A New Lease on Life

By Tom “redefining road rage” Waters
November 16, 2004

I don't ask for much from my motor vehicle. All I want is a moving box with a decent radio to keep my cigarettes in that's going to get me safely from point A to point B.

I hate my car. I really, really hate my car. Most people don’t assign emotion to their vehicles unless they’ve just purchased one or their cars are on the way out. My car has been on the way out since I got it four years ago. It’s never quite forgiven me for driving it through a fence on the way home from a strip club two weeks after buying it. It’s a ‘94 burgundy colored Buick Century. It had sixty thousand miles on it when I got it and now it’s closing in on 140,000. We’ve promoted books for a hundred mile radius. We’ve taken vacation trips down to my summer home and back. We traveled together for bar and club reviews in Canada, Niagara Falls and beyond. It’s taken the brunt of my various job commutes for the last four or five professions I’ve had. And I hate it with a passion.

When I get a new car, I’m not going to sell this one. I’m going to take it into a secluded field with a sledgehammer and go to work on it. I’m gonna get medieval on my car. And after I puncture the tires and smash out the windows, I’m going to set it on fire. And then I’m going to roll it off a cliff and take a picture for posterity. After that, I’ll take the remains and give them an improper burial. I think it’s cursed. It’s given me problems ever since that first accident. We haven’t gotten along since. I’ve dumped thousands of dollars into that unholy piece of shit. New batteries, new brakes, new steering reservoir, new tires, new coils. You don’t really turn into an armchair auto-mechanic until you have a vehicle that’s always got something wrong with it.

I don’t ask for much from my motor vehicle. All I want is a moving box with a decent radio to keep my cigarettes in that’s going to get me safely from point A to point B. The Buick can’t even do that. If I get it repaired, it begins complaining about something else approximately one week after leaving the auto shop. It’s natural state is decline. It’s been terminal for four years and I’ve just been pouring money into it to keep it on life support. I’ve had other cars with mixed results. My first car was an ‘87 Chevy Celebrity. I drove it like a maniac because it was my first car and it just stopped running one day. That I could live with. My second car was an ancient black Volkswagen Rabbit. It was a standard that spent ten years in storage and was prone to stalling. This wasn’t entirely the Rabbit’s fault. I was no good at working standard controls. One day on the way to work at a toy store it stalled making a right and I got rear ended, and that was the end of it. No hard feelings. After that, I got a Dodge Spirit. Aside from a flat tire, we got along famously. It wasn’t a sporty car or a flashy car but it ran without complaint. And then it got stolen. That was when I got this awful collection of satanic parts that I’m currently tooling around in.

The Buick has been rear ended more times than Nathan Lane. To it’s credit, though, the car can take it like a champ. It’s a good winter car because it runs like shit, but no more or less than it does the rest of the year. People have run into the back end of it at stop lights, red lights, and in parking lots where it sat motionless. Once I had the rear light replaced to the tune of three hundred dollars but other than that it takes it in the back side like a trooper. I got hit so violently once at a stop that it knocked the hat off of my head. No visible damage. It may be evil but it can take a beating better than Tina Turner.

When I drove through the chain link fence during the aforementioned incident earlier in this essay the antennae broke off at the root. It still gets decent reception. I’ve tried to like my car, but my affections haven’t been returned. Every seven hundred miles I have to feed it a quart of motor oil because it leaks incessantly. Every two hundred miles I have to dump steering fluid in because the rack and pinion steering is on the way out and needs to be replaced. I yanked the dome light out because it goes on and off intermittently during the winter. It’s possessed. I haven’t washed it for at least two years because I don’t see the point in being nice to it.

On the way home from vacation two years ago it stalled. The battery was acting funny all week. I got a jump from a considerate motorist and it stalled again. After a third jump it stalled it’s way into the parking spot at my apartment. My father and I replaced the battery and it still wouldn’t run. After a week at the auto shop and plenty of fiddling under the dash, we had our diagnosis. It was a rare wiring problem. A one in a million occurrence that cost in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars. Some chance defect in it’s manufacturing that I had no control over. I will never buy a Buick again. Ever. I hate my car with a passion that surprises me. And it hates me back.

It won’t last another winter without divine intervention. I’m thinking of getting a nice, unremarkable used Honda, because my older brother has owned two of them and they don’t appear to cause many problems. One would presume that such a wish isn’t asking for much, but not everybody drives the shit-box that I have to live with. I had a girlfriend once who always bought rolling time-bombs for five hundred dollars or less. It was all she could afford, and her cars were either sitting in driveways collecting dust, billowing smoke, or breaking down in rare and spectacular ways. She made friends with a lot of mechanics. This car, my car, was not cheap, but it’s never forgiven me. We got off to a bad start, and the end will be a lot worse.

I don’t know how it will all end, and I don’t care. I don’t even think about my car anymore, or get aggravated when the mechanic calls and tells me how much it will be this time. I’m thinking about my next car, and how well we’ll get along. I presume that some day when I least expect it my car will blow up for no reason, or the transmission will pop out of the hood like a jack in the box. Maybe the axle will break and I’ll go skidding into drive-time traffic. I’ve survived worse.

I don’t ask for much out of life, but I want my next car to have an understanding with me. I know people who drive happily to their jobs. They whistle and place their coffees into conveniently placed cup-holders, choosing their preset radio stations with the click of a button, switching on their cruise controls and adjusting their heat or air conditioning for optimum comfort. They wash their cars every week and get the oil changed every three thousand miles like clock-work. They take care of the interior and if there’s any debris it’s cleaned out on a weekly basis. Their upholstery is vacuumed and sanitized whenever the weather is nice. In the summer times, they smile and wax their cars under the heat of a weekend sun. That’s all I want.

I want a good car that doesn’t drain every dime out of my fucking pocket and make me crazier than I am because there’s always something wrong with it. I want a vehicle that isn’t a fiduciary black hole where one tire is always going flat and puddles are visible after pulling out of a spot. I want a goddamned car that doesn’t grumble when I need the smallest degree of pick up. I’m sick of this piece of shit. I want a divorce from this car for irreconcilable differences. And after I destroy it, pulverize it, and incinerate it so that no automobile owner has to go through the trials and tribulations that I’ve gone through again, I’ll take a picture of it’s remains and keep it in the glove compartment of my new car. As a hint. A reminder to be good no matter what, especially when I really need it. My next car won’t be perfect. It won’t be a mid life crisis-mobile or something that I show off at auto shows, but it’s going to run happily. Or else.