Repairs to Simone to top $600
BY LORENZO WILLIAMSTON
IMPERIAL CITY HERALD
HAMPTON — When T.R.’s mother left him a voicemail saying that she had bad news, he automatically knew it was about Simone-Camille Crystal.
“Essentially every time she calls with bad news when I don’t have one of my cars, it’s about my car,” he said. “I just wasn’t expecting it to be $600 worth of bad news.”
For parts alone, the repairs — a new radiator and head gasket — will cost R and his mother over $600. This doesn’t bother R at all, though.
“$600 is a lot for a 15-year-old car but it’s cheaper than getting a new one. Besides, this is the first problem Simone has had that wasn’t directly my fault. It was my fault that all the fuses blew last spring; it was my fault that the hood shattered the windshield … well my brother-in-law is part of the blame for that. I broke the trunk latch a few years ago before the car was even mine and had to pay to get that fixed. My radio shorted out a few weeks ago when I had the windows down during a hurricane. Come to think of it, almost every time I touched this car, I broke something on it.”
Is R a jinx on his car? That probably isn’t the case this time as the problem started with an un-flushed radiator.
In the eight years that Crystal plied the streets of Baltimore, Md., and later St. Mary’s County, Md., before coming to Hampton, Va., it appears that no one ever bothered to even check to see if the radiator needed to be flushed. Over time, rust and other nasty things began to clog the cooling system. During his trip to Prices Fork and Imperial City, Va., R pushed Crystal to the limit.
“After I found out what the problem was, I can see why she broke down,” R said. “It was like I forced a middle aged man with clogged arteries to run a marathon.”
While traveling down Interstate 81 Oct. 14, a large chunk of rust was propelled through the system, the thermostat fell apart and, at some point during the over 300 mile trip home, the head gasket couldn’t take it any longer.
“I barely made it out of the first set of mountains when things started to break,” R said. “I nearly got stuck in this town called Independence but some mechanics in a neighboring city called Galax fixed Simone enough to get me home. I had a little bit of doubts at first but I knew that Simone would get me home. She’s a good car.”
Crystal is now in intensive care at Langley Park. Due to R reaching the point in the semester where he generally runs out of money, the repairs cannot be made until January 2005. Until then, R is driving his mother’s car, Samantha Acclaim Plymouth.
“My mom’s retired now,” R said. “She only goes as far as my sister’s house, the neighborhood Food Lion and sometimes Farm Fresh. Our mechanic said that Simone can make it that far. She can probably do more, in my opinion. She got me back here, didn’t she?”
This, ladies and gentlemen and writers for The Captain’s Log, is how you write a news feature. This particular headline was chosen because you all should know who Simone is since she’s been mentioned before in this Web log. If this were to go in a newspaper, it couldn’t have that assumption unless my car was mentioned fairly recently in the paper. In a real news story, you ALWAYS get someone’s last name. Mine isn’t here because of my name policy (although 75-80% of anyone reading this should know the last names of anyone mentioned here anyway). I think that it courtesy to have some semblance (word of the week) of privacy of people who didn’t personally elect to be talked about on the Internet for everyone to see.If you’re a reporter and you introduce yourself as such, all bets are off but there’s a lot of legal technicalities you should know about that I’m not explaining here.
