Seven PM, five nights ago, the big park-n-ride lot at the southern end of the light-rail line. I’ve just spent 35 minutes riding on the train; I have another 15 or 20 to go behind the wheel of my car before I see the lights of home. I’m tired. It’s been another of those relentless-onslaught kind of days that seem to have become the default for my job, and I really don’t need any more bullshit tonight.

I don’t know how far I parked from the train platform. I’ve never been good at judging distances. Not like my dad, who can tell at a glance and with surprisingly good accuracy how far away something is, anywhere from about a half-inch up to a half-mile. The walk from the platform to my car isn’t as far as a half-mile, but it’s a lot closer to that than it is to the half-inch, and it takes me a good minute or so to make the hike, the whole time thinking about how much I just want this day to be done.

My Mustang waits for me, gleaming dully in the orange glow of the sodium-vapor lamps. It’s a welcome sight. My keys are already in my hand, and I hit the unlock button on the remote-control fob from 20 paces away. The interior lights come on, the headlamps flash twice, and the car alarm chirps four times to indicate that it has been triggered at some point during the 10 hours since I armed it this morning. But of course it has. The alarm is always going off. If the park-n-ride’s closest neighbor wasn’t a sprawling hillside cemetery, I’m sure it would be a real nuisance. As it is, I doubt more than three breathing people ever hear the damn thing as it screams at the passing birds who set it off. I never wanted a car alarm, didn’t want to be one of those guys. It was my dad’s idea — no, actually his insistence — that I get one shortly after I bought the car, because he was just certain that a Mustang convertible was bound to attract trouble. I thought he was being silly, that nothing would happen to my car and that an alarm wouldn’t stop anything if it did. But I caved eventually, the way I always do with him. And I dutifully set it every single day, and some days I even feel a little safer.

I notice the problem through the driver’s-side window as I’m reaching for the door handle. The glove box is hanging open. And the lid to the center console between the seats is standing straight up. A cold prickle races over my arms and legs at the same moment a hot flush rolls through my stomach and face. Somebody has been in my car.

I take a quick glance around and instantly feel foolish for it. As if the intruder would still be nearby. This probably happened hours earlier. I jerk the door open and drop into the driver’s seat, my seat, in my car, that someone else no doubt had their butt planted in while they rifled through my stuff. An irrational but comforting thought zips through my brain: maybe it was only my dad. Maybe Dad needed to get something from my car for some reason and, without bothering to call and let me know what he was doing, he got my spare set of keys out of my desk at home and drove over here and unlocked the car and… and what? Forgot to close the glove box and console when he left? Of course it wasn’t my dad. Somebody broke into my fracking car while it sat defenseless all day in a fracking park-and-ride lot while I was 25 fracking miles away at fracking work, and they fracking robbed me. And when I type “frack,” I’m sure you all know I’m thinking of a somewhat stronger word, right?

I’ve owned that car just over eight years and in that period it’s been broken into three times. Three times. Although to be fair, the first incident was my own damn fault, as I absent-mindedly left it unlocked one night at The Girlfriend’s apartment. The second time, the bastards didn’t manage to actually get into the car, but they slashed the hell out of my convertible top trying. And now this. I couldn’t fathom how they’d gotten in — the chirps I heard when I hit the remote confirmed that I had armed the alarm when I walked away from the car that morning, and making the alarm hot locks the doors — but there was no question they had gotten in. I imagined them working fast, in and out in seconds while the car honked its horn and the alarm wailed away, loyal little robots calling for help that wasn’t going to come because no one was around to hear except the permanent residents of Lake Hills Memorial. So much for car alarms.

The really irritating thing, weirdly, is how little they actually took: a MiniMagLite from the glove box and an aftermarket no-name cell-phone charger from the console. That’s it. Oh, they got into the trunk as well, using the button in the glove box, and they opened the duffle bag filled with tools I keep back there and had a peek inside, but they apparently didn’t see anything in the bag they liked. So now I’m stuck with paranoia and feelings of violation and impotent rage over a flashlight and a cell-phone charger? Bastards! Goddamned worthless waste-of-protein pus-sucking skeezy bastards!

I call the police non-emergency line before I leave the parking lot, knowing the bastards who broke into my car won’t ever be caught and I’ll never get any satisfaction in this. The dispatcher tells me to go about my business and an officer will call me back as soon as possible. It takes nearly two hours before I get the call, and then it comes from the Utah Transit Authority instead of the city PD I initially contacted. So I don’t even get a hearing from the real police, I get a transit cop. And one
who sounds pretty bored at that. I tell him about my flashlight, and that I’m a little wigged out because I still can’t figure how the bastards got into my car while the alarm was active, because the locks and the alarm are tied together. He shrugs off my concerns and asks me if I’d be willing to press charges if they ever catch them. A pretty big “if,” but of course I say yes.
Then he tells me that an Acura was stolen from the same lot that day, and the cops figure it was the same person or persons. So I have that minor consolation: at least they didn’t take my whole damn car. And at least my top didn’t
get slashed again. But still… I am utterly disgusted and infuriated me that this stuff happens in a supposedly civilized society. That we can’t just park our cars and go to work and trust that they’ll be okay, that nobody will bother them because people will do the right thing and respect other people’s stuff. This didn’t happen because the economy is bad. My car wasn’t broken into by some down-on-his-luck Jean Valjean who needed something he could trade for a loaf of bread because he’s starving. This was some punk kid trying to score an iPod or some CDs or something he could easily pawn
for spending money, and who just didn’t give a shit that some of us actually work for these things. A well-fed little bastard, most likely, from a nice, respectable suburban family. Or a gangbanger working for some chopshop that had that Acura stripped to the frame within two hours of its leaving the park-n-ride lot. And again, I should be happy that my car isn’t one of the commonly stolen models… and I am… but the fact that the car was “merely” robbed rather than ripped off entirely doesn’t change the fact that somebody broke the social contract. They destroyed (again!) my faith that my property will
remain unmolested if I’m not sitting there watching it all the time. And even worse, I’ve got no way of rectifying it. Nothing is going to make me feel better about this. There will be no justice in this case, I know there won’t. The damn police probably aren’t even looking for these bastards, because there’s no trail for them to follow. It’s just one of those things and they don’t have the resources to follow up on it. So I just have to accept that shit happens and continue with my routine, never knowing if or when it’s going to happen again, and feeling like maybe I shouldn’t be driving a car I love and worked hard to own because it’s just not worth the trouble.

The night of the break-in, as I try and mostly fail to get some sleep, I have a dream. In the dream, I come up to the car and
catch the burglar in the act. And in my hand is one of those huge silver-chromed semi-auto pistols the guys in movies always seem to use. I tap the punk on the shoulder with it and ask just what in the hell he thinks he’s doing there in my car? MY CAR. He thinks I’m going to shoot him and raises his hands in supplication, but instead I reverse my grip on the gun and punch him with it, breaking his nose. And then the gun is a tire iron and I start going to town on this son-of-a-bitch, beating him down to the ground. In my dream, I beat this man to death. To death. Because he was going to take my flashlight.

I wake up feeling a rage so concentrated that it makes me sick to my stomach. I am disgusted with myself for even imagining such things. And I blame the bastard who broke into my car for making me feel that way. That’s the worst violation of all.

Incidentally, I finally figured out how they got into the car without deactivating the alarm. They used some kind of punch tool on the keyslot on the driver’s door. I didn’t notice because I’d used the remote fob. Possibly the car wasn’t even locked as I approached it and all I did when I hit my button was disarm the alarm. But later I saw that the door around the round slot fitting is slightly dented, and when I tried my key in the slot, I found the mechanism is broken. The key will go into the slot, but it won’t turn. The locks still work with the remote, so it’s not an inconvenience… but I will have to replace the damn thing. Meantime, the rage I felt that night hasn’t gone away.

As I wrote over on Facebook the day after, I hope the assholes who broke into my car and added yet another pebble to my growing burden of hatred for the whole human race enjoy the glow of my MiniMagLite as they rot in the darkest, hottest, foulest pits of hell. And I’ll say it one more time for good measure: Bastards!