Rescuing Ronda — BigsBlogs

Life would be rather dull if good things were always happening to you. You can only really appreciate the good times when there's some shite in there to gain perspective. From my first day in New Orleans that had been pretty much the case and I was on something of a high. My home and my housemates were fantastic, Mardi Gras had been all I'd hoped it would be and I'd just been offered a job by the company I'd moved here to work with. Things couldn't be rosier.

One of the biggest sources of my happiness was a possession that I had developed an almost unnatural closeness to, namely my scooter, Ronda. I had bought her for the hearty sum of $500 from a college student on Craigslist. It was about a week's worth of pedicab cash so not an insignificant amount to part with.

Very soon, we were inseparable. In London I had been a die hard cyclist. But here, the incessant humidity made cycling any long distance a rather soggy affair. Scooters are pretty much the perfect way of getting around in NOLA. Aside from being well ventilated, you can also park anywhere for free. Plus fuel and insurance basically cost nothing.

In Ronda's case this was literally true as she was apparently sold to the previous owner as a "49cc" scooter and therefore exempt from registration and insurance requirements. 50cc scooters and above are the ones that apparently need official documents and the like. Or so I was told.

"Have you ever had any issues with the police?" I asked my Craigslist friend.

"Nah, they're to concerned with the murder rate here to really bother with checking a scooter's registration. You'd need to be doing donuts and shooting a gun in the air on Canal St for them to really take notice."

Semi-reassured but also smelling some serious BS, I took possession of her and embarked on a series of misadventures around the city. I'd get around to registering her at some point, I thought. It was apparent from the offset that she had bags of personality and the fact that she already had a few battle scars meant that I could throw her around without much care. During Mardi Gras I wound up with a pretty nasty gash on my foot which bled all over her. So we were quite literally bonded by blood. I quickly grew to love every little Chinese made piece of her.

So you can imagine my reaction when I stepped out on the porch on a sunny Sunday morning only to discover that my beloved Ronda was not where I'd left her. At first I thought that I'd gone a bit soft and left her somewhere. But a check of the house security camera revealed that about 10 minutes after I'd taken out the trash at 10:50pm, two hooded figures approached her and stopped in the middle of the street. After a few deliberative moments they pounced. Unfortunately it was too dark to make out any defining features so they remained painfully anonymous.

I felt a little sick to my stomach watching the two of them sizing my poor little Ronda up on the recording. One of them stood guard in the middle of the street while the other had his way with her. It was all over in a matter of minutes. A great sadness filled my heart and it dawned on me that there was a high likelihood that she would never be part of my life again.

I did what anyone would do and called the police and they said they would ring back later. I was beginning to get my first taste of the 'not a single fuck given' attitude police have here to any crime that doesn't involve first degree murder. Eventually they called back but, of course, I didn't have a registration number. I did have the VIN number which is actually more relevant as it's bolted onto the chassis and uniquely identifies all scooters. But this didn't appear on their systems so it was a resounding fuck off.

Sophie kindly offered to drive around and look for it with our new housemate Jaclyn. This was literally Jaclyn's first day moving here from New York and really not the best of introductions. As they were on foot, it was very likely that the thieves were from St Claude, the slightly dodgier neighbourhood a few blocks away. A few months ago the bins had been stolen from outside the house and had wound up in a pile here. So there was a small chance that she would have suffered a similar fate.

We spent over an hour circling around, desperately hoping to find her. A small part of me was believed that that I'd see her idly parked on someone's driveway or passing buy. I'd then tell Sophie to give chase and then jump out of the door and do a flying clothesline, landing unharmed and with her thief subdued and only slightly harmed.

After passing by all of the notable crime hotspots within a few miles, we called off the search. I felt heartbroken. But I resolved to find her one way or another. I began tapping into my very limited rolodex to see if anyone could help. Sophie's mother kindly posted an ad on a local neighbourhood watch app. My friend priscilla got in touch with every chop shop in the city. She was an artist and used them for her supplies. According to Priscilla there were only three places that it could end up if it was being sold for scrap and she knew the owners of all of them.

I was starting to feel optimistic and decided to head to the local police station to see if a personal appearance would persuade them to give a little more of a shit. I had pictures of me on the scooter, pictures of the VIN number and even a time stamped photo of the two people as they made off with her. I walked up to a female officer at the reception. She had sleeve tattoos on both arms and a 'don't even think about it' haircut.

"Hi, my scooter was taken from outside my home last night. I have some.."

"What's the registration?" She interrupted.

"Well...it doesn't have one. But I have a VIN number." She shot me a look as if I'd just stumbled into the police station claiming to have lost my pet rock.

At that point I knew I was barking up the wrong tree and that it was more likely that Jennifer Lawrence was going to walk into the police station and ask me to marry her than to get a police report filed with the New Orleans Police Department.

This is very much par for the course in this city. There is something of a Faustian Pact that you make here with the police here. You can own a scooter that is unregistered, uninsured and probably stolen and the police won't give you any grief for it. There's simply too much other crap going on here for them to waste their time on it. Any crime that doesn't begin with the words First Degree won't get a great deal of attention from them. Even the theft of a registered, totally legitimate scooter wouldn't get much of an airing.

To add insult to injury, I actually saw her a day later when I was in an Uber on the way to lunch. It actually drove right by me. I jumped out of my seat and asked my driver to give chase. Sadly by the time we rounded the corner she had disappeared. Fate it seemed, had ordained it to give me one last painful, tantilising glimpse of her.

That was the last time I saw Ronda. I was in the doldrums for about a day but quickly resolved that this may have been a sign from Karma that I needed to have a scooter that could be registered and insured. If I were to have ended up in a serious accident, it could have cost me many thousands of dollars so it seemed like the proper course of action. So three days after Ronda's fateful nighttime tryst, I walked into a shop called Scoots and put my credit card to use. Soon I found myself the owner of a licensed and insured replacement who I named Guinevere.

Within a few weeks I had almost forgotten about Ronda. I still keep her keys on me at all times though. Just i case I find her again. It's always good to hold on to hope. In the grander scheme of setbacks it's pretty minuscule though. I'm not quite one of those strange men who love inanimate objects more than other people. And ultimately it is always people who bring me the greatest happiness in life. And I'm eternally grateful for their presence in mine. I mean, what good is a scooter if you don't have anyone to ride on it with you?