are both too tall to see anything but concrete speeding by out the window, Mike, the prodigy of public transportation, sage of the street, savvily sensed that we were near our street. "Pull the cord," he urged. I wasn't too sure we could stop, it looked like we were on the freeway. "Pull the cord!"
Okay! I reached out and yanked the cord. "Stop requested," informed the automated voice. But the bus driver didn't even flinch, and the concrete kept speeding by faster. "I think we're on the freeway," Mike interposed. Yep, headed non-stop to Wahiawa.
Once we got to Wahiawa, we decided to wait for a hub to maximize our chances of finding a bus back to town. We got our transfers and exited the bus at a Park-And-Ride. A sign showed the routes headed towards Honolulu, and luckily, just then, one of those routes turned the corner.
As we boarded the bus, the driver exclaimed, "Whoa! You can't get on here with that cooler!" We tried to explain that we just got off a bus with the cooler, but he wasn't having it. We sat on the bus stop bench, searching for an idea, when the driver got off the bus and switched with a new driver.
The new driver also was not pleased about the cooler, but after throwing a fit he said we could bring it on, as long as we kept it in our lap. So we sat on a virtually empty bus for 20 miles with a cooler in our lap until we could get off at the first available spot in town, directly across the street from where we got on the first bus.
We decided to quit scheming and just walk. Walk down forgotten bike paths, walk past homeless camps, walk, walk, walk. Until finally we were done walking, finally we could put down the wreaking cooler, finally we could put the key in the ignition of Mike's car, turn it over, and be greeted by... an empty gas light.
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