Car Talk

My first car burned out. Literally. Oil fell onto the engine, a fire started, and within minutes a thick black smoke was trapped inside my '79 Cutlass. Flames carved a hole in the hood and continued to push skyward. There was no saving it; the fire department and bank employees watched it melt in the parking lot from a safe distance.

My second car faded away. My aunt's death put me into a 2000 Camry and put the '88 Accord into retirement.

Reflecting on the Accord is not the same as remembering my time in the Cutlass. There was no driving to secluded areas to make out with my girlfriend in my second car; I had an apartment or a dorm for that sort of thing (the making out, not the driving). Friends did not throw tacos out he window of my Accord as they did with the Cutlass. The Accord was just a car, slow but steady, chauffeuring me from age 17 to 25. This is its eulogy.

It was an odd car that I coveted since by dad bought it. It was used. I forgot how much I had wanted it until Mrs. Brown, who taught me in seventh grade, mailed a letter to me. It was a letter she asked us to write to our future selves, with the promise that she would send it to that future self after five years or so. "Do you have the Accord yet?" it asked. I did. "Are you a basketball star yet?" it asked. Fucking letter. Fucking former self. I guess it is possible to ride your own ass.

The car had already been punished because of my basketball skills. An odd thing - when dad was driving his new, used car to see his son win the league tournament, a rock cracked the windshield. Fixed, was a tiny spider web directly in the driver's line of vision - it was a Norden bombsight, the target on the screen of Top Gun: The Video Game. Screws behind the steering wheel were triggers for destruction.

The Accord was an odd duck. Two little levers controlled the side vents - pulling the levers opened the side vents, pushing the levers closed them. Dad thought the side vents should be closed when the air conditioning was on, because it says "vent", and "vent" is just regular air, not conditioned air. He was wrong. Amy once told me that my car had more features than hers - false, because hers was newer and better, and she said that because of my side vent levers. I guess I looked busy when I drove it, fiddling with levers and knobs. There were four separate buttons for the horn. I was a cosmonaut.

The first dent came when visiting Amy in Salina. Wow. In my life I have gone to Salina to visit someone. Huh.

It was parked at her father's place of work. There was a small patch of ice in the parking stall next to mine; there had been a winter storm a few days earlier, and the patch melted slowly in the shade. After I suffered through Titanic, we retrieved my car and noted the dent. A driver was so incompetent that he/she slipped over the ice patch and into my car while trying to park.

I lied and told my dad it happened in the school parking lot. I wanted to wait and tell him that so I would be up at school, talking on the phone, giving him the "bad" news. It was just a dent. And soon, it would be joined by a dent on the opposite side. I don't recall how that got there - just another parking lot incident, I suppose.

The dents gave the car character, but not the kind I wanted it to have. Dropping off Anastasia for the Easter holiday, her mother saw the dents and was anxious.

I was anxious weeks later. I was driving the Accord 95 miles per hour, the fastest I drove it up to that point and the fastest it's ever traveled since. I was racing to a showing of a shitty movie about Paul Rudd (gay) and Jennifer Aniston (wishing he wasn't gay). Speeding east on I-70 to Topeka, I was exciting and spontaneous and my relationship with Anastasia was saved. Driving west on I-70 back to Manhattan, Paul McCartney playing in the cassette deck, things were obvious and imminent.

The cassette deck was a source of derision, even more so when it went on the fritz. Two fingers pressed between the two main dashboard vents would coax the front speakers into action. A bump would turn them off again. Pounding, on. Brakes, off. Nathan helped me discover the whole thing was broken, and a new stereo was put in its place. Another cassette deck. I am an idiot.

It went as far north as Minneapolis, as far west as Hays, as far south as Oklahoma City, as far east as Wisconsin.

It had to be warmed before driving in cold weather. Waiting in the car for the engine and myself to become warm, I would breathe into my coat. When I die, I will regret the month I spent sitting and waiting, minutes turning into hours into days into, surely, one month of my life.

The car was not built for air conditioning. It drained the car's power; the Accord shook like a child frightened of red lights.

It was punished. Its hood was severely scratched due to my father's poor placement of old shower door. The roof and trunk developed cancer; paint fading, turning white in the sun. The metal arm used to support the hood became detached at its pivot - a saber when removed from the plastic latch near its hook. A large hole in the muffler. A leak in the power steering rack. Things were getting bad, and I'm glad it's over.

Thank you, no frills package of the 1988 Honda Accord. You were never stuck in mud, snow, or ice. You never held my keys captive. You never left me stranded or in a terrible bind. Die with dignity.