A Butterfly Flaps its Wings

It was the summer of '91, I was a grad student in Blacksburg, Va and I had just bought my first car - a 1984 Nissan Sentra. It didn't have a cassette deck (CDs were a luxury) and so I invested in one, but being a starving (ok, maybe not actually starving) student, I hooked it up myself. Some of the wiring was a tad confusing, but it seemed to work. Soon after, I was taking a couple of friends on an outing and the guy in the back seat comments, "Hey, how come your rear speakers are not working?" Innocent enough? Maybe, but that little comment lead to a car break-in, being shot at, almost going to court, a broken window, and a shattered windshield. Far fetched? Not so much...

I, of course jumped to the conclusion that I must not have wired something correctly. I yanked out the deck from the dashboard and started connecting wires that were hanging loose. At one point there was a crackle and I noticed that my clock was no longer working - I had shorted it out. A bit disappointing, but I ploughed on. Very soon there was another crackle and the deck, my brand new Pioneer Cassette deck, was no longer operational. Now that hurt. But, its not without reason that I am the designated customer service negotiator - I called the company and they agreed to repair it. I sent it in and was now without any kind of music system - not even radio.

Now, not having a music system was ok for tooling around Blacksburg, but the following weekend we were heading out on a 200 mile drive to an amusement park. A friend had a small boom box that he often took in his (equally ancient) car and he offered to lend me the same. It had a cigarette lighter adapter and so, we were all set. We even taped it to the dashboard so that nobody had to hold it all the time. Road trip was great and we returned late in the night and I went to bed without cleaning out my car. The next morning (a Sunday), a friend called to say that there appeared to be broken glass near my car. I ran down and sure enough, somebody had broken my car window in order to steal the $20 boom box. Now I not only had to replace my friend's boom box, but I also had get a new window. Thankfully, the thief had very considerately broken the rear window which didn't slide and so was not as expensive to fix as the front ones. I was able to find a replacement at a junk yard, but that plus the install put me $100 in the hole.

A week later, my 'repaired' Pioneer deck came back. I headed back down to install it, but it still wasn't working. Their note in the shipping package explicitly said that they had tested it. I was stumped - I knew next to nothing about cars and didn't know what to do next. Somebody then suggested looking at the fuses. I didn't know cars had fuses. I looked and sure enough one of them was blown - that was the second crackle I had heard. The clock was really gone, but the deck had never shorted. I changed fuses and now I had my deck working again. After all the hassle, I couldn't care less about the rear speakers not working, which had started this whole chain of events.

Well, the clock was still broken and after my first experience with junk yards I thought I would call around and see if somebody had a replacement for the clock. Sure enough, one of them did. He gave me directions and I headed off, with coincidentally, the same two friends in the car. Blacksburg is in a pretty rural part of Virginia and once you get outside of town, it becomes hilly billy country pretty soon. The directions were hard to follow and we were soon lost on some country road. At one point we decided to head back and in order to make a U-turn I had to turn into the driveway of a farm house. We noticed a couple of kids playing in the yard. As I started driving away, my rear windshield turned opaque and my friend in the rear seat started yelling, "Drive, drive!" I gunned the engine and left the place in a hurry. My friend exclaimed, "We were shot!" Yup, one of the kids had taken a shot at us and hit the rear windshield. We had noticed the guns in the kids hands, but had thought nothing of it. We drove home gingerly and after some debate, called the cops. Now, this is the deep south and here we were, students from India accusing a couple of white kids of having shot at us. We didn't even know exactly where the house was. The officer took our report and headed out to investigate.

He called me back a while later and said that he had indeed located the house and yes, there were kids playing with a BB gun and yes, they had seen a blue car turn around and leave in a hurry, but no, they had not taken a shot at the car. The kids dad claimed that he was there the whole time and he had seen it all. All I wanted was for the guy to pay for the windshield, but he was not budging. The cop said I could press charges, but it had to go to juvenile court since the kids were underage. I decided I should try, at least in the hope that the dad would settle out of court and pay for my windshield. The courts were in the next town (Christiansburg) and I started making weekly trips there. I was getting no traction - the cop seemed sympathetic, but he was pretty frank - he said the chances of me prevailing in juvie court were slim. Then if I lost, I may have to pay the expenses of the other side too. And maybe they would counter sue for a false charge. I could read between the lines - the word of 3 foreigners did not count for much against that of two white kids in that part of the country. The trips were getting painful - I had to schedule them around my classes and I was still driving with a plastic sheet in place of the rear windshield. In the end I gave up and paid for the replacement on my own. This was again from a junk yard and while it fit well, the defrost wiring did not work. Kind of a pain in the winter. I was out another $150, not to count all the aggravation and stress of the court house visits. My clock was still busted and my rear speakers were still silent.

It was several weeks later and a I had helped a friend do some India shopping. He was unloading stuff from my trunk and commented casually, "So how come you don't have rear speakers?" I responded, that of course I had rear speakers - the speaker meshes were clear visible behind the rear seats - but that they didn't work. He invited me to check for myself and as I stuck my head into the trunk I realized that he was correct: there were no speakers. There was the mesh, but no speakers below them. All this while I had been trying to coax sound from non-existent speakers. The thought occurred to me that I could saved myself some trouble if the audiophile had never ridden in my rear seat. Or maybe, the story I got from it is worth it?