How Many Israelis...

Question: How many Israelis does it take to jump-start a PT Cruiser?

Answer: 2-and-a-half.

My father tried, God bless him. I, the half-breed, tried along with him, but it took the skilled, weather beaten hands of Soly, the Israeli mechanic to whom we are devoted, to get that engine to crank. I couldn't believe it but, at 8am this morning, there he was, standing in my driveway with his sleeves rolled up.

I'll bet you thought mechanics stopped making house-calls, or never did.

When my father came over to the house yesterday to try to jump the dead car, the only thing he succeeded in doing was setting off the car alarm. At least ten times. This alarm is one of those aftermarket ones, the ones that scream "1990s," with the intermittent beeping, horn honking, buzzing, siren that, after about three minutes inspires you to go digging into your left pupil with a broken Coke bottle.

Our street is a small street, with small little houses piled almost on top of each other. It was a beautiful day yesterday, so everybody on the street was either outside gardening or puttering around with their windows open.

EEEE! EEEE! EEEEE! HONK! HONK! HONK! HONK! BooOOOOOP! BoooOOOOP!

We're anxiously awaiting the arrival of our "Most Popular New Neighbor" award.

Being Israeli, my father has little capacity for sympathy or empathy-- these are mostly Western traits born out of guilt and self-loathing, of which he has none. Because of this, he was thoroughly uninterested when I hysterically insisted that he stop the futile, and very noisy, attempts to jump the car.

"Shut up already," he said to me, applying the red and black cables to the thoroughly coked-out battery once again.

BoooooOOOOOOOOOOOOP! BoooOOOOOOOOOP!

"Dad, please stop. Please. People are going to start leaving us death-threats in our mailbox."

"Just turn the fuckin' key, please already."

Nothing. Not even a click.

It took 20 minutes of alarm howling and my pleadings to get him to stop. I think towards the end I was actually clutching his shirtsleeve.

"Okay, okay. Jesus," he muttered as he threw the jumper cables into his car. "Call Soly in the morning, he'll come over and jump it for you."

"He will?"

"Yeah, he did it for me," my father said, shrugging.

Sure enough, Soly, short, hairy, loud, pulled into the alley behind my house at 8am this morning. He was driving a white Nissan Altima from the mid-nineties, a customer's car. Soly always drives customers' cars for his own errands while they're in the shop. I can only imagine what he does in my car when it's there all day. He stopped the Altima right in the middle of the alley. 20 feet away, I observed a shirt-and-tie neighbor getting into his Ford Explorer, ready to go to work.

"Soly, you know you can park next to my car, you don't have to leave it in the middle of the alley."

"If someone's coming, I'll move it. I'm not parking it here forever," he assured me gruffly as he took out the power booster and jumper cables.

"Yeah, but I think that guy over there in the Explorer wants to get out."

Soly squinted his eyes at the Explorer with its headlights on and the engine running.

"Fuck him!"

As Soly popped the PT Cruiser's hood, I noticed the Explorer making the extremely tight three point turn to exit the alley the other way. He had to reverse and go forward about six times.

I warned Soly that the alarm would probably go off the minute he touched the jumper cables to the points.

"So? Turn the fucking thing off with the gizmo," he said, referring to the electronic key fob. I knew this wouldn't work, but I said nothing. The alarm was an aftermarket, ultra-sensitive piece of equipment installed by Mrs. Apron's father years ago, and I had no idea where the specific key fob that controlled that alarm was, but I played dumb, because I didn't want to get yelled at by two Israelis in as many days.

Sure enough, as soon as the jumper cables were applied, the electronic melody blasted through the early morning air of suburbia at approximately 312 decibels.

"JESUS!" he shouted over the noise, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TRYING TO DO? WAKE UP YOUR ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD?! TURN IT OFF! PUSH THE GIZMO!"

I did, and nothing happened. He stared at me.

"This is no fucking factory alarm!" he shouted, pointing his small, fat, hairy finger at me. He was accusing me of concealing information from him, and he was right. I was.

"Somebody put a fucking alarm in here!" I stared at him, and I shrugged like an imbecile.

"San-af-a-beech!" he yelled as he stuck his head underneath the steering wheel of the car.

"Ah-HAH!" he roared. "You see this fucking button? This is the control for this bullsheeet alarm! Push it when I attach the jumper cables."

I did, and the alarm died. It died. And the car started. Peace prevailed at last.

He eyed me suspiciously.

"The factory alarm for a PT Cruiser just honks the goddamn horn, it doesn't do all this beep beep beep bullsheet."

"Oh," I said.

He looked at me.

"Follow me to the fucking shop."

And I did.

And now you know that it takes 2-and-a-half Israelis to jump-start a PT Cruiser, though I suspect that one could have done it on his own.