drive me fast, crash me crazy

“The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.” – Miller, Repo Man

It’s a fickle romance we have, my automobile and I. It started out as a blast, having the mechanized freedom to come and go as I pleased, but the charm faded pretty fast after being cut off by some cell phone-using asshole in an Escalade for the umpteenth time. All pretenses about being a rational animal slipped away, and the lizard brain took control. Defensive driving? Well, the best defense is a good offense. If that means matching speeds to keep some fuckhead on my left from getting across to his exit after he nearly sideswiped me, so be it.

I got my driver’s license just before I graduated high school in 1990, but it wasn’t until the November of 2001 that I became a car owner, and even then it had to be forced upon me. My brother got married and moved to an apartment in Allston, where parking is extremely hard to come by. He and his wife decided to hold on to her later model Ford Escort and shed the 1990 Olds Cutlass he bought from my grandmother a couple years previous. He offered the car to me, but my natural state of inertia led to the poor machine lying idle in my grandmother’s driveway for three months, with no steps taken towards getting it registered and insured. At the beginning of November, he issued an ultimatum: either I assume ownership or he’d have the car towed to the scrapyard.

Even though I ended up sinking most of my savings into keeping up the old heap (six hundred bucks off the bat for new brake pads, rotors, and calipers), Supercar and I had some really fun times together. She only had a four-cylinder motor, but she could beat most rice rockets from the stop line, at least for the first hundred yards before she topped out. She’d turn over on the first try, even on the coldest days, although her heating and cooling systems were always problematic. The poor girl had a hard time holding her antifreeze, and would spring coolant leaks every couple of months.

She wasn’t much to look at, either. The paint had peeled off to the bare metal in several places, and she had rust spots in several places, including a huge one on the center roof that looked like Supercar was sporting a bindi. My wife’s nephew referred to her as “the Stained Car”, as in “Someday, you and me and Otto can go to Toys’r’Us. But not in the Stained Car.” It was the rust that did in Supercar. When I tried kicking the driver side door shut with my boot, and it left a gaping foot-shaped hole in the metal, I knew that the poor car’s day had come.

Before I had Supercar towed away, my wife and I swung by my grandmother’s place to sit inside the old heap one last time. I cut the red plastic Oldmobile insignia out of her steering wheel, to keep as a talisman. It now resides in the glove compartment of my current car, a 1998 Chevy Lumina that used to belong to the retired police chief. Super Lumina has more horses, more interior and trunk space, and plenty of options, but will never match that 1990 Cutlass in terms of personality.

Rust in peace, my old, sweet chariot.

The Go-Go’s – Speeding (from the Fast Times at Ridgemont High OST, 1982) – My wife was quite the Go-Go’s fan in her tweener days. She used to listen to Beauty and the Beat over and over on her brother’s record player. One time, she didn’t notice she put the record down over another one on the turntable. When it wouldn’t play, she cried. That story made me simultaneously chuckle and feel sad.

The Dugites – In Your Car (from Hisstorical: The Best of the Dugites, 2004) – Cute (maybe too cute), catchy Aussie new wave pop from the early 1980’s.

Vince Taylor & His Playboys – Brand New Cadillac (from a 1958 single) – I love the Clash’s cover version, but it doesn’t come close to matching the raw menacing power of the original.

The Toy Dolls – Tommy Kowey’s Car (from a 1980 single, collected on Ten Years of Toys, 2002) – It took a while to convince my wife that vocalist Michael “Olga” Algar was indeed a man.