Test Drive

Contrary to popular belief and a lucrative office pool, Omar Bricks will one day again own a car. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day and for the rest of my goddamned life, even if I have to stick a wheel up Henry Ford's ass and ride him to work like a unicycle. It will come to pass.

Seeking to end the Curse of the Bricksmobile once and for all, I set out this weekend intending to play the field and test drive a few of the many suitors for the title of Next Bricks Ride.

At first I was really excited to test out one of those new electric cars, thinking that would be a blast in the pants. But of course that turned out to be a crock, turns out just because it's electric doesn't mean it can defy gravity like those slot cars we had when we were kids. You know the ones I'm talking about, they would race up the wall and back down, unless of course you took the very top piece of the track out, in which case they would race up the track and knock a picture frame off the wall, leaving a bitchin' electric burn mark on the wall like Frankenstein's undershorts. And the best part was you could do it again, after you found out where the car ricocheted behind the toilet in the bathroom. That was my favorite toy when I was a kid, and I spent countless hours figuring out the different angles you could put the track at to get the car to shoot toward a friend who was swinging a whiffle ball bat, or to see if you could smoke one by the mailman's head. Tyco missed the chance to make a freakin' mint by marketing those things as a Thelma and Louise playset back in the 90's, I'm telling you.

So anyway, after that it's the usual bullshit about "You wrecked our car into a bank," and all that "he said, she said" nonsense. I say if you're going to let people test-drive fruity electric cars next door to a bank with a giant sloped façade, well you wrote your own script for that saga. But you know how people are, always carping about some imagined offense and looking for a chance to sue.

Personally, I don't think electric cars are ever really going to take off until they make them more like bumpercars. Because that one I drove was flimsy as shit. I rammed this guy because he was wearing a 49ers hat, and when I got out to say "Don't worry dude, it's an electric car!" I realized the thing was nearly totaled. Whatever the master craftsmen who made those bumpercars knew about durability has clearly been lost to the ages. They must have opted to start from another branch of electric car evolution, the golf cart. And fun as those things are, only a jackass would ram two of those things together as a funny joke. They need to go back and start from scratch with the original bumpercar as their model, and just make them faster. That'd be badass. They can even keep that big pole that sticks out of the back, it'd be perfect for a flag or hanging wet laundry. By the time you got anywhere, your clothes would be dry and would smell like the city as a free bonus.

I thought maybe one of those hybrid gas-electric cars would be a better deal, like you could be stealthy silent but still backfire when you needed to, for effect. And I guess the one I drove would be all right, if you were playing a nerd in a movie or something. But for practical everyday use it was pretty weak. That thing was so small I'd have to buy a bike lock to keep some juiced-up ex-con from carrying the thing away while I was inside organizing my pocket protectors. I'm not kidding, I pulled off a Flintstones stop at a light once to impress the ladies and my shoes didn't even smoke.

But the real problem with the hybrid car came when it was time to refuel. Walgreens had a sale on D-cell batteries, so I figured tossing a half-dozen of those in the tank ought to do the trick, right? Well, if you're on the same page with me there don't even think about test-driving one of those hybrid cars, because it's not going to end well, trust me.

After that debacle I decided that gas was going to have to meet my car-propulsion needs for the foreseeable future. And you know what that means; I made a bee line straight for the Hummer dealership. Because if you're going to drive an car that runs on old-fashioned gas, you might as well drive the one that uses the most of it. We don't have time this week to go into how my Hummer test drive went, but tune in next issue when we'll discuss the prosecution's case and why they make those Taco Bell drive-thrus so damned small.

Bricks out.

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