Yesterday was a beautiful day to wash my beloved Pup Bug, the fire-engine red ’79 convertible VW Super Beetle that has given me so much joy over the last five years. I hosed it down, taking particular pleasure in watching the black streams of dust and soot as they poured over the car’s bubbly contours and drained away in the gutter. Soaped up a sponge and started rubbing the shine back into my favorite toy.
That’s when I noticed it. A 6-inch wide, half-inch deep horizontal dent at the base of the boot cover, the equivalent of the tip of your nose. Front and center, like it had been punched in the face.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a garage. One of the most disheartening aspects of owning the Pup Bug is watching from my window as inconsiderate assholes try to parallel park near it, usually with the subtlety of a frazzled monkey. Because the Pup Bug has extended rear and front bumpers, I usually don’t have to worry, although it is entirely possible that some idiot could hit one of them hard enough to punch it back into the body.
This dent, however, was created by a car that is much taller than the Pup Bug, with a bumper whose bottom is above the top of mine. We’ll call the offending car — oh, I don’t know — a goddamned SUV?
To create a dent that wide and deep you would have to have backed into the Pup Bug at something along the lines of 5 m.p.h, or you would have had to made contact with the car and then gunned the engine while still in reverse. It is unlikely, unless you are blind, deaf, and retarded, that you would have been unaware of causing that kind of damage.
However it was done, the person who did it is one of millions of inconsiderate (or perhaps just sloppy and incompetent) assholes who should be killed. Painfully and in public, preferably under the wheels of their own cars. Jerks.
