The Monte Carlo Story

Spring semester: day twenty-seven

This is my car. I love my car.


As most of you know, it is a 1996 Monte Carlo Z34, 3.4L DOHC V6, 215hp engine, automatic transmission. Super-fast, despite a large number of cosmetic and a few mechanical issues. I call it "The Decepticon," as it sports a large Decepticon logo on the hood. I also refer to it as a "she," because, after all, I'm a guy and this car is my baby.

I have owned this car since last June, when I purchased it for $500 (the last of my tax refund money from last year). She is one of the few things I own outright, and one of the few things that nobody can ever take from me. Since I bought her, she has been incredibly reliable for a car of her age and a car with her problems (she needs new spark plugs, an oil change, new tires, a coolant flush, etc etc). I have put over 3,000 miles on her since June, almost all miles from driving back and forth to school every day.

And as of last night, I was pretty sure she was trying to commit ritual seppuku.

I will tell this story to you now, of course, but I will also preface it (because I know I haven't written here in a long time) with the fact that I've had a lot of personal ups and downs in my life over the past few weeks, and that's why I haven't written here. Honestly, however, I've been incredibly happy for the past several days, with no signs of that happiness and contentment going away anytime soon. I'm telling you this because I don't want my readers (who are mostly my family and friends) to worry about me. I'm wonderful. Just worry about the car.

Anyway.

Yesterday was a typical Tuesday. Got up, drove to school, taught my classes, fulfilled my office hours and went to class, and came home. The coming home was the really bad part.

It's approximately 24 miles from my driveway to the parking lot at Flat State University and vice versa, give or take a tenth of a mile or so. It's a straight-stretch drive for 90% of it, up and down Interstate 135. While I do like to speed a little (yes, I admit this), the drive isn't particularly taxing on the car. At least I don't think so, anyway. She's been a daily driver with no real issues since June, even with her problems.

About halfway home last night, I noticed that my lights were dimmer than usual. As in, at about half-power. That's not a good thing, I thought. Then, on my dashboard, the "volts" light came on. Oh, so not good. This had never happened before in all the months I've been driving the car on a daily or almost-daily basis.

Almost immediately, the car began to overheat. Quickly. A lot. Like, the temperature gauge redlined within three or four minutes, and the "hot" light lit up on my dashboard too. Shit. Shitshitshit.

I pulled off at the nearest exit and parked on the side of a gravel country road. I was easily ten or eleven miles from home, still, at this point. I turned the car off completely and popped the hood. The car's cooling fan was still running even though the car was off, as some vehicles have that running automatically even with the car off to cool down the engine until it reaches a certain temperature (it does kick off after a while, obviously). I was shaking. I was scared. I've never had this happen in a car I've been driving. Something was quite obviously wrong, because even in the extreme temperatures of last summer -- close to 110 every day -- the car never overheated. Ever. In fact, she barely had the temperature gauge run higher than about 150 or so, and that was on the super-hot days.

I waited for the fan to kick off, pacing back and forth at the side of the car, examining my options in my head. There's a rest stop seven miles from my house, and it was two or three miles away from me at that point. If I could get it running again and it started heating up really bad that quickly, I could stop there, call a towing service from one of their phone books (one of the only remaining places on the planet where phone books are still really, really useful), and get a tow to a shop and a ride home. But, more than anything else, I wanted the car to make it home. Just so that no matter what else happened, at least I'd be home and could deal with it from there, in my natural environment, where I could take care of things myself.

I started the car again after about ten minutes of waiting. She fired up immediately with no problem, the lights were strong, and the "volts" and "hot" lights were off. She seemed normal.

For about a minute or so.

Then the "volts" light came back on and the lights dimmed again. I turned her around in an attempt to get back onto the interstate, only to find that my power steering was intermittently going in and out as well. This was not good. However, she had cooled down, and wasn't overheating yet. So, I put my faith in her and got back on the interstate. And I drove very, very slowly. Like, 45 or so. She slowly heated up again, but not to the redline. Power steering kept going in and out. Accelerator wouldn't send a lot of power to the engine, and when it did it felt like it was in rolling spurts of short bursts of energy. Her temperature didn't begin to redline again until I was past the rest area, and when it did, I let her coast for a few hundred yards until the "hot" light went back off. Once I was past the rest area, there wasn't really any turning back -- Newton was about four miles away, and I always get off at the first Newton exit. I kept her speed really low, kept her between 45 and 55 most of the time, just coasting sometimes but desperately trying to get to town. It was the longest and most frantic, palpitation-inducing four miles of driving I've ever done.

Finally, I got her to the Newton exit, got her off the road, and onto the city streets, heart beating really fast in fear, saying things like Fuckfuckfuckfuck over and over under my breath like some sort of automotive mantra. A few moments later, as I was desperately trying to go as slowly, yet as quickly, as possible to get home, the "hot" light turned off again. I crept down the city streets until I made it home, going about 20 the entire way. When I pulled into my driveway, I felt so much relief. So much. I'd made it home. No matter what problems the car had, I'd made it home. I immediately turned her off and popped the hood again, so that her overheating engine could cool down. The automatic fan ran for about ten minutes after the car was off, during which time I checked the coolant levels (seemed fine) and added a little more, also adding the rest of a quart of oil to the engine as well in hopes that would help. Nothing under the hood looked amiss -- no smoking, nothing appeared to be broken, no belts appeared to be off-track or off-kilter. The engine, for all intents and purposes, looked normal. Yes, it smelled hot, but that's because it was hot. But then again, it was dark. And it's hard to see anything under my balcony (where I park the car) when it's dark, even with the outside lights on. So, to my view, everything appeared normal.

Once I was sure the car wasn't going to burst into flames or anything like that, I went inside. I was, well, shaken, for lack of a better term. My heart was beating very fast in nervousness and fear, and I was really twitchy. I wanted to know what was wrong with my car. And now that I was home, my head started going through all sorts of possible scenarios.

By the way, if you own one, never Google "monte carlo + overheating + volts" because the results will absolutely make you ten times more paranoid.

Anyway, I knew that whatever was wrong with my babycar (yes, I call her my "babycar," stop looking at me like that) had to be serious. This wasn't an isolated incident. It was something that had to immediately be taken care of. Almost at once, I emailed my students and told them my office hours would be canceled today. I also emailed those in charge of various sections of departments or classes at school and told them I would be unable to make it in. I knew, instinctively, that whatever was wrong wasn't going to be able to be fixed in the span of a few hours, so I would most certainly miss class and not even go to campus at all today.

After that was done, I talked to two friends and told them what was going on, and one of them suggested that it might be a belt issue, because she'd just had that fixed on her car and it was giving her much the same symptoms out of the blue. If one of the bigger belts goes out, apparently it'll screw the entire car's mechanisms. Hm. Strange. I mean, it makes sense of course, but because of the "volts" light being on, I was worried about the battery a little as well as the alternator possibly being the culprit. Of the two, I was more worried about the alternator. The battery, at least, I know is new. The car's previous owner had put a new battery into the car less than a month before I purchased it. So that left the alternator as a possible culprit, along with the aforementioned belt(s).

I did not, of course, want it to be the alternator -- though that would generally be a simple fix. Alternators are expensive, in case you didn't know. On specialized models of cars like mine -- the Z34 version of the Monte Carlo -- they tend to be even more expensive. The belts are at least cheap and fairly easy to replace, and they should be replaced every once in a while anyway.

So, after that was done, around 10PM, I began Googling auto repair places in town. There are only two that do any substantial engine work, which I figured is what I needed. The first one I took the car to about a month after I bought it, and they told me that it was going to be $400 to get spark plugs replaced. Both of them have online contact forms/requests for service appointments, which was the only way I could reach them between 10PM and the morning -- and possibly have an appointment waiting for me as soon as I woke up. So, I contacted both of them. I was fully prepared to have to spend $1,000 on this car to fix it, even though I only paid $500 for it. I would not have had a choice -- living alone in Newton and making graduate student money, I simply cannot quickly buy a new car, and I must have a working vehicle that will get me from home to Wichita and back three (sometimes four) days a week. Because of this I also sent one of those "possible desperate pleas for money" emails to my parents, even though at this point all of my readers should know how much I absolutely hate asking anyone for help, even though I know most people in my life would provide it very quickly if they knew I was in need. Most of all, I hate begging my parents for anything. They raised me, they provided for me for so many years that I feel really guilty about it. I'm almost thirty years old, and it makes me feel like a huge leech or mooch.

Then I stayed up really late, knowing I didn't have to go in this morning, and finally fell asleep -- taking my phone to bed with me in case I were to receive a call from one of the body shops. I found a third one and sent them an email when I awoke around 10, as well, making my morning coffee and trying to wake up. The events of the car trip home last night seemed so long ago, so far away, yet I still knew I had to deal with it today. Which sucked, but still.

Around 11 or so I got a reply email from the third body shop I contacted. I never heard back from the others, by the way. The tech told me that by the symptoms, it sounded like I'd blown a belt, or that one had come loose and was flapping about, and could possibly be the one which ran the water pump (which would explain why the car was overheating). He set up an appointment for 2PM and told me to bring it in; if that was the problem, he could more than likely fix it today. This, of course, made me ecstatic, regardless of how much the repairs might have ended up costing me. So, I took a shower and got dressed, and went downstairs to leave around 1:10 or so.

Here, of course, was the real test. I still did not know what was wrong with the car, at all. In fact, I didn't even know if it would start, much less make the four miles or so to the repair shop. For all I knew, if it were the alternator, I could turn the key and nothing would happen whatsoever. If I had blown yet another spark plug instead, it could be just as bad. It could start up, run fine for half the trip to the shop, and then die on me in the middle of Newton's main street. If I'd blown a head gasket, then the rest of the drive home probably did damage enough. All sorts of different scenarios were running through my mind, is what I'm saying -- I wasn't sure what would or could happen.

I started the car. She started just fine, just like normal. And no lights came on the dashboard. This was a plus. I paused for a moment, and as my hand left the wheel to shift the car into reverse, the "volts" light came on again. Well, here goes nothing, I thought. Let's just get her there and see what they say.

I drove carefully, slowly, through downtown Newton, hitting what seemed to be every stoplight. Of course, this made me super-apprehensive, especially as with each stoplight and the longer the car was running, the temperature gauge slowly crept up a little further. Also, of course, the power steering wasn't working at all after I backed out of the driveway, which made the drive that much more harrowing.

I did make it, though, in about fifteen minutes, with the temperature gauge slightly to the right of the halfway point -- nowhere near overheating, but still much hotter than the car normally runs. I parked, went inside, and gave them my information before handing over the key and sitting in the waiting room for about an hour while they evaluated things. Occasionally I would flip through one of the many magazines there, but it was just me and nobody else. Every once in a while someone who seemed to be one of the shop's "regular customers" came in, made small talk with the manager guy who had emailed me and had been working with me, and then left.

I also noticed that it looked to be a rather high-end repair shop -- not only did I see a pristine 1968 Ford Galaxie 500, but another guy was having his DeTomaso Pantera worked on. No, I'm not kidding. I've also never seen one of those in person until today. Who would've guessed that someone in Newton owned one? They're pretty rare cars.

Finally, he came out and told me "Well, we figured out what's wrong with your car..."

"Oh?" I asked. "How bad is it?"

"Well, like I thought before," he said, "it was indeed a belt problem."

This made me relieved. By a lot. The rest of the conversation followed as such, to the best of my memory:

"But it's not just the belt, it's the serpentine belt, and the belt tensioner. The belt tensioner went bad -- it burned out completely. It got hot, and melted the belt itself."

Okay, that's bad, but not incredibly, kill-the-car bad.

"Anyway," he continued, "Since that belt turns pretty much everything, nothing inside the engine was moving. That's why the car was overheating; the water pump wasn't running, and why your power steering was out. The good news is that it's not really expensive and it's pretty easy to fix once we take out the old tensioner and put in a new one, but..."

He paused. I got the feeling that the other shoe was about to drop here any second now.

"Well, you have the 3.4L engine. The only one we have is for the 3.1L engine in those model years, and we've checked...there's not a single one in town."

At this point I knew yep, my classes are going to be canceled tomorrow. No doubt.

"However, we're getting one brought one in here, and we'll be able to put it on tomorrow. We move things really fast here; we don't like to make people wait on their vehicles any longer than they have to. If we had the part today we could put it on now and you could drive 'er home."

Through the plate window behind him, I could see the mighty Decepticon in the garage with her hood up, and a tech installing what looked like a new belt already.

"That's great," I said. "What a relief. I didn't know what it was. To me, it could've been anything from a bad alternator to a blown head gasket. I've just never had that happen to a car I was driving before, so I apologize if I seemed a little too nervous before or a little too relieved now compared to some of your other customers."

"Oh no, it's okay. If it were an alternator, we'd be looking at about $800 worth of parts and labor. Especially on a car like yours, because the alternator on yours is waaaaay back underneath everything else. You almost have to take apart the entire engine to get to it."

As an aside, I may have mentioned here before that the engine in my Monte Carlo is widely considered to be one of the absolute worst engineering designs in GM's history. To fit an engine that size and that powerful (again, 215hp) under that car's hood, GM sacrificed a lot of accessibility in order to cram it all in. Hence why the battery is underneath the washer fluid tank, and the washer fluid tank has to be completely detached and removed to change the battery, then replaced. It's a pretty reliable engine -- I mean, look at mine, with 220k+ miles on it -- but it's just an awful design, and really hard to work on for even most regular maintenance, like spark plugs.

"But no," he went on, "your alternator is fine, and this won't be that expensive to fix -- but still expensive. We're looking at $287.09 here."

The first words out of my mouth were, seriously, "Are you serious? That's fantastic!" which I'm sure shocked him a little, judging by the look on his face. "No, seriously," I continued, "I was expecting this to be something like $800 or $900 to fix, so I'm glad it's not that bad. That's a relief."

Mind you, $287.09 is not a small amount of money, especially when I have to pay the rent this week as well, and just paid my credit card bill and cable bill earlier this week. And it is an unexpected expense that, just a little over a month ago, would've been my death knell. Right now, however? If it puts my car back on the road and keeps it running with no other major problems for the moment? I'll take what I can get. I'll pay it and deal with it. My Monte Carlo is my lifeline and I desperately need it to last me at least until I graduate, if possible. After that, I don't know what/where I'll be in life, but I need it at least for that year-and-change I have left. So I'll do whatever I can to keep her running, piece by piece. If she needs a belt and belt tensioner, then that's what she gets. I do still have to do all of the other work on her as well, but right now that's not really an option until I get my tax refunds. Believe me, a very large chunk of those will be sunk into car repairs and upkeep.

I thanked him, shook his hand, and waited for a free tech to give me a ride home. I pick up the car tomorrow and pay the bill. How I'll get back up there remains to be seen; the tech said if they had the ability to let him go for a few minutes, he could come back and pick me up again. If not, it looks like I'll be getting about four miles' worth of walking exercise tomorrow when it's done and I can pay the bill and take her home.

But, of course, who knows when that will be. Once I got back home (which is weird to look at without a Monte Carlo in the driveway or garage for once) I canceled my classes for tomorrow via email, and later this evening I sent an email to the office admins in case they wanted to put signs on the doors of my classrooms in the morning, just in case not all of my students check their email. They usually do. I hate canceling my classes, but there's enough wiggle room in the spring semester to where I can move a few things around a little bit and keep them all on the same page. It wasn't until I'd done this to where I realized I could've just emailed my officemate and asked him to do the same thing, as he teaches in the same building -- if not the same room I do -- at 8AM. But oh well. I still want to go by the book for everything, lest anything happen. It's very, very rare that I cancel any of my classes on the spur of the moment. I think this is only the second time I've had to do so since I've been a GTA, and the first was because I was deathly ill with a sinus/ear infection close to the end of my first semester.

Of course, I missed my editing class today, too. I asked my friends to get extra copies of the handouts/reading assignment for me, so that I can play a little catch-up when I get the chance, but I have no clue if anyone did. If they did, they haven't told me. Oh well. Can't do much about it until I get back to campus next week.

So that's the Monte Carlo story. It could've been a lot worse, but as it is, it wasn't that great. Still, I'm grateful that it wasn't a blown head gasket or blown alternator, which would've cost a lot more. And I think the situation probably raised my blood pressure by a good ten points or more over the past day or so. But, on the good side (due to canceled classes), I get to extend my weekend a few days longer than it normally would be, and I have a lot of plans for this weekend. There's a lot of work that must be done around the house, the weather's been gorgeous (high today? 73, at the highest I saw it here), and I can get a little relaxation time in.

By the way, next week I don't have any classes of my own. Both of them have been canceled due to the AWP Conference going on next week, a conference which about 80% of the department (no kidding) is attending. So, all I will have to be there for are the little things like my office hours and Writing Center hour, practicum, etc. Oh, and teaching my classes, of course. Less time on campus every day makes me happy, and I'm already becoming pretty happy in my life right now -- despite things like the car problems.