Feaverish

I can’t find my favorite pen, and I’m fairly (20%?) certain one of my coworkers stole it. Leaving aside (for now) the issue of even having a favorite pen in the first place, the whole thing is weird because I rarely have anything stolen. Well, except my bike lights are stolen all the frickin’ time. Like, I stop at a traffic light (sometimes) and by the time the light turns green my bike’s been totally stripped. But I never get anything major stolen.

Actually, our car got stolen a couple of summers ago. Technically, it was stolen one and a half times, but I’ll get to that. Haven’t I told this story before? Maybe not. Okay, kids, gather round. Papa Feaverish has a tale to tell.

It all started in the summer of oh-three. L and I went outside one morning, and noticed our car was gone. Since our neighborhood at the time had a pretty competitive parking situation, we thought maybe we’d had to park the car someplace further away, out of sight. We hadn’t. The car was definitely gone. The police sent an officer to file the report, and he assured us that they’d either find the car in the next few weeks, or not at all. Fabulous!

Also, a friend of ours had had her car stolen a few months before, and when the cops found it a couple of days later it turned out to have been used as a combination drug dispensary and brothel. Best of all, the officer on the scene went through the car item by item asking our friend to claim any items that were hers. “One rubber dildo, approximately, mmm, 12 inches long?” “One tub lube?” “Four pornographic magazines depicting inter-species sex acts?”

So obviously we had a lot to look forward to. We didn’t hear anything for a couple of days, and then L’s bank called to say someone had tried to cash a check apparently written by L, only it looked like they’d erased the word “VOID” in big letters across the check. Ah ha! The check had been used to pay someone’s rent, and a quick call to the landlord (who’d tried to cash the check) gave us the address. I thought perhaps the police should be informed as to this new turn of events, but L, mad with vigilante rage, decided we should go check it out ourselves. Obviously whoever had stolen our car found a voided check in it and tried to use it to pay their rent. L was sure we’d find our car at the address the landlord had given us, so we prowled the area for several sweltering hours in the non-air–conditioned Backupmobile, but couldn’t find our car anywhere. The cops found it a few days later, and besides some drug paraphernalia and several stolen laptops, there wasn’t anything wrong with it.

A few weeks later, L and I went outside to run some errands and our car was once again nowhere to be found. We called the police and told them our car was stolen again. Something didn’t feel right, though, and a few minutes after we’d called the cops we realized that we’d driven to the coffee shop up the street that morning — the coffee shop that we always just walk to — and then walked home afterwards, having totally forgotten that we’d driven.

Well, we all had a good laugh, and then we called the cops back to tell them never mind, the case of the missing car had been solved.

The End