Saturday, March 7, 2009

Found Keys

Riding his bike home from a bar. Cool night, a Saturday. The Complete and Total Loser, ever the magpie, spots something outside a car, on the pavement, out of the ordinary.
Not trash this. Something else. A wallet? He looks. Keys. Car keys. A fancy set, two inches long, an inch-and-a-half wide. Several buttons on them. He pushes the unlock one. The car right next to them lights up. It's a Lexus. A nice one.
The Loser ponders this. You are what you drive, they say in L.A. He's on the opposite coast, but he has a few beers in him and thinks it might be fun to tool around in a decent car for a change. His last car was a '90 Toyota Tercel. A piece of shit. It was made when cars were all switched from carburetors to fuel injection systems, except for this one. It still had the old style set of lungs on it, and never ran right. At the end, it couldn't breathe and he sold it to a coworker with caveats for $100. She scrapped it in three months, no hard feelings.

So what to do? This is in the city. Multiple rowhouses all over. Knock on every door at 11 p.m.? "Do you have a Lexus?" "Get out of my face, dude." No thanks.
Lightbulb. Open the door, put the keys inside, but not in the ignition. On the floor. The Loser does this, then, when the door closes, wonders if this car, with its sophisticated systems, will lock the doors afterward. A cruel joke. But there's not time to worry about this; he has work Sunday, as losers do, and the clocks jump ahead.
He pedals home, and so to bed.

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