volume 7
Cars
“Here in my car/ I feel safest of all/ I can lock
all my doors /
It's the only way to live/ In cars”
-Gary Numan
by Juli Stinaff-Lai
I don’t know why I still have a car. I live near enough to the city that I can get almost anywhere I need to go on public transportation, but the thought of not having a car makes me panicky. The car sits uselessly on the street outside my apartment building, some kind of two-ton security blanket dripping oil. I blame this neediness and dependency on my suburban upbringing. Buses are about as common in suburbia as white tigers, and it would probably take Siegfried and Roy to conjure one up. There are precious few bus-stop signs in my suburb and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone standing by one in the entire time that I lived there. Everyone drives. We live in a Herbert Hooverian paradise, a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.
To understand the suburban dependency on the automobile, you must travel to suburbia. Some things just must be seen to be believed. Chicago streets are laid out as a grid, as any sane human being would do it. This was not good enough for suburban planners. It was far too boring, too structured. They wanted to be free and creative. They wanted to make beautiful subdivisions of houses that all looked exactly the same and streets that folded in on themselves in circles and spirals and pentagrams so that no one would EVER find their way out to a main road. After dropping a little acid, they planned their idyllic retreat and no one has been able to navigate it since. There is no easy way to walk to anything in my suburb. Even if something is within walking distance, the maze of streets you have to wind your way out of in order to leave your subdivision will have you dizzy and tired if not outright lost. Remember the snowy maze scene at the end of The Shining with the close-up of Jack Nicholson’s frozen dead face staring out toward hell? Stephen King lived in a suburb, I can tell you that.
So cars become a necessary fact of life in the suburbs. You cannot get anywhere without one, and one of the major rites of passage in a suburbanite’s young life is when she achieves driving age. Getting your learner’s permit is as important as your bat mitzvah, or your confirmation, or your graduation even. Sometimes it’s more important.
I did not have a happy beginning in driver’s education. My parents
and I did not realize I should have had a learner’s permit and been
practicing driving before driver’s ed began. This turned out to be
a major oversight. My first day on the driving range (a huge blacktopped
area that sometimes served as a parking lot) was my very first time behind
the wheel of a car. I was shaking and sweating and praying I wouldn’t
screw up. All we had to do that day was pull the car forward to a white line
and then put it in reverse and back it up to another white line. I was shaking
so bad the mirrors vibrated, especially in reverse. Going backwards?! In
a car?! By MYSELF?! My sixteen-year-old brain could not wrap around the idea
of reverse and my car responded accordingly. It barely pulled within three
feet of each line. I inched the car forward micrometer by micrometer and
back even slower. Glaciers cruised faster than my Dodge Shadow and me. When
the ordeal of class was over, my classmates and I exited our vehicles and gathered
around our instructor, also a Phys Ed teacher I should note, and none too happy
to be teaching a bunch of overpriveleged suburban brats how to drive during
summer break. We gathered around Mr. (I’ll change his name to protect
his identity) Sphincter to get tips on our driving that day. “Well class,
you all did pretty good today. Did anyone notice Juli’s driving?”A
few hands went up. Mine was not one of them. I was not entirely sure I had
seen my own driving. I think it was mainly an out-of-body experience for me.
If I had been aware of anything, I might have thought he was going to compliment
me on my safe speed. You can’t get in many accidents if you never leave
your driveway. He continued, “Juli has what we call bad depth perception.
She’s going to have to watch out for this as she drives. Bad depth perception
can be a real problem. I didn’t notice anyone else out there with this
problem, but you’re all going to have to watch out for Juli.”Sprinkles
of laughter surrounded me. If I had ever had any delusions of being cool, this
was the end of them.
Mr. Sphincter and I continued to have a stormy relationship as I insisted on driving with both feet, could not parallel park to save my life, and loved to take out those little orange cones. It didn’t help that whenever I hit a cone Mr. Sphincter would react as though I’d crushed the head of a small child beneath my wheel like an overripe melon. He couldn’t understand my fear of driving and I couldn’t understand his unnatural attraction to orange safety cones. We did not get along well.
Maybe I was doomed from the beginning, though. In my little Stepford Wife suburb, all the driveways and garages have shiny new cars. If they’re not brand new, they’re at least in very good condition. Mini-vans and SUV’s are scrubbed and polished on sunny summer days in the driveways of my hometown. People love their cars. Then there’s our family. More specifically, I should say, there’s my father. My father has NEVER bought a new car. I think a new car might have killed his best friend or something, stalking outside the window with a knife gripped in one sweaty tire. My father HATES new cars. “Why buy a new car? They’re just more expensive pieces of crap. They all die sooner or later anyway.”I think my father has some serious car abandonment issues. He’s like that girlfriend you have that keeps getting involved with married men. You watch her crash and burn and want to say, “what the hell are you doing?”My father gets involved with loser cars. If they’re not up-chucking their engines onto the highway for him, he’s crashing them into stop signs. It’s all very dysfunctional and I want to get him into vehicular therapy as soon as possible.
It wasn’t always this way. I remember when we named the cars my father bought. He bought a well-used white Audi once when I was a kid and we named it Dangermouse after our favorite cartoon character at the time, a crime-fighting mouse with an English accent and James Bond-style gadgets. It was all very cute and fun until Dangermouse died of engine failure and my brother had to steer the corpse to the junkyard while my dad pushed it from behind with my mother’s station wagon. Things seemed to go quickly downhill after that. We have had so many cars that I really cannot remember them all. If I should pull up to my parents’house and see a strange car in the driveway, I wouldn’t even blink.
One of my favorite childhood memories is of a brown Chevy Monza my Dad bought. (Yes, no one has heard of many of the cars we bought. If my dad could have found an Edsel he would not have hesitated to buy one.) We nicknamed the Chevy the Cookie Monza. Awwww. How cute. Well one fine day my father, my little brother and sister and I went out for a drive in the Cookie Monza. I was the oldest at about 10 or so, my little brother was about 6 and my little sister was probably 4 or 5. Everything seemed ordinary until this inexplicable look crossed my father’s face and he immediately pulled into an abandoned gas station. “Everybody out of the car!”he yelled. Something in his tone of voice scared us and we didn’t even ask why we were getting out of the car. (Or were we so accustomed to car disasters already that we could see what was coming?) We huddled together on an old concrete divider and stared around at the weedy blacktop and rusted-out structure that used to house the gas pumps. My father ran around to the front of the car and popped the hood to reveal not just rolling black smoke, but actual flames leaping out of the engine compartment. Now I don’t know about you, but at ten years old, my only experience with car fires prior to this one was on television. And whenever there was a car fire on television that same car was ALWAYS about two seconds away from exploding. So my brother and sister and I huddled in the abandoned gas station, certain we were about to breathe our last breath; that the Cookie Monza we had loved and trusted was about to explode like a land mine and impale us all with shrapnel. We had done something horrible in the sight of the car gods to whom we were now praying for deliverance. My father, however, merely cursed softly to himself and searched for something to put the fire out. He found an old hubcap filled with rain water and doused the engine. As soon as the car seemed sufficiently cool he ordered us all back inside. Oh, my father also does not call tow trucks. Tow trucks were apparently in on the plot to kill his best friend. My brother and sister and I looked at my father as if he had just lapsed into Swahili. Get back in the car that was just on FIRE?! Ah, but this is just a day in the life of the Stinaff family cars. “No problem here, officer.”
And speaking of officers of the law, you can’t get too deep into a conversation about our cars without bringing up our accidents. In my seven years of driving I’ve had at least seven cars. This is not all because of engine failure I’m sorry to say. I’ve also had about six or seven accidents. Insurance salespeople no longer call me. In fact they scatter like pigeons when they see me coming. First of all, I’m a collision-only kind of girl. I’ve never had a car worth insuring. Second, I treat other cars like those orange safety cones, small, non-threatening, no big deal to squish. I couldn’t get insurance with a voucher from the pope.
My first accident was at the ripe old age of seventeen. It was the first day of school, a crisp and sunny September day. I was dressed in one of my favorite outfits, deep purple poet’s blouse, long wispy black skirt, and high black suede boots with my Molly Ringwald haircut completing the look. Oh yes. I looked killer AND I was driving myself to school. Damn I was cool. The car was a beige, seventy-something, Oldsmobile behemoth, but I didn’t care. I didn’t have to take the bus. I could leave campus whenever I wanted. The freedom and excitement of adult life lay before me with all its possibilities as endless as the blue fall sky. I was still wrapped up in all my day-dreamy possibilites, which poor car-less soul I’ll drive home, where I’ll go for lunch, that sort of thing, when I came to the first major intersection of the trip. The intersection is about a block from my house, a classic four-way light. I was in the left turn lane with my blinker on, hands at two and ten on the wheel, seat-belt firmly in place, and my mind in the next county. The light was green and I didn’t immediately see anyone coming, so naturally, instead of inching my way forward to see past the car in the opposite left turn lane, I just went ahead and blasted through the intersection. Brilliant.
That sound of screeching tires and the thud of tons of metal impacting each other is something you can’t forget. It is utterly distinctive. I remember going to the Auto Show a few years ago. The police department had a car accident simulator, complete with sound effects, to impress upon people the dangers of drunk driving. That sound of screeching and slamming played over and over again until I thought I would throw up. I thought I would throw up that fateful fall day too. I kept holding my stomach and doubling over. The paramedics asked me if something was wrong with me internally. I said no. They asked if I was sure. I watched them load the guy from the pick-up truck, whose front-end now seemed to grow out of my passenger side door, into an ambulance with a whiplash collar around his neck. I started crying.
I continued to cry hysterically in the backseat of the cop car all the way through the accident report procedure, which seemed never to end, and all the way home. My father tried to console me, but I melodramatically proclaimed that I would never drive again. Just the thought of it made my stomach crunch up in sympathy pains with the cars. I kept picturing the man in the pick-up truck. His face was twisted in utter surprise and disgust. How could I be so stupid? I actually managed to avoid driving for about three years after that accident.
Three years later I was working for a temp agency several suburbs over and most of the jobs were at least a twenty-minute drive from my house. My father worked and my mother had her own agenda and couldn’t be expected to chauffeur me. Anyway, they wanted me to get over this fear. It was unnatural. A suburbanite afraid of driving? I might as well be an invalid, I’d spend all my time at home anyway.
One of my first jobs required me to drive into Des Plaines, a lovely suburb, and I can say this with all authority since I got to see every inch of it that day. The streets change names about every other block, curve around each other and come together in impossible angles. It is possible to be on one street and have to make several left or right turns to stay on the same street. I don’t care what anyone says or the explanations they make about old streets being widened or continued or whatever. This is not normal. And for someone who is directionally impaired, it is just downright unfair. I couldn’t find North with both hands and a compass. I spent over an hour trying to figure out where the hell I was supposed to be going and what relationship it had to wherever the hell I was, then finally gave up on it. I made a semi-hysterical call on a payphone to the temp agency telling them I couldn’t find the damn place and I was going home. Needless to say, they didn’t look kindly on this.
My next employers were easier to find and stayed in one place, for which I was grateful. The quality of my automobiles seemed to be in steady decline, though. I bought according to my father’s rule of thumb at the time: never buy a car for more than a thousand dollars. He picked out most of the winners I drove from the Trading Times, a weekly flyer full of ads run by local people selling their cars. This is a whole other area of discussion; my father’s car choices. He has, arguably, risked his life for a good deal. On one car-buying occasion he ventured into a very seedy part of Chicago and bought a van, the seats of which, on later inspection, turned out to be covered with gang insignias.
One friend told me, “buying a used car is just buying another person’s set of problems,”and this turns out to be true in my case. My cars have had every mechanical problem on the books, and probably some that weren’t. I’m pretty sure some of the cars were sub-legal. The Oldsmobile, for instance, had a broken speedometer, odometer, and gear gauge. “But officer! It says right here I was going 0 mph!”Fortunately (Ha!), that car was totaled in the aforementioned pick-up truck tango, so I never had to try that line out on any cops. Some of my other car problems include, but are not limited to: rusted-out mufflers falling off, transmissions dying in busy intersections, bad oil gauges causing smoking engines, radiators leaking, and tires shredding. I have pushed cars from roadways by myself, detached mufflers from my car’s undersides, and created a whole new language of curse words for cars and their problems. I guess this is character-building. It is nothing if not story-building. I guess I should be grateful it isn’t worse and that I can laugh about it, but I would really like to drive a new car. Just once. Maybe I should just kiss my parents goodbye and become that rare breed of person who uses only public transit. But right now, to quote that 80’s great, Gary Numan, again, “It’s the only way to live/In cars.”