Make Mine Mike

More quick car talk.

This past week I had taken my banged-up baby to a couple of mechanics, who both quoted me a few thou to fix it. The lease inspector said if I turned in the car as is, it’d cost me $4600 (!) And my insurance company -- and who knows if and when they would cover me -- would still make me pay the 2 deductibles totaling a grand, plus they’d surely raise my rates. Mikey’s screwed right?

Not royally though.

Next time a friend tells you, “Dude, I’m tellin’ ya,” you should heed their advice. I kept hesitating to see Juan, my friend’s mechanic. Juan is way up in the Valley -- pretty far schlep just to get another ridiculous quote and take a week and a half to fix so I’d have to make arrangements to get around from the edge of the earth up there. But when my friend insisted, “Dude, I’m tellin’ ya,” well, who could argue with that logic?

So I roadtripped up to see Juan, who said he’d charge me to repair everything -- even the other little scratches on the car -- for $800 and change. Sweet. That's less than the deductibles, and no raised rates or hassles. Plus Juan would only take a few days, and he gave me a loaner in the meantime. Granted, I got my spankin’ fresh hoopity-doopitydoo with the brand new car smell at home... but this little Hyundai would get me to and from Juan’s shop in the hinderlands. Super sweet.

I cancelled the insurance claims, and drove to work relieved...

Know what’s weird? Written in the dust of the loaner’s back window -- backwards so I could read it forward in the rear-view -- it said “POLIS STATION”. I assume the Hispanic guys at Juan’s misspelled “police” phonetically in Spanish. Did they get this cardboard box of a car from the cops?

Or maybe they just left off the H in “Polish”, as in the car came from the mechanic’s buffing area. Or from Krakow?

While I pondered my geeky word games, I cruised past a patrol unit with a few police officers. Female cops. Oh baby, there's something about a woman in uniform… really got my nightstick in a chokehold. They had their dark hair pulled back in a bun -- Latina-looking, and I gotta thing for las chicanas. Especialmente en la policia....

IMO, LAPD is much different the NYPD. Most New York cops I’ve seen are nothing like the ones on TV. By comparison, the most attractive real-life police make Dennis Franz look like a fashion model. And that includes the female officers. But in LA, the police are tan and tall and buff and chiseled... and that includes the female officers. Even with their equipment and bullet-proof vests, it was obvious these babes in blue were bootylicious.

Guess I was just in a good mood about solving my car problems. But I wasn’t quite ecstatic enough to forget these women had guns and tazers and fifteen ways to break a perp's neck. Otherwise, when I drove past, I just mighta said, “Hey, you ladies wanna polish my station?”