I have weird sleep schedules. So sometimes when my better half, Suzy, is at work, I am asleep for the day.

Low blood pressure makes me groggy and irritable moments after waking so getting a call during sleep usually elicits a short Arin. It was Suzy though, and having called me what seemed like soon after she had left for work, I knew something was up. She said the car was acting weird. A little bit of smoke coming from the hood. I told her I’d try to get Tomar, our roomate, to drive me to pick her up and take a look at the car.

That night that’s exactly what happened, and I took a look at the car. Limited knowledge of it left me without any explanation, especially since it hasn’t had any problems related to smoking car. I had taken it to the shop twice recently, once got major hardware repairs and once for an oil change. Neither said anything about something that would cause the car to overheat or smoke for any reason. I ran it a bit and it didn’t start doing the smoking thing for a while. It did it for a second, and slowly fizzled out. It was really cold out, I figured it was just steam, you know, the vapor from when you breathe out. The temperature gauge on the dashboard was reading as normal.

Home isn’t too far away from where Suzy works, so I decided to drive it home and have it looked at the next day.

It drove fine. About ¾ of the way there, the brakes gave out. It had a hard time starting up from being stopped, and then it started smoking all at once. It was miracle there was a small space right in front of me I could pull into to park on the street. It was also a miracle the brakes suddenly came back. As if my car was giving its its last go to keep me safe.

I got out of the car and looked at the hood, it sure was smoking. Then a little flame. I really couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think that kind of stuff really happened, you know, to a normal car. Maybe formula racers or whatever.

I looked down and saw the entire bottom of the front half of the car was illuminated orange. Instantly I signalled to Suzy and told her to get out. She was on her phone, not paying much attention to what was going on around her until I did this. She told me my face said it all, and she grabbed all of her things and rushed out.

I tell this story now because I want to stress how important this was.

Within seconds the fire had engulfed the entire front half of the car. The windshield shattered under the pressure of the heat, and the fumes from the car were so noxious I wanted to pass out just from being near it. Shortly into the fire, the tires made a terrifying pop and hissing noise. The right tire had blown, tipping the car to the right. I had parked on the curb, and anyone who has had a full car in LA knows the frustration of opening and closing a door over the curb when there are people in it weighing it down. The bottom of the front passenger door dragged along the curb without anyone in it. It was essentially jammed. Can you imagine trying to get out of the car, trapped like that?

If you car is smoking, get out.

I immediately called 911, and having never done so in my life, I was pretty impressed with the efficiency. The conversation went like this.

911: 911 Emergency. Me: My car is on fire, what do I do? 911: Are you in the car? Me: No. 911: I will connect you to the fire department. Like, fucking, 1 second later. Fire: Burbank Fire. Me: My car is on fire. Fire: Where are you? Me: The corner of Providencia and Lake in Burbank. Fire: We will be right there.

It seemed like they took forever, but in reality it was really only 1 or 2 minutes. I was amazed. They parked and immediately started spraying. Two cops plowed through traffic and blocked off both lanes in sync.

It was pretty badass, all tragedy aside.

This event also showed me how silly people can be under stress. I consider Suzy and myself to have reacted pretty normally. I was met with surprise, defeat, and an instant desire to move forward from a bad situation. Suzy was devastated, and I held her in my arms as she cried at the unthinkable. Still though, she took time to take a picture of it with her phone, and to be honest, I wanted to do the same, but I didn’t wanna look silly with this audience of balcony spectators. I’m glad she did, I’m always upset when I don’t catch a big moment on camera because I didn’t think to snap it.

Now, all seriousness aside, here are the funny things that happened.

The first person I interacted with was a young teenager, our conversation went like this:

Kid: What happened?! Me: Uh, my car caught on fire. What else can I say?

He then walked right over to the car, right on the curb besides it, and stared for a second. I was meters away by this point. I didn’t know if cars actually exploded or not. Just seemed like the safe thing to do. He turned back to me and said:

Kid: I’m gunna get our fire extinguisher!

At this point the car was pretty totaled anyway, so I was like, whatever. He ran to a house across the street, and ran back with no fire extinguisher. He yelled to me:

Kid: We didn’t have one! Me: Okay.

Then he stood right next to the car, on the curb, and watched it burn. About 3 feet from it. His mother screamed from her house to get away from the car. Can you believe it took her three shouts for him to finally move?

The Samaritans didn’t stop coming. A group of two twenty-somethings came around the corner and spouted basically the same dialog the first kid spouted, but, instead of telling me they were getting help, they just ran off. I crossed the street and watched from afar, and about a minute later, the twenty-somethings careened back over. One of them was holding a measuring cup filled with something and I soon found out what it was when he tossed it on the unrelenting 12 foot flame and shouted:

Twenty-Something: Hydrogen Peroxide and Baking Soda!!!

like a Dragonball character. It was probably the most pathetic thing I’d ever seen. The mixture he threw kind of wafted away in the wind, while the amount that hit the fire… well you can imagine.

Better still was that after the obvious defeat, his friend shouted:

Friend: What was that?

To which Twenty-Something replied:

Twenty-Something: It’ll put it out!!

Clearly.

In any case, firemen came, fucking destroyed that fire, and then they gave me their awesome heroic warmth and left into the night like a brigade of batmans. It was pretty cool.

Anyway I don’t have a car anymore. NNWHOOPS.