04/23/03’s illustrious band:

The Green Albatross

Brought to you by a boy and his pickup.

Once upon a time, I was married to a guy I shall refer to as El Pendejo. (Spanish speakers will note that this is not an affectionate nickname.) While we did not have children together, we did have vehicles, and that’s where the story gets ugly. Well, one of the places where it gets ugly.

When EP and I split three years ago, he got custody of the green pickup. Things went OK for a while, with him making payments on his wheels and me on mine. But about this time last year, he started missing payments. Lots of them. Big ones. Since both our names were on the loan, the bank helped itself to the missing funds from the next best account. That happened to be MY account, and I was not notified in advance that this would be happening. So imagine my surprise, and my vocabulary, when I awoke one morning to find a couple grand missing.

Yeah. Once I returned from orbit, I placed a sharply worded phone call to EP. After much hemming and hawing, he admitted that he’d known this day was coming, and he was very sorry, but he didn’t have the money to pay me back. However, he was “working on” the problem. I know him well enough to know that “working on” means “studiously ignoring,” but he at least got his parents to reimburse me for the missed payments.

EP could not come up with a plan to meet his obligations, and another payment got missed, so I made my next call to his parents. Normally I wouldn’t hold parents responsible for the actions of a man in his mid-30s, but they had made the mistake, when we split, of saying, “If there’s ever anything we can do for you, just ask.” So I asked.

In the end, after much more hemming and hawing, the Mother and Father P decided to buy the pickup from their son and make the payments. Father P figured he could use the truck in his part-time landscaping business. They took out a loan, sent me the title to sign, and all was quiet.

Until tax time this spring. I opened up my state tax refund check to find it a couple hundred dollars light, along with a note stating that the corresponding amount had been “reclaimed” by the Department of Revenue. The parties requesting the reclamation were collection agencies.

I knew right away where to trace this new trouble to, since I’ve never had a collection agency after me in my life. Working the phones revealed that several unpaid parking tickets had accrued to a certain green pickup with a certain familiar license plate number, and since my name was on the truck’s title, the claimants tapped my tax refund.

What? My name on the title?! But I had sold that truck six months ago!

Several more calls later, I learned that the title had not actually been transferred. So I sent a very strongly worded letter to Mother P telling her who to call, what to do and how much to reimburse me. Again. A month passed with no results, during which time I cursed the whole clan for irresponsible good-for-nothings, so I resent my “request” via registered mail. And I added a warning that if they didn’t take care of business post haste, I would reclaim my property.

Mother P finally called back to say that she’d sent me a check, a copy of the now-transferred title, and a letter of explanation immediately upon receipt of my first letter, so if it was lost, she’d resend. But then it turned up in a stack of office mail (since I didn’t want to give them my home address) that had been delivered just a couple days ago. And her second envelope reached my desk an hour later. Good ol’ mailroom!

In her letter, Mother P referred to the pickup as a green albatross that has caused nothing but trouble since she became involved with it. (Yeah, one could say the same thing about certain of her offspring.) Her loan officer had screwed up on the sales tax, leaving her with an unpleasant surprise later on, and he had also failed to carry out the title transfer, resulting in my tax reclamation problem. Also, the truck turned out to need several thousand dollars’ worth of repairs before Father P could reliably use it in his business. On top of that, Grandmother P had recently passed away. Plus, EP’s sister, after briefly escaping an abusive marriage, abruptly decided to return to it and cut off all contact with the family. So it hasn’t exactly been happy fun time at the P house.

I’m still peeved at the mishandling of the affair, but I felt sorry enough for Mother P to send her a sympathy note. She at least seems to be trying to behave well, but she sure isn’t getting any help.

Anyway, I hope that this chapter in my life, and Mother P’s, is finally drawing to a close. Let us all think encouraging thoughts, keep up on our car payments, and learn our lesson about marrying pendejos.

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