Crime wave

Labor Day weekend my car was spray-painted. Sitting right outside my house, in my nice neighborhood. Fuck Black Cars was the elevated message (silly twits. The car is dark green.) I was moderately miffed when I discovered this little act of vandalism, which was when I went out to make my garbage run on Sunday night (see Note of June 10, 2008). However, the next day, when I went out to wash the offensive message off, I became really disheartened when I discovered it wasn’t written in the egg-based substance I had thought it was (what would make me think such a thing? I suppose because it was yellow), but rather yellow paint. As in difficult to get off, especially off the trunk of the car, without taking the car paint with it.

After realizing this was going to take more than a pan of water with Mr. Clean added, I went back into the house and called the police. Of course there was nothing they would be able to do, but I felt they should be informed. You wouldn’t bother in a big city, where the police are busy with the murders and the rapes and the muggings and the break-ins, but in relatively crime-free small-town Maine, attention was more likely to be paid. Maybe there had been a string of spray-paintings. Maybe I was part of a pattern. Or might be the start of a pattern.

The fellow who came out was 1) my idea of attractive and 2) very nice. Properly sympathetic. “Really nice,” he says with acerbity, of the message. He tells me two things that make me feel a tiny bit better. One is that he’d noticed that a For Sale back up the block had also been spray-painted. And the other is that they’ve occasionally had trouble with this kind of thing when there have been games at the ball field which sits at the end of my street. I had had the uneasy feeling that I might be being singled out, since my car sat right beside the three cars that go with the house next door, all of us with our rear-ends to the street, so equally vulnerable to violation, but only mine was violated. But relief that it probably wasn’t a matter of me having a secret enemy (like my next-door neighbors on the other side? Whose howling, barking dogs, shut up in the house for 10-12 hours a day, I’ve called the police about more than once? The thought did cross my mind...), was almost immediately replaced by the sinking realization that the little creep(s) who did this could do it again, anytime.

However, my immediate problem was the writing on the back window of my car. I really could not be driving around with Fuck Black screaming at people (the Cars part can only be read if you’re standing near the car, looking down at the trunk.) I didn’t know what to use, thought of paint remover – obviously not for the trunk, but maybe for the window? – called first my landlord, to see if he had any, but he wasn’t home (never a landlord when you need one), so called the one of my staff who owns a home, and might possibly have such an item in her possession.

“I have paint thinner,” Barb says. I figure it’s worth a try, so drive to Hallowell (the back way, so as to be viewed by as few cars as possible), to Barb’s house, where she produces a paint scraper she found while waiting for me. The paint scraper actually proves quite efficacious at removing the paint from the window, though it takes a while. So we forget about the paint thinner. Barb digs around in her house some more and finds a much smaller scraper that she uses to help me, and the two of us spend maybe 45 minutes scraping away yellow paint. I’m deeply appreciative for her "being there for me,” as the cliche goes.

I’ve now asked several people for suggestions as to what to do about the trunk. I can’t afford to have it repainted. Acetone, like nail polish, might take the spray-paint off, one fellow suggests. But yes, it might take some of the car paint off, too. Another of the patrons at the library suggests trying a rubbing compound (what’s a rubbing compound?). And yet someone else makes the suggestion that I buy some spray paint in a color as close to the muddy green of my car as possible, and do the repainting myself. “Or paint it all yellow,” he said, with a wicked grin. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about it not matching.”

No, all I have to worry about is its happening again. But what am I going to do, sit out on my tiny front porch every night with my firearm in my hand? I think not...