HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#47 :: Saab front wheel bearings

My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, died in 1987 of AIDS. (Read a bit more about him here.) He was an early casualty, before drug cocktails, before it was acceptable to even be HIV-positive. Very much closeted, he gutted it out for more than a year under the guise of a "rare blood disease" - a lie close enough to the truth for him to live with, but far enough to keep his friends close. Homeopathic treatment didn't do a damn thing, and he died a long, ugly, painful death. When I was called to his death bed, he had already left his body, which was still warm and breathing on machines that simply had not been turned off yet. A few days earlier, he had asked me to take his car, a 1975 Toyota Celica ST, metalflake brown in color, with 4 on the floor, a car in which we had rolled with a happy buzz on to many clubs and concerts in St. Petersburg Florida during the '80s - to get it washed so it would be ready for him when he got out of the hospital. (Read on ...)

That was as close as he got to a will. He died intestate, leaving some unpaid bills, a house full of books and music, a bereft and shattered girlfriend, a newsroom full of stunned colleagues and an answering machine message that said, "Steve is gone right now. The ghost is in the machine. Tell it who you are and it will call you back when he returns." So he left me this car - I had ditched my decrepit '70 Volvo (into which I had foolishly poured $6,000 worth of renovations and repairs - but that's another story) - and I made it my mission to keep it on the road for as long as I could, and drive it into the ground. The odometer - hovering somewhere around 90,000 when I got it, quit at 174,000 or so. A short while later, the engine quit, so I had another one put in (a rebuild of a Japanese-market Celica engine) and kept on going. I did most of my own repairs other than that - brakes, bearing seals, clutch hydraulics, and so on. I had it painted electric blue at one point. I bottomed out in Philadephia's rutted cobblestone side streets, almost tearing the front-end crossmember and oil pan off the bottom of the car. I paid a lot to get it fixed. It kept running. It rode out to California in 1990 with my furniture, in a moving van hired by the L.A. Times, which had just hired me. I kept driving. Brush fires, floods, countless city council meetings. It kept rolling to beaches, deserts, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego. I had it painted "Plum crazy purple" - a wicked metalflake variation favored for the 1974 Dodge Challenger and Swinger - upholstered in cream leather, and replaced the wheel with one of solid mahogany and machined aluminum. The Northridge earthquake, more fires and countless trips up and down twisty roads in the Santa Monica Mountains, a particularly vicious bout of the Santa Ana winds that ripped the door from my hands and flung it open, crumpling the trailing edge of the front quarter panel. It ran and ran and ran. At some point, I replaced the front wheel bearings, which were howling kind of noisily. And not long thereafter - exactly seven years to the week after he died, the electrical system crapped out in the parking lot of an Oxnard mall while I was on assignment. That was the signal. I had it fixed, thanked Steve for giving me seven years of spiritually rewarding, safe and happy driving, and donated it to an auto mechanics program at Pierce College. My very educated guess is that it had somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 miles on it. I moved on to a brand-new Saab 900 (another wonderful car, for purely mechanical reasons) and I replaced the wheel bearings in that one, after a good 140,000 miles. These are the Saab's dead bearings. They put me in mind of Steve and the Celica, both of whom I miss terribly.