Eric: A Retrospective

In the gay community it's not uncommon for couples to have open relationships - something that me and Ed have never bought into. That is until someone entered our world and turned everything upside down. His name was Eric and we took a momentous step from coupledom to threesome.

Dressed all in blue, with an electric sunroof and fully working aircon, he wore his roo bar like a seductive smile - it was love at first sight. So when the fateful day of Wednesday 12th December arrived, we drove into Melbourne to carry out a task we had been dreading. It was time to sell Eric.

Our relationship with Eric had started three months earlier, when we arrived in Brisbane, desperate to find a van and start our travels. It was pretty slim pickings at the time and we had actually decided to buy another van when at the last minute we saw an ad on gumtree for our Eric. The next day we viewed Eric and his owner worked a fine sales pitch but a few things worried us - mainly that his license plates were registered in a different state. I won't bore you with the complexities of the Australian car system but in short if we wanted to register the van in our name and not spend a lot of money we had to take Eric to the state of Victoria, approximately 5000 km's away and somewhere that we wouldn't be reaching for three months. If the police had pulled us over it could have spelt trouble but we decided that Eric was worth the risk.

The next day we handed over $3250 and took him to the mechanics for some minor repairs. We then set off on our first journey, a gentle three hour drive to Hervey Bay. All was well until we came off the highway and slowed down to drive through the city. Eric was making a very odd clunking noise every time we went over a bump. Just to put our minds at ease we popped him into a mechanics - he told us two things, firstly that the bushes in the upper control arm had gone and needed to be replaced and secondly that Eric was a very rare model of van and his parts cost disproportionally more compared to other vans. What have we done, we thought, a thought that was further enhanced when Eric wouldn't start the next day due to a flat battery. But we learned some good lessons early on, especially about trawling car wreckers yards to find cheap second hand bits. So with a new upper control arm , we set off thinking our run of bad luck was over, Eric had other ideas though.

Travelling to Townsville the next day, doing 110 km's down the highway, I suddenly felt the steering wheel begin to shake. "This is a very rough road isn't it" I said to Ed - the road actually looked very flat and inside I knew something was very badly wrong. That is when we heard the bang - our back tyre had burst. "Brake and steer" screamed Ed. I tried but lost total control and Eric skidded across the road, heading into oncoming traffic, before coming off the road completely and almost rolling over. To say we shit ourselves is a total understatement - we were so lucky to be in one piece. As an aside, we funnily enough came across a leaflet, a few weeks later, about what to do if your tyre blows on the highway. What are the two biggest no no's - don't brake and don't steer. Great work Edwardo.

So there we were on the side of the highway, in the middle of nowhere and neither of us wanted to risk changing the tyre. Thankfully when we bought Eric we got membership to the NRMA (equivalent of the RAC) thrown in. It was time to call them up but when I looked at the membership I realised that it wasn't in my name. The only thing I could do was pretend to be the previous owner. Surely an easy task for a former drama student like myself but this was going to put my acting skills to test as the previous owner was Indian. From that moment on I became Mr Harpreet Singh - Harp for short. I even went as far as to create a bit of a back story for myself in case the rescue mechanic asked me about my unusual name. I would say that my parents went on holiday to India, converted to Hinduism, then fell pregnant and I was the result. Fortunately the mechanic asked no questions, even when Ed accidentally shouted "Matt....I mean Harp, where's the car jack!"

So he cost us money in repairs, almost killed us and put my fine acting skills to the test but we still loved him. In fairness he ran like a dream for the majority of our trip, took us up mountain sides and in total drove us over 12000 km's. Then two days before we were due to sell him his engine started to make a very peculiar noise. All I can say is thank fuck for WD40 because we sprayed it liberally before every viewing and he sounded just fine.

So should we have worried about selling Eric, actually no because we managed to sell him to the second person who viewed him for the full asking price! There will always be an Eric shaped void in our life but the $4000 we got for him, giving us $750 in profit, has filled it very nicely.

We miss you Eric but hope you're happy in your new home.