COAL: The Mercedes Years

By
– Posted on June 14, 2023

We’re now up to January, 2017.  We’d been in Seattle for six months, and we were loving life.  We had a beautiful home across the street from Lake Washington, in a wonderful neighborhood with great neighbors and a shopping center two blocks away that had everything we needed: a supermarket; a hardware store; bakery; our bank, and a Starbucks.  We thought we’d camp out in my family home for six months while we looked for a place closer in town, but we decided we liked where we were so much we’d put the profits from the sale of our homes in DC and WV into remodeling rather than buy a new home.

Rick had to try to figure out all the electronic gadgets in the car.


 

The lease was ending our our 2014 BMW 528xi. After bad experiences with BMW, we (stupidly, as it turns out), went looking at Merecedes sedans.  I really wanted an S-class, but that was too much money.  We settled on a new 2017 Mercedes C-300 sedan in Selenite Gray.  “Michael” (as we named him) had a turbo four engine, with enough power to meet my modest driving demands.  It was very comfortable, and Nash Metropolitan tolerated laying in the back seat.  We bought the Premium 3 package primarily because it had a superb sound system, important to Rick because he’s an audiophile.

Rick getting instructions on how to link the new car to his phone


 

 

If you’ve been to Seattle in recent years, you probably know we have horrible; atrocious; abominable, unspeakably bad traffic here.  Seattle is shaped like an hourglass, sandwiched between Puget Sound and Lake Washington.  There is one major freeway—Interstate 5—that goes north-south.  Even though it’s 12 lanes wide in places, with four lanes reversing direction at noon, nowadays it is a parking lot most of the day.  I used to drive the 12 miles from my family home to Rick’s apartment downtown in 15 minutes.  Now, the same drive to go to Seattle Men’s Chorus practice Monday evenings takes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half.  It’s the unpredictability that is most annoying: you never know when the traffic will be merely bad and when it will be a parking lot.  The satellite radio and high-end sound system helped keep us sane. I’d listen to Motown or news broadcasts, and he’d listen to country or classical.  Insulated in a quiet luxury sedan, we were able to keep the noisy world at bay.

A couple of years after we moved home, we received some tragic news: My older brother Jim had died suddenly.  He lived on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, in the weekend home my Dad had built—it’s the house with the ’55 Buick and ’58 Plymouth pictured in my earlier COALs.  He had a form of autism, and led a quiet life mowing lawns and subsisting on disability.  We weren’t terribly close, but I did what I could to help him financially, and that included helping him with transportation.  I’d given him my ’72 Pinto in 1976, and purchased a couple of pickup trucks over the years for his gardening work.  Alas, Jim never took care of things; he couldn’t deal well with challenges like home repair or car repair.  In 2012, I paid $3,000 to put a new engine into his truck—the old one had failed because he never had it serviced.  Now that he was gone, his house and 2008 Dodge Dakota became mine.  

The old grey mare cleaned up nicely.


 

Rick and I decided quickly to sell Jim’s house.  It was in terrible shape, and we didn’t want the expense and bother of fixing it up and maintaining a second home.  The truck was another matter; I couldn’t bear to part with it.  It was disgustingly filthy, and needed work.  So I spent some time detailing it and giving it long-overdue service.  The mechanic told me it would need a new transmission and brakes soon. I held off on that, figuring I’d only use the truck for occasional trips to Lowes or the garden center to haul things that wouldn’t fit in the Mercedes.   And it was kind of nice to have a second car.  I’d use it to help friends move stuff around; I once took a chorus friend and his husband along as we hauled some of their old household items to a recycling center.  It was quite comical to see Niels, who is 6’4″ tall, contorting himself into the jump seats in the crew cab.

After about six months, the transmission in the pickup began to fail; it wouldn’t upshift from first to second, or I couldn’t get it to shift out of neutral.  Much as it broke my heart to sell a part of my brother’s life, I took it to a Ford dealer and walked away with $3,000.  On a whim, I checked the local Mercedes dealer and found my second midlife-crisis car: a 2017 SLC AMG convertible.

I drove the car home from the dealer in a rare Seattle snowstorm. With all that power and light weight it was truly scary.


 

Video: SLK top going down

Rick walking away thinking “What silly thing has Steve done now?


 

The SLC was the vroom-vroom AMG edition.  It had a twin-turbo four and high-end underpinnings.  It was super fun to drop the top and cruise on into It’s Better Than Ever Street. It was also wildly impractical.  Seattle, as you may know, is cursed with cold, grey, drizzling rain six months out of the year.  Not at all top-down weather.  With the top down, you had room for a toothbrush and an extra pair of sunglasses in the trunk, and not much more when the top was up.  And with only two seats, we could not go anywhere if the dog came along: Rick refused to carry Nash on his lap when we went to visit our friends on Camano Island, but he acquiesced to my purchase.  A key to success in any long-term relationship is knowing when to let your spouse buy stupid, expensive stuff.  I kept my mouth shut when he spent $40,000 on a new sound system when we moved to Seattle after retirement, so he bit his lip and kept quiet when I bought the SLC.

Alas, the joy was short-lived.  Two months after purchase, the car began squealing from the left front wheel when braking.  It wasn’t just loud, it was cats-howling-at-the-moon loud.  I took it back to the dealer and had them replace the brakes under warranty.  That lasted about six months,  but then the problem returned.  When I went back to the dealer they tried the “It’s a high performance car, Steve, of course the brakes are noisy” line on me.  But I stuck to my guns and had the brakes replaced at their cost again.  Six weeks later the fan in the HVAC system refused to work, so back I went yet again to get that fixed.

By March of 2021, the brakes started acting up for a third time.  I talked it over with Rick, and found that the dealer had a 2017 C300 Cabriolet for sale.  Back I went to the dealer and insisted they take the car back and give me the C300 to replace it.  I pointed out that “Certified Pre-Owned” meant nothing if you had to replace the brakes every six months.  Despite being very amiable most of the time, I can get very, uh, forceful if I’m wronged.  After a tense standoff, the dealer gave me a decent offer on the SLC and I walked away with a 2017 C300 convertible.  They even refunded the unused portion of my extended warranty.

We have ducks that live in the creek next to our home. Donald; Dennis, and Daisy approved of my new car.


 

The C300 was a lovely shade of dark blue, which is my favorite color.  From certain angles, the humped rear window and raised rear deck reminding me of the ’48-’54 step-down Hudsons, so I named him “Hudson”.  It didn’t have the vroom-vroom go of the SLC, but it did have a back seat, which meant we could go places with the dog.  And we could go grocery shopping and bring home a full week’s worth of food, so it was much more practical than the SLC.

We call ourselves “The Backrow Basses”. Here we got our first COVID vaccine doses—cards turned sideways to ensure privacy.


 

This was the era of COVID.  The Seattle Men’s Chorus had shut down early in the pandemic—one of our singers is an ER doctor who treated the first COVID patients.  He urged us to shut down everything early; 200 men sitting in close proximity singing and spewing aerosolized particles is a huge risk.  Good thing, too; a week after we shut down, a singer who sits near me came down with COVID and nearly died.  So with that part of my life on hold we basically sat at home for the rest of the year, and neither of our cars got much use.  I spent the next year singing my parts into a computer at home and then techno-whizzes would stitch it all together to make a video of us singing together.  When we started up singing again in 2021, we’d sit six feet apart.  Three of us crammed into Hudson and drove 90 miles to Sequim to get our first covid shots in March 2021.  Mike (center),  who sat in back, was rather stoic about the cramped quarters.  On some day-long rehearsals, when we’d break for lunch, we’d head to my car. I’d put the top down to minimize the risk while we munched our lunches.

I loved driving Hudson.  He gave us great service, but by 2022 his warranty was expiring, and I knew keeping German cars past the warranty expiration date was problematic.   Besides, I’d kind of gotten the must-have-a-convertible thing out of my brain, so it was time to move on. I’ll talk about that, and what we did with Michael, the C300 sedan, in my final chapter.

Previous chapters:

  1. Buicks Aplenty; a Fiat, and a Pontiac • The Early Years.
  2. 1958 Plymouth Custom Suburban • Dad’s Biggest regret.
  3. 1965 Buick Sportwagon • My first car.
  4. 1967 Datsun 1600 • The first car that was legally mine.
  5. A Pair of Pintos.
  6. 1983 & ’87 Toyota Celica • What’s the Plural of ‘Celica’?
  7. 1987 Ford Taurus MT-5 • Tragedy, An Unexpected New Car, And Two Midlife Crises
  8. 1987 Jeep Cherokee and ’96 Grand Cherokee • Entering the SUV Era
  9. The BMW Era