I realized I was the victim of a crime en route to a baby music class. Said baby was happily strapped into her car seat. We were only running a few minutes late. Things were going smoothly, for once. I put my key into the ignition and turned.
Nothing could have prepared me for the sound that followed. A dying, sputtering, desperate sort of sound, accompanied by every warning light on my dashboard flashing at once. I turned the car off. It had finally happened. Someone had stolen my catalytic converter.
The first time I heard about catalytic converters was eight years ago. Freshly arrived in LA, I was doing what everyone does when they first get here: hiking up to the observatory in Griffith Park, which is a fun weekend activity where you basically walk straight up the side of a mountain. As I huffed and puffed, one of the people I was with told me about their new relationship. I could tell from the way they were talking about the relationship it was not going to end well (it did not) but in a sidebar they mentioned this person’s catalytic converter was recently stolen.
As my acquaintance began to dive into the complications of the person they were seeing being newly separated from their celebrity spouse (I really was in LA now, wasn’t I?) I tuned out to log information that seemed like one day it would be relevant: there are things called catalytic converters, and they can be stolen. I vowed two things that day: not to get involved with fresh divorcees and to protect my catalytic converter at all costs. Hypothetical, in both cases, because I wasn’t dating and didn’t have a car, but better safe than sorry.
What is a catalytic converter? It’s something in your car that connects to something else in your car and without it your car sounds like it’s in actual physical pain, even though you know intuitively that your car is an inanimate object and can’t feel pain. It also costs lots of money to replace because it contains valuable metals that people like to steal for money because there’s nothing new in human history, not even once.
At the time it was stolen, my car was parked right in front of my apartment, visible from my bedroom window. I had heard horrific sounds on the street the past few nights (sounds like people cutting things out of the bottom of cars) and thought to myself, “Hm, I wonder if people are stealing catalytic converters.” This is what we call “intuition.”
I called my husband (luckily not a messy divorcee when we met, so I at least kept one promise to my younger self) who gave me a hug and the keys to his car. We arrived at baby music class late, but we were there. “Did we just wake up from a nap?” she asked the baby and I, holding a guitar and smiling. I said, “No, we just got our catalytic convertor stolen.” “Aw,” she said, blank faced, and then sang a jaunty rendition of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” Life goes on.
The next morning, in the pouring rain, a tow truck took my car to my mechanic, who as previously relayed, is basically my spiritual advisor at this point. He assured me he would be able to replace it and submit the claim to my insurance company. There are things you can do, apparently, to deter it from get stolen again but life (like street parking) has no guarantees. Ask not for whom the car sputters and screams, it screams for thee.