The wugglewagon is sick again, and I got into a fight in the Costco parking lot.

The first rule of Costco—and, well, life—is that you never go to Costco on Saturday. But I did.  And seeing as how I simply needed to accompany my brother to get a quick price quote from the optometrist, I emerged from the store entirely unscathed.

Then…

I agree to let my brother partake in the quintessentially Californian experience of driving, as he 1) does not have a car and 2) now goes to the school on the east coast for the better part of the year.  So in he climbs behind the wheel of the wugglewagon, while I clamber onto the passenger side.

Pulling out of the parking spot, I feel the engine shudder and stall, a symptom most definitely abnormal for a vehicle with an automatic transmission.  Then came the now-all-too-familiar sputtering as power suddenly drained and we are left with a 4000-pound metal machine that hadn’t even built up enough momentum to keep up a slow roll.  It was the same sickness that had just sent the wugglewagon to the mechanic the week before.

So basically the car broke down.  In the Costco parking lot.  At the busiest interaction right in front of the building.  On a Saturday.  Omg.

As my brother tried to restart the engine, I quickly turned on the emergency blinkers and waved at the car right behind me to go around, and it did.  Then came the next car.

Let me preface this ensuing episode of road rage by saying that, by this time, I’d had a pretty long day.  I’d driven up to the city at 8am in order to move half my possessions in the apartment and assemble the big Ikea furniture pieces.  After that was done, I’d crossed the Bay Bridge to go fetch my brother from Berkeley, and from there proceeded to first take him to our regular optometrist and drop my mom off at a seminar thing.  This was the first time in hours that I was supposed to be able to just sit there.

Okay, so anyway…

From the rear-view mirror, I see an angry, 20-something Asian guy in the driver’s seat start to spew profanities at what he perceived to be us blocking traffic for no reason in the world.  Except that I had a reason.

On and on he goes, cursing up a storm (or, at least, making the appropriate mouth shapes and displaying the appropriate body language that would go along with that, as far as I can see in the mirror).  Now I felt my blood pressure spiking and the fiery temper that I can conjure when provoked starts smoking.  Aw, hell no—I am not about to be pushed around by some rude fucker because, beyond my control, my car broke down.  Yes, we were blocking the way…because the car broke down.

Besides, he could have at least started with polite toot of the horn (like a “Maybe you haven’t noticed—and it’s totally fine because I do it too sometimes—but you’re clear to go now”).  Even then, it would still have been rude, for I’d made sure to turn my emergency blinkers on ages ago!

What ensued was a tangled mess of enraged waving (for I tried to do him a favor by telling him to go around) and me matching his profane ranting and raving.  And the whole time he’s going off on me, his window’s up.  Um, excuse me, you rude-ass rat bastard, but if you’re going to cuss us out in the middle of a Costco parking lot on a Saturday afternoon in front of swarms of middle-class Asian families, the least you could do is muster up the courage to roll down your window so we can hear it!

Now I was really, really mad.

He finally took the hint and went around.  I leaned on the horn—hard—flipped him off and let him have a piece of my mind with the windows down.

He lifted his finger in return, while his girlfriend did one of those hand gestures to me that connoted “Calm down, bitch.  I don’t even want to deal with you right now.”  Aw, hell no: part deux.

Furious and furiously panicked, my brother thankfully mustered enough power out of the poor wugglewagon to move it over to the closest parking spot we could find, which just happened to be one of the 15-minute loading zone spaces.  God forbid another cretin should try to give me hell again, I leave the emergency blinkers on for a good 15 minutes—at the expense of the battery—until my dad can come fetch me.

Off in the distance, I spy the aforementioned fucker and his girlfriend climb out of their car to go into Costco.  So maybe I’m not a very big person, but I am scrappy.  On top of that, both of them were tiny—like, probably come up to my eyes tiny (and I’m about 5’5” on a good day; usually closer to 5’4.5”).  Oh, lordy lordy, what I wouldn’t give to run up to them and knife them good, or at least pound them into a pulp.

But I took the high road and refrained.  (Plus the only things in my trunk that were anything close to weapons were my 4” black patent stilettos, and I’m not about to ruin them on some low-life like that.)

Still, my blood boiled.  Tomorrow I’ll be off to law school, and this aspiring attorney wasn’t about to let injustice slide so easily.  I tore off the only paper scraps I could find (unfortunately all I had in my bag were receipts and shipping slips with my personal information, so I was left with very little usable material) and left a note on their windshield, stating in a nutshell all the anger I have expressed here.

“Dear Sir & Madam,
Given that MY CAR BROKE DOWN back there, your rush to profanities seems entirely inappropriate.  …Yada yada yada…”

Though my inner thoughts were anything but, I kept it classy alright. 

Finally, my dad arrived.  Optimist that he is, he handed me his keys and said he’d try to drive the wugglewagon back home.  This would prove to be impossible.  At the very least, however, my dad was able to move the wugglewagon all the way to the other side of the parking lot, just in case that son-of-a-bitch re-emerged from Costco and decided to exact revenge on my surely recognizable (for he’d been posted behind me and my Cal license plate frames for a good five minutes) car.

I have been seething for the last two hours.

Woosa.  Woooooooooooooosa.

“Dear Karma,
Please bite those two fuckers in the ass, and then some.”

As for my brother—well—cooler heads surely prevailed in his case and he seemed largely unperturbed, or at the very least nowhere near murderously enraged.

Meanwhile, I am never going to Costco on a Saturday ever again.