Giving Tanks

(This is a continuation of the entry Ain't That A Mother)

I suppose it was the universe’s little joke when I got to the Hertz location at LAX and looked around for my car in the President’s Circle and found waiting for me a vehicle as big as my ego. All of the sass disappeared from my walk and I crumpled like a trailer in a tornado. Suddenly, looming before me was the largest SUV I had ever seen. It was a Lincoln Navigator. It seats seven comfortably. It probably sleeps seven comfortably too. I am pretty sure as a kid I rode on smaller school buses. In a moment of panic, I almost went in to the counter and insisted on a smaller car. However that is always a pain in the ass and they were just being polite trying to upgrade me.

It was just ironic that on my last trip to LA, they gave me a Prius and this time, I was handed the genetic opposite: a thundering thirsty mastodon. Of course, last time it took me thirty minutes and a dutiful scan of the owner’s manual in the parking lot just to figure out how to drive the Prius, so perhaps my issue is not so much the cars they give me, but instead the fact that I am just not a very good driver.

Times have been tough since my heyday in Hollywood and jumbo SUVs have been getting a bad rap. Gas prices have been high, the environment is in a shambles. Just this week, a massive oil spill in the gulf has dominated the news. This is not the moment to tool around town alone in something four times the size of my little convertible at home. I felt self conscious as I drove down the street, the wheels barely fitting inside the white lines on the road. “I’m not an asshole. It’s a rental,” I wanted to call out to what I assumed were astonished locals, shaking their heads in deserved disapproval.