Many years ago, Los Angeles was hit by
a relentless rainstorm the likes of which
I’d never seen in my life. It rained for
what seemed like forty days and forty
nights, nonstop and hard. Rivers
overflowed. Houses slid down hillsides.
Bad hair wreaked chaos throughout the
most image-conscious city in the world.
This was the kind of rain you didn’t
want to be driving around in in anything,
let alone a twenty-three-year-old junker
convertible with a leaky roof, no grill, a
back window that was duct-taped shut
and a front tire that went flat every three
days.
I’d been in the market for a new car
for a long time and couldn’t find