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May the good Lord be with you
Down every road you roam.
And may sunshine and happiness
Surround you when you’re far from home.
And may you grow to be proud,
Dignified and true,
And do unto others
As you’d have done to you.
Be courageous and be brave,
And in my heart you’ll always stay
Forever young, forever young,
Forever young, forever young.
-Rod Stewart, “Forever Young”
I would like to dedicate that song to my car. Please listen to it while you read this column.
Next week my black ’95 Jetta will be given away to charity, to a tow truck driver who will tell me he’s sorry, pat me on the back, hook up the Jetta to his truck, and wheel it down West Broadway and out of sight toward an automobile’s version of euthanasia, to a hack shop where saws gnaw through metal and rusty VW parts fall to the ground like ears off lepers. My Jetta will be gone, and my life will become easier, but less interesting.
Becoming less interesting – that’s a natural symptom of aging, just like varicose veins, repetitiveness, a disintegrating vocabulary, and those purple veins that crawl and spider-web across old people’s calves.
I’m already on my way. The descent into the mundane has begun.
Remember when you were little and you had to sit through an adult dinner party and everything they said was boring? The subjects they talked about – the local public school system, furniture, the first Bush, Dukakis, their children – were ridiculously irrelevant. The things they laughed at weren’t funny. They didn’t seem to care about dinosaurs, Nintendo, or dump trucks.
Do you know why your parents and their friends were so boring? Because their cars worked.
When your car does not function properly, you are a compelling person, and because a dysfunctional car is a rite of passage, a symbol of youth, the young are naturally more compelling than their elders. If your car won’t start on a sub-zero January day, you have a conversation starter. If your park brake gives out and the car rolls backward and downhill into a dumpster, you have the ability to roll your way, with an automobile anecdote, through any awkward conversation. Witness this:
What’s up?
A Nothing.
Really nothing?
A Yeah, that’s right. I said nothing. Got a problem with that?
No. Geez. Sorry I asked.
A
A
(checking watch)
A
A (coughing)
A
My Geo Prism’s park brake gave way and the car rolled into a dumpster today.
A That’s a funny story!
I know! Wanna hear the long version?
A Yeah!
Okay, so I park my Prism on this hill…
With a dysfunctional car, you’re also dangerous. Dangerous in a mysterious, sexy way, like any time you arrive at a house party, you could exit your vehicle, take several steps toward the front door, and get blown though a living room window when your car explodes for no reason. This is how James Bond arrives at parties, and he has never aged (if anything, he has more hair and it’s blonder now) nor become less interesting.
With the Jetta on its deathbed, I feel that a part of me, and a part of this column, is similarly getting its plug pulled. The Jetta, my anthropomorphized friend, has provided plenty of writing fodder over the years. So to remember and honor the Jetta, I want to talk about my relationship with it, starting from the beginning and inserting some of its fondest, fuzziest appearances from past columns.
A few weeks ago, when I told my buddy Huge that I was thinking about buying a new car, he said, “Just don’t buy it from Rat Boy.” Rat Boy sold me the Jetta. Here’s what I wrote about the experience in my Confessions of a Dangerous Car Owner column:
After hunting around for several weeks, I found a reasonably priced Jetta in Hooksett, NH. The dealership was called Auto$ave.
Important Lesson: If you're ever in the market for anything, and you're prepared to spend thousands of dollars, and it's something important (like a car), and you really don't want it to fall apart, don't shop at a place that uses dollar signs instead of S's.
The car salesman whom I spoke with was a mechanic with a tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt and grease stains all over his NASCAR hat. I brought him over to a black Jetta GLS that I liked.
"Can I take this car for a test drive?" I asked.
"Sure," he said. He had the kind of backwater New England accent that makes farm animals skitter for cover. "Which one?"
"This one."
"That one's not ready."
"Why not?"
"It doesn't have an engine."
"Oh."
I was told that I could test drive a Kia Sephia instead. I declined, but they assured me that the Jetta would drive beautifully once they got, you know, the engine and stuff back in it.
I said, "Okay. Well, can I see the vehicle history report?"
They said no. This was the reasoning: if they showed me the vehicle history report, then they would have to show everyone the vehicle history report. This is the same argument that my fourth grade teacher employed to defend not letting us eat Combos in class. I persisted and said I would walk off the lot if they didn't show me a VHR. They said they didn't know where it was. I started walking. They suddenly found it.
The owner of the dealership showed me the vehicle history report. There was a photograph paper-clipped on to it that showed the same Jetta I had been looking at, but half-crumpled.
"This explains the blood stains on the upholstery," I said.
"You mean the cranberry juice," he said.
My first summer with the Jetta was problem-free, but in retrospect, that was probably because I didn’t drive it. I was living on an island, so the Jetta stayed home in Maine, patiently waiting to break down as soon as I got back, like a dog who waits to eat poop out of the cat’s litter box until the master gets home.
Dods and I drove to Michigan that September to see Joey, and the Jetta’s catalytic converter blew up in Western Ontario. Because it was dusk, and because the only visible structure within 100 kilometers was a grain silo, and because that part of Canada smells like manure, we limped on toward America.
But the Jetta would only go 50 miles per hour. It had no juice left. There was only one incline between where we were and where we needed to be, and that was the bridge that brings you across the border to Detroit. By the time we reached the bridge’s apex, we had slowed to five miles per hour and we were towing a train of angry honking headlights that went all the way back to Toronto.
The busted catalytic converter turned our weekend in Michigan to a full week because nobody in that state wants to fix a German car. We finally decided to take our chances and see if we could drive home going 50 mph the entire way. We got to London, Ontario before the Jetta overheated, coughed, and died, and Dods and I spent the night in a Howard Johson’s drinking Labatt Blue and watching the Simpsons.
Sure, it was depressing at the time, but I just wrote three paragraphs about it. The same trip to Michigan in a nice car wouldn’t even get me three sentences.
As the Jetta grew older, it developed idiosyncrasies. Its hubcaps fell off, so I replaced them with fake chrome ones, but those fell off too. Now I drive around on black rims – they all look like replacement tires, but they go well with the dents the Jetta has accrued after three years parked in a fraternity parking lot.
Now, knowing that the Jetta will be sent to pasture next week, I’ve taken to running over grocery carts in the Stop N’ Shop parking lot. It’s fun, like I’m living out my life-long dream of driving in a demolition derby, but I always feel remorse afterward. It’s like picking on the elderly, like going to your grandmother’s nursing home and beating her in arm wrestling.
Here’s how I described the Jetta’s growing list of problems in my Confessions column:
It frequently rolls its own windows down. It tells me to check its engine just because it's bored. It waits five minutes into a drive and then starts honking as if I've stolen it. (The security system is like an old guard dog that's mostly blind and deaf but still thinks it has a job to perform. Most of the time it just naps and farts but sometimes it wakes up and starts barking just in case it missed anything.)
Actually, the windows never really rolled themselves down. They were more likely to perform a hit-the-deck freefall into the door, like they was trying to hide from other vehicles. Sometimes the windows would lock themselves in an upright position, which was especially annoying in the summer (with an A/C unit that had crapped out in year number two).
Lately I’ve been convinced there’s a poltergeist in my back right seat. The window, about once or week, will crank itself up, then down, then up again, or all the way back down, making an possessed mechanical groaning noise like Steve Martin’s car seat in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I have no control over it. This winter it rolled itself down before I traveled to Florida, so I just taped a garbage bag over the window and hoped that nobody broke in to steal one of the headrests (the only thing worth stealing at this point).
This fall, the rearview mirror, which I had to glue to the windshield in college, began falling off every time a door was slammed, or the park brake was touched, or a passenger sneezed. So now it’s on the floor with a travel mug and a half-eaten Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwich that I should probably throw away.
The radio stopped working, so I bought an iPod dock and velcroed it to the dashboard. I’m sure the iPod dock sounds great in a living room, but it’s a little hard to hear in a rattling car that clicks, clacks, and wheezes louder than a World War II tank.
But these are just the small problems. The Jetta drives so poorly that a mechanic recently told me, after taking it around the block to diagnose it, that it simply couldn’t be driven. I begged to differ, took my keys, and eased it out of the lot like a horse whisperer mounting a wild black stallion (if the stallion had had three knee replacement surgeries and insisted on lying down at every intersection).
The Jetta stalls a lot. Here’s what I wrote in my I Got One Thousand Dollars column:
Frequently, as the Jetta is turning, the engine shuts off, which means the power steering shuts off, which means the car starts drifting into oncoming traffic, which means I have to simultaneously crank on the steering wheel and restart the car. I do this a lot, and I’m willing to bet that nobody in the history of driving has been better at the maneuver.
In that same column, I estimated that the Jetta goes from 0-60 in one hour, but that’s probably on the slow side of the truth. I actually got challenged to a race by a guy in a plumber’s van a couple months ago. He thought I was joking when I said he’d beat me, but when the light turned green, he smoked me off the line. (I just stopped myself from writing that I couldn’t remember why he wanted to race because I suddenly remembered: while waiting for the light to turn, I had to rev the engine to keep it from stalling. He must have thought I was raring to go – with anyone, even a plumber in an Econoline van.)
Last week I was pulled over by a police officer who sauntered to my window and asked if the car had undergone any post-manufacturer modifications.
“Post-what?” I said.
One look inside the interior, at the Velcro sound system and the rearview mirror next to the breakfast sandwich (which is probably illegal, come to think of it), must have convinced him that this was not a car that had undergone many positive modifications since 1995.
He told me that my brake lights weren’t working – they were yellow instead of red, which I guess was why he asked me about the post-manufacturer modifications. He must have thought I replaced the taillights to give the Jetta more street cred. And in truth, it does have street cred. Nobody fucks with it. I’ve parked it in front of the projects, often with the windows down, for almost a year now, and nobody’s tried to break into it even once. I’m kind of insulted, actually.
After getting pulled over, I decided the Jetta needed to go. It was supposed to fail inspection this month, anyway. So I drove to a used car dealership, and on the way, the Jetta let me know that it was okay with my decision and ready to move on. It told me this by rolling its window down on the coldest day of the year and stalling in the middle of an intersection. It was ready to be euthanised.
But when it’s gone, my life will be that much duller, that much older. I’ll have one less badge of youth – the shitty car – to wear with pride. The column will suffer.
My dad says that having owned the Jetta will make me always appreciate a functioning car, one that I don’t have to worry about. That may be true, but I suspect that a functioning car, one that gives me nothing to talk or write about, will always make me appreciate the Jetta.
I suppose in a perfect world my new car would turn out to be just as dysfunctional as the old car, and every new car I buy for the rest of my life will reveal itself to be a total lemon, just like the Jetta. Rod Stewart wrote a song about that once. It was called “Forever Young.”
And when you finally fly away
Ill be hoping that I served you well
For all the wisdom of a lifetime
No one can ever tell
But whatever road you choose
I’m right behind you, win or lose
Forever young, forever young
Forever young ,forever young
Forever young, forever young
For, forever young, forever young
Good-bye, Jetta. It’s been a pretty wonderful ride.
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adam@theadamwhite.com |
