My Beauty, my Bride, my Benzo
What follows is a paean to my pauper’s coach, my partner in crime, my pouting four-wheeled mistress who over the years has stolen both my heart and my credit card.
My Benzo.
These days, she’s like an old showgirl who’s traipsed her last casino runway. Her exterior skin is slate-colored, with a matching light-gray leather interior, drab and sort of goofy, like something an old lady might pick off the showroom floor.
Yes, my 1998 E-320 four-door sedan is showing her advancing age. She’s already hit the century mark, which in car years translates to 110,000 miles. Her finish is cracked and dinged, not all of her functions still work.
Windows stick in mid-roll. Knobs break. Her electrical nerves have gone haywire, prompting the glow of the dreaded dashboard idiot light and too many worried trips to the doctor’s repair service.
But, oh, the the places we've been!
I’ve spirited her around the world, shown her the sights. She’s even gone undercover, a metallic overseas spy in a hostile foreign landscape.
I’ve never met anything like her -- half machine, half human.
My own Ex Machina.
She was already 20 (with 20,000 miles) when we first met. Her ex, a friend of my wife’s, had for long months left her cocooned in a warm garage.
So when she came into our lives, in 2004, let me tell you, she was one styling chica caliente, a real piece of work.
My wife claimed her first. She fell in love with that circular hood ornament that pointed our Benzo's way, parting the unwashed crowds, like a queen’s scepter.
And me?
I drove a black 2008 Volvo S-80 four-door with black leather interior.
Man, this Euro-dude was slick and fast, his turbo power propelling me to blow posers off the line as I barged onto the freeway.
So, the two girls hung together, and so did we boys.
Until the fall of 2008, when my work took us to Korea. By us, I mean my wife and I.
Because my plan was to leave both the Benzo and Volvo in Bay Area storage. Once we got to Seoul, I reasoned, we could buy some old beater to bang around town.
My wife would have none of it. Without Lady Benzo and her tell-tale circular hood logo, she’d feel like an empress without her clothes, a princess without her pea.
“OK, go ahead,” I huffed. “But you handle the paperwork. I’ve got shit to do.”
My wife called the South Korean embassy in Washington and, so I’m told, was informed that, yes, she could legally bring the car into Seoul.
The passage was by no means cheap, costing $1,600 to have the car strapped down on the deck of some container ship.
Both my wife and I got to Seoul before our Benzo. And me tell you, we were in store for quite a rude reunion. I drove the car off the shipyard lot, with a temporary paper license plate affixed to its rear, until I could apply for the real thing.
Then I made the call to Seoul DMV to get our girl registered and insured.
Not so fast, we were told.
The Korean government had only recently changed its laws regarding the importation of used foreign vehicles. As of now, our Mercedes was about as welcome in the country as Kim Jong Un with an armload of nuclear missiles.
She was too old by two years.
The new cutoff age was 2000.
Now they tell me.
“Well, what do I do?” I asked. “The car’s already here.”
The Korean bureaucrat was merciless.
“Send it back,” he said.
I hung up the phone one pissed-off little punk. First, I blamed my wife for her blunder. Then I got mad at an unyielding Korean government.
“OK,” I told my wife. “If they want to play that game, then let’s play.”
I was not sending this car back.
I was going to drive it.
For four years, I motored that old girl all over the ROK. Slunk down low behind the wheel, I knew that my Benzo had no documents; I had no driver’s license, no insurance.
We were both on the lam.
But we did have those temporary plates, which quickly got dirty and looked close enough to being legitimate.
I remember one day, driving in Seoul with my wife, when I passed a police officer who gave us the stink eye. In the beginning, we couldn’t help but freeze up at such moments.
To get stopped would be, ahem, messy.
Finally, he drove away.
“This is exciting,” my wife said.
“Yep,” I responded. “We’re like Guatemalans in Houston. Illegal and without papers.”
Our ruse was aided by one convenient fact. Korean police were loathe to stop foreigners. Most didn’t know English or any of the European languages spoken by ex-pats in Seoul.
Maybe they figured their lack of language skills would be embarrassing and cause them to lose face, which is huge in the Confucian Korean culture.
So whenever some copper began eye-balling us for some perceived offense, he’d finally spot my pale white-boy features and dismissively wave us on.
My Benzo -- and my face -- had become a rolling Get Out of Jail Free card.
My cronies tempted me to get arrogant.
This car's identity had been wiped clean, they’d say. It was invisible, it's data not in the system. It was a shoe with no footprint, a mobster’s sedan with its own will and rule of law, a vehicle that could carry bodies in its trunk.
Badda bing, badda boom.
I could do anything.
Like roll through tollbooths without paying. And what could the attendant do? They couldn’t see my plates, for one. And even if they did, they were devoid of meaning.
I never did that, of course.
(OK, I did. But just once, maybe twice. The attendant looked confused and unhappy.)
One night, after drinking on the town, me and my Benzo got in some real hot water.
We limped into our apartment complex at 4 a.m., only to find the parking lot chock-full. There was one narrow spot between two cars, blocked off by a plastic orange highway cone.
I stumbled out, kicked away the cone and backed in the Benzo, drunkenly scraping the adjacent car. Realizing my blunder, I pulled out and banged another car, finally skulking off to park on another floor.
Well, what I didn’t know was there was a woman sitting inside the first car I’d hit. She phoned security, who consulted their video surveillance.
Busted.
They had both me and my Benzo dead to rights.
I paid big time for that little escapade.
My Benzo didn’t talk to me for an entire month.
Finally, in 2012, it was time to come home.
I moved to Las Vegas and had the Mercedes shipped back for another 2,400 clams, hemming and hawing when Korean customs officials demanded to know why I had not registered the car.
My wife had returned to San Francisco the year before and was already driving the Volvo.
That left just me and my Benzo.
We became a thing, a couple, an item.
Since then, we have flitted across the entire western U.S., she and I, up and down Nevada, Arizona, Utah and California.
Recently, though, I have watched her mechanical brain fail with automobile dementia. First it was her electrical system, then this and then that.
Finally, on a drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, she coughed and stalled on the treacherous Baker Grade. I willed her forward, inching along the road shoulder as the big semis and delivery trucks blasted their horns as they sped past, but it was no use.
I gave up, pulled over and had her towed the last 100 miles home.
Two catalytic converters and $2,000 later, she still purrs in my garage. Actually, that murmur has morphed into a nagging smoke’s cough; rough-sounding and troubling.
My 17-year-old niece has recently been calling lately from Los Angeles, nagging me. She just got her learner’s permit and now has her eyes on my Benzo.
She says a man of my stature and taste deserves a better ride.
And I laugh.
How could I not?
She ain't getting this car.
But no matter what happens between us, I do know this: She’ll always be my girl, my Benzo.
What a long strange trip it’s been.