Night of the Burning Car

Let's see, the week before we went to SBL in Philadelphia, I was not sleeping so well (probably because of stress and other things). Around 3:15am I heard something outside of our bedroom window. I just ignored it since all kinds of things go bump in the night in Brooklyn. Then this annoying car alarm went off. Living in Jerusalem and now in New York, one learns to try and ignore the nightly malfunctioning itinerant car alarm. But this alarm with its horn honking at full throttle would not stop and then I heard the distinct sound of licking flames.

I got up and looked out our "backside". Beyond Mr. Chan's concrete menagerie and the neighbor's rubbish heap, there lies a parking lot (about 100 feet from our window). On this night I witnessed a pretty nice car going up in flames in this parking lot (by the way, the parking lot is in front of our local US post office that has bullet proof pawn shop windows for tellers).

I just kind of stared there for a while in my 3 am stupor like I was watching a movie. It started small and then spread throughout the whole car. The car's horn was going off non-stop and its lights were on full blast, some how triggered by the fire spreading into the engine block. The headlights on the burning car looking right at me were like eerie eyes of a victim beseeching my help.

It was like watching a rooster being swallowed by a snake, fighting for its life with every last ounce of breath cockadooling away. When the fire inhaled the car's battery, it belched out a thirty foot flame sending sparks helter skelter making my eyes blink and my head bob away. With the battery consumed, the honking and lights were quelched, as the snake had fulling subdued its prey. Now only the digestion of the carcas remained.

I started to wake up and realize that when the fire reached the fuel tank it would get pretty nasty. Maybe I should call someone.

In a couple of minutes though, I started to hear the faint sirens of faithful fire trucks off in the distance. Obviously a more alert neighbor had the same idea. Soon two trucks showed up with twenty guys. One guy sprayed it down for 20-30 minutes(?) and the other 19 stood around waiting for the gas tank to blow. It didn't happen. The fire died in the face of the aqua onslaught.

I went a couple of days later and looked at the car up close and personal. Everything was burnt out from the inside but you could still see the "newness" of its former self on the edges. It was dead but the tires still looked new.

I guess someone set it on fire. Maybe some punks doing what punks do best. Maybe the owner wanted to collect the insurance. Maybe spontaneous combustion? My own theory: Just another sacrificial anonymous car in Brooklyn claimed by the neighborhood King Kong.