With a cool bottle of white wine minus three healthy swigs stuffed in my rucksack I made my way back out on to the Avenue Papagayo looking for inspiration. It came almost immediately, and I silently cursed myself for being so short-sighted. All this time I had been wondering how to go about hot-wiring a car, but the answer was staring me full in the face across the intersection from the cafe.
I shook my head at my own lack of proactivity as I approached Autos Solyplaya, outside of which sat a large billboard saying ‘Rent A Car’…
Getting inside was easy, as the metal rolling gate that was supposed to secure the shop interior had been left open, and it was just a case of rolling it up and kicking the wooden door in. It gave easily, and I was thankful I didn’t have to smash one of the large windows that fronted on to the street. I saw no reason to make excess noise even now, but mainly I didn’t fancy the idea of getting a shard of glass in my eye and having to hunt down a doctor’s surgery. The thought occurred to me that I should probably seek one out anyway and load up on antibiotics, emergency bandages, antihistamines and the like, as the first aid kit I had brought from the hotel was rudimentary to say the least. I wasn’t a hypochondriac by nature but it paid to be prepared. So far I had fallen off a roof, dislocated my shoulder and survived an exploding hotel, and the thought had crossed my mind that I might be immortal. Finding out would be interesting if something more serious happened to me, and for a second I wandered if stealing a car with the amount of alcohol I had put away in the past few days was a good idea.
First things first, I had to steal the car.
Inside, the shop was as plain as you would expect of a car rental office. One desk sat in the centre of the reception area and a rubber plant stood proudly beside it by way of decoration. The computer on the desk was dead, not even pressing the on button stimulated the screen to life, so I hovered around trying to locate the key bank. I located it in the rear room; a square white box on the wall that I jimmied open with a chair leg to reveal four of five rows of various car keys. Never having been accustomed to a great deal of choice in life I just grabbed the first set that hit my eye line. The symbol on the black grip revealed that they belonged to a Toyota. I headed back outside immediately to find the car. The most obvious thing to do was walk outside, press the button and see which car beeped open. As I was learning though, not everything was as simple as that in Lanzarote. The keys I had selected weren’t of the remote keyless kind, but plain old manual openers. I didn’t even think they made those anymore.
Every set I selected was the same. What in God’s name? With a deal of straining I wrenched the key cupboard off the wall and hefted it outside to try and open every car on the street. As I passed the desk in the main reception room I noticed the drawers were not locked and thought a quick rummage might yield something of use. Besides the expected piles of rental paperwork there was an additional set of keys in here, which I noted with anticipation featured an auto-open infrared button. With even greater joy I noticed that the leather tag attached to the set of keys sported the Porsche logo. Must belong to the owner of the franchise…
Out on the street I scanned the pavement for signs of the Porsche in question, but all I could see were the standard white Toyotas and Seats that made up most of the rental inventory. A thought struck me, why would the owner of a successful car rental joint park his precious Porsche with the riff raff? He or she must have a private parking space somewhere, probably out the back. My suspicions were confirmed as upon searching round the rear of the building there, in its own designated parking spot, was a weather-beaten but quite beautiful 911. I pointed the key, held my breath, and pressed the open button. Nada. The red light didn’t even blink on the keys. I tried the key in the door and with some surprise discovered it was already open.
I knew even before I turned the key in the ignition that the car would be as dead as leaves on a pavement. I knew even if I replaced the battery, spark plugs, alternator or any other part of the engine that controlled ignition that when I turned the key the result would be the same. Yet I held firm to one idea; maybe it was the fuel that had gone stale.
Consider this: any fuel in a car that had been sitting in the relentless, pounding heat of the Canaries for more than a couple of months would surely have lost its qualities of ignition. How long had this car been sat here un-manned and un-started? It could have been weeks, even months or years since someone had sparked this baby up. There was the part of me that knew that, like the garbage bins, it had probably never been used at all. It was just a shell, a dummy corporation, a prop that had been placed here to make me retain the hope that there were, or had been, other people here at some point.
A man could go crazy contemplating the implications. So instead of allowing myself to get caught up in another deep session of existential ruminating, I resolved to test out my fuel theory. I let off the handbrake and with no small degree of difficulty began to push the Porsche out of its spot and onto the main road. Five minutes later I had it round the side of the car rental office and at the junction onto the main drag, Avenue Papagayo. As luck would have it, this avenue was luckily on a fairly decent slope, heading from the church opposite at the crest of the hill all the way down the main street to a roundabout at the bottom about a quarter of a mile away. It was just a case of pushing it on to the Avenue, jumping in and coasting down the hill, sticking it in gear and popping the clutch while turning the ignition key and hoping something would catch.
But in my excitement at finding the car and testing the fuel theory I had totally neglected to check the most important thing. The brakes. So when as expected the Porsche didn’t sputter into life on the decline but remained resolutely lifeless I got a heck of a shock upon slamming on the brakes when absolutely nothing happened. By this stage the speedometer said I was going 20 mph. But there was still a good three or four hundred yards before the road ran out and I hit the roundabout. I didn’t know it yet, but the roundabout wasn’t really that at all, but a slight circular raise in the road filled with gravel to indicate the presence of traffic control. Beyond it was a pedestrian walkway leading to more shops, separated by some fairly immovable looking concrete bollards.
Shit, I thought as the needle reached 30mph. I began to weave in the road to try and slow the car’s momentum. There wasn’t much room to do this, with the pavement on one side and a line of parked cars on the other sandwiching me in, and all I succeeded in doing was maintaining a speed of around 33mph rather than slowing down. I pulled the handbrake, which did about as much good as asking the car politely if it would mind slowing down a bit. I pumped the brakes again out of instinct but they were clearly linked to the car’s on board computer which of course required power to work. I was going into those bollards regardless, which was going to do wonders for the Porsche’s chassis.
There was a huge metal anchor in the centre of the roundabout, so I couldn’t even go over it in the hope that the gravel centre would take a bit of pace off. I skirted round it and went over the bollards at around 36mph with a crunch that suggested the car came off worse, and slammed into a standalone wooden hut displaying ‘Informacion Turistica’. This didn’t offer much resistance except to deploy the airbag, and with a mouth full of powder and zero visibility I ended up ploughing through an arrangement of metal chairs and broadsiding a restaurant called Sabina before finally coming to rest.