I Wish I Knew A Good Mechanic

Sometime ago, six years ago this fall to be exact, I traveled to London, England to meet with someone I had been corresponding with online, someone who claimed she were single, had a couple of kids and was a Modern Orthodox Jewish female…well two out of three ain’t bad. She had the two kids and she was a Modern Orthodox Jewish female…but she was married!

I was unemployed at the time, in between jobs and going to England was the last thing on my mind. I was more focused on trying to find a job and keeping focus on my own life.

Over and over again I was encouraged by both her and my other three Chicago roommates to go to England. I had no money, was truly near bankrupt and living off of unemployment didn’t pay for a whole heck of a lot; besides I was already up to my ears in bills, like the Internet and telephone and car payments on my second and current car, a 1999 Blue Midnight Saturn.

My first car, a 1992 fire-red Geo Prism, died in the previous winter in a nine-foot snowdrift from rocking too hard out of it, with over 92,000 miles on it. From that day forward, I treated my Saturn with kid gloves…anyway….the bills were higher priorities, so I thought carefully and looked at my almost non-existent funds.

Then suddenly, my female friend made an offer I couldn’t refuse; she told me to pay for the entire ticket and when I got to England, she would pay me back half of the ticket money. Such a deal I thought at first, but since she insisted she would pay me, I went ahead and bit into it like a greedy Jewfish, hook, line and sinker.

In the meantime on the other side of the pond, The Times of London reporter Eve Ann Prentice (also the author of the memoir/biography, One Woman's War) was working diligently writing stories for the newspaper, for which she had just returned from a long stint, covering the Serbian-Croatian civil war in Kosovo.

Eve Ann by all accounts was friendly with a great personality, yet a true scrapper of a person; always fighting the good fight for the common man, the underdog and the little guy all rolled into one.

But some blokes just don’t like reporters. Blokes who especially feel threatened when a reporter does a better job gathering information than an official government agency that’s built its reputation on information-gathering for decades.

Enter America; always sticking its hands and nose where it she shouldn’t, but does so anyway. Seeing that an American governmental agency didn’t like the fact that Eve Ann had built up a good resource pool of foreign contacts, sources we call them in journalism terms, for her stories that she wrote while covering the civil war.

Contacts that even that American agency didn’t have, making them look bad and pale in comparison. It was a late Monday night near the end of August, 2000 at approximately 10pm that Eve Ann and her boyfriend heard a knock on the door of at her home in St. Albers, a tiny village outside of London.

The street on her block was as narrow as a Chicago city sidewalk. It was truly a miracle that the black-stretch limo fit within that space. Her boyfriend peered out their window of their tiny homestead.

There in the front of the door stood two men in black suits, sporting dark sunglasses and wired earpieces within their ears. They stood outside on the sidewalk until they were let into her apartment…reluctantly, perhaps.

Once inside, the two men questioned her constantly about the scads of information she possessed regarding the civil war in Kosovo. According to all known accounts Eve Ann chose NOT to cooperate with the two men. It was in fact, within her inalienable rights within her own country to rightfully refuse to divulge such gathered information. She had held her ground and her journalistic ethics as well.

The boys in black didn’t like that one bit and left almost hurriedly. After that visit, Eve Ann discovered that her home and newspaper office had been wire-tapped and bugged. The boys in black weren’t playing nice anymore. Eve Ann didn’t particularly care for their shit and moved onward.

Fast-forward six years later; word on the street is that Eve Ann is living in Ireland dying of cancer, something she's been inflicted with since age 17 and is being treated for chemotherapy.

Damn! Double damn! Triple damn!

Pray that Eve Ann makes it through this suffering as painlessly as possible.

On the other hand, I just wish I knew a good mechanic to fix those boys in black permanently.