Take My Car... Please! - Page 2

Still stumped on how I'm going to dump the beast, I took my dog for a walk along Commercial Drive. Suddenly I saw a sculpture that was so cheesy, it gave me a salt rush. The seven-foot fiberglass sculpture was a gaudily painted bear dressed in a polo shirt and Bermuda shorts. Reared up on his spindly hind legs, this "Spirit Bear" was waving like the Queen with one hand and scratching his nut-sack with the other.

At first, I frowned and looked away, thinking this was yet another Commercial Drive mime. But later, when I surfed the web, I discovered that this bear was supposed to be "art." Various artists were commissioned to design 10 distinct Spirit Bears that would stand guard over multiple Vancouver locations. Each bear comes with a cutesy name like "The Tooth Beary," "Love Mama and Papa Bear," and my personal least favourite, "Vancoubear." I had a cunning plan:

From: Ken Hegan
To: Mayor Sam Sullivan
Subject: Artistic Proposal: Taking it to the Streets

Dear His Worship Sam Sullivan, Mayor of Vancouver,
Sir, it has come to my attention that Vancouver boasts the finest public art in the world. Forget Rome, London, Paris and New York. Next to Vancouver's prized public sculptures, those art-deficient towns look like nose-picking amateurs.

Just gaze upon Vancouver's eye-popping cement "100" under the Granville Street Bridge, and our wonderful tangle of rusted steel in Vanier Park. How marvellously po-mo! But now your delightful Spirit Bears (bears wearing flip-flops? Genius!) have almost made me forget Vancouver's painfully beautiful killer whales that were airbrushed to look sort of like "Bobby Orca" and "Orca Presley."

Impossible acts to follow? For most artists, yes. But now I, Ken Hegan, am preparing to unveil a new sculpture series that will blow those mammals off the map! My series of 200-plus sculptures is made from actual parts of a collectible antique rust-red Chevy Cavalier.

Here's how it works:

The City of Vancouver pays me a handsome fee for the opportunity to stuff my car with C-4 plastic explosives and then publicly blow it into a bazillion pieces! The backdraft will knock your socks off, sir, so lock the brakes on your wheelchair!

Next, City workers will pick up the pieces and mount them prominently around town: Strathcona can display a piece of my shrapnel-scarred spare tire. Marpole can erect my stick shift. City Hall hangs my half-melted steering wheel from your flagpole, and so forth.
Collectively entitled The Carpse, my artistic explosion symbolizes how viciously high rents have devastated our city's art scene and forced artists to abandon Vancouver and live in dingy suburban basement suites.

Either that, or The Carpse represents the potential threat of evil-doing, Winter Olympic-hating terrorists who, according to VPD Chief Jamie "sleepless nights" Graham, may be plotting to destroy our Winter Canadian way of life. Either way, it's pretty cool to blow up a guy's car, hey?
Sir, this is truly a unique opportunity. Artistic genius doesn't happen every day. So, starting today, right now, you have 24 hours to claim The Carpse for Vancouver or I'll take my art to Kamloops.

I remain your loyal and faithful servant,
I.M. Ken Hegan
Artist
Mount Unpleasant (Fraser/Broadway)

No reply from the Mayor. Damn it all to Hell! Doesn't anybody appreciate art anymore? Man, I bet if Jimmy/James Green was mayor, he'd be all over this idea like a frat kid on a porn star
.
Come to think of it, what I should have said to the Mayor was, "Hey Sam, the cops know your van by now, so I bet you're looking for a safer injection site. Tell you what: give me three large for The Carpse, and I'll even smoke the windows for you. P.S. Only call my pager!!!"

Running out of options here. It's 9:30 a.m. and this morning my wife said I have to dump the car by day's end. To prove that she meant business, before she left for work, she packed my suitcase and left it by the front door. "Hegan, I'll be back at five sharp," she warned. "If I come back to see that junker still rotting at the curb, you're going to walk around the block three times but only come back twice. Got it?"

Hmmm...what if I remove the licence plates and abandon the car where it lies? It's not like they could trace it back to me. Actually, that's not true. When I first took ownership, the Feds made me tell them the serial number that's etched into the driver-side doorframe. I suppose I could scrape it off, but I'm hardly handy, and the only tool around this house is me.

I know! DIY means "do it yourself,"not "do it myself," right? So I'll charge people ten bucks to sledgehammer the bejesus out of it. People will have to bring their own sledgehammer, of course, and I'll make extra sure they flatten the serial number. Hell, I could probably charge people five bucks just to watch.

To sweeten the deal, I'll paint the faces of Gordon Campbell, George Bush and Stephen Harper on the doors and hood, and maybe our weird Inuit-y Olympic mascot that looks like a retarded goalie walking like an Egyptian. I bet that kind of political violence would be a hit on Commercial Drive. Not that anybody on the Drive has two spare nickels to bang together. Also, I'm no expert, but it probably takes at least an afternoon to make really bad East Van street theatre.

Early afternoon. Palms are sweaty. Desperate for salvation, I hop on the web and Google "how to get rid of your Vancouver car for scrap." My first hit is AirCare's Scrap-It Program, aimed at getting older, high-polluting vehicles off the road. By trading in your gas-guzzling beast, you can get $1,000 toward a new hybrid, $750 towards a new guzzler and up to $750 towards an electric bicycle, vanpool or carpool, plus cash incentives for bikes and TransLink passes. Sweet!

I'm about to sign up when I see the fine print: "Remember all vehicles being scrapped must be driven to the recycling yard." Damn. If I had just a few more hours, I'd saw a hole in the floorboards and literally run my car across the finish line Freddy Flintstone-style. The next ad that I find online is:

!@ WANTED FOR CASH @!
YOUR DEAD, CRASH-TESTED
OR UNWANTED VEHICLES!!
SCRAP Cars, Vans, Pick-Ups
No Whls No Prob. Hiab Equipt.
HONEST ENGINES
604-580-4715 or Cell-323-4485
honest_engines@shaw.ca

I call them up and talk to Charlie, who says that, on a good week, Honest Engines hauls off 10 cars to the scrapyard. They're a small company that used to do bigger business. Three years back, Charlie used to drag off four cars a day. However, competition is stiff right now because the price of scrap metal is high. Charlie says he can get anywhere from $90 to $135 a ton at a scrap metal place. The scrap metal place then trucks or barges it to Tacoma, where the car is ground down and put on a boat to China, Japan or Korea.

"Then it comes back as a Hyundai, microwave, or cheap Chinese tools," says Charlie. "We're a tiny cog in the world economy."

Speaking of which, business is slow because Honest Engines can't afford to pay for a fancy Yellow Pages ad. He sounds so sad about the competition, I feel sorry for him. But then I remember that (a) my wife is going to kick my ass if I don't dump this thing, and (b) I'm 1/16th Inuit so his company's name kind of bugs me. So I Google again and find:

I see them everywhere. On your lawn with grass growing out of the windshield. Isn't it time to get rid of that Scrap Car?
Call Scrap Happy Cars and I'll come take it away for you. 604-719-3811.

Not bad, not bad. But picking up cars sounds like more of a hobby than a career, plus he didn't mention the all-important $$$$. I search again and get:

ALWAYS THE BEST!!
Car and Truck Removal, Copper
Aluminum, etc. 604-376-7012.
$$ CASH FOR MOST $$

Good enough for me. So I call them up and talk to a nice fella who says he'll send a flatbed truck over tout de suite, and pay a nominal fee to boot. Sure enough, 20 minutes later I'm watching the guy's thick-necked son, Adam, slowly winching the Carpse onto his flatbed. I know it sounds like I'm making this up, but it really does start to rain as I watch the back wheels bounce over the leaves and the garbage and the dead animals that once used my car for shelter.

I sign over the ownership papers. Adam explains that he got to me so quickly because business is slow today. Normally they'd be hauling off at least eight beaters a day.

Then Adam hands me ten bucks, waves out the window and drives my Carpse off to the slaughterhouse. I stand alone there for a moment, and suddenly I feel a tug. A tear slides down my cheek. On the one hand, I've saved my marriage with just minutes to spare. On the other hand, it feels like I'm in the terminal ward, and I've pulled the plug on a good friend who used to give me free rides, and who only broke down when I was in a hurry.

And while it's the death of an era and the end of a friendship, on the bright side it's also the start of a rust-red toaster in some god-forsaken Korean sweatshop. Toast on, my friend, toast on.

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