My first car was a useless 1977 Chrysler LeBaron, as mean and obtuse a car as ever existed. We fought for years and then it was crushed by a man named Toady. He towed it behind his shop and crushed it in a portable crusher. The crusher squatted on a flatbed truck like a frog on steroids. In the space of five seconds the LeBaron was reduced to a steel mattress 13 feet long, five feet wide, and six inches high. Toady sandwiched this curious object with four other very flat cars for a trip to the shredder. After the LeBaron was shredded, he said, it would be melted into a steel brick. The brick would then be sold to make a bridge or a car.
Toady was a burly man with a crewcut and one bad eye. His left eye was honest but his right eye kept going off on its own in a vaguely circular pattern, making it hard for me to concentrate on the fate of my LeBaron, which had cost me a lot of money and run smoothly for about a week. Soon after I bought the car I bought a very cheap tape deck for it. The tape deck worked properly for about a week, too. It developed a heart murmur and lost one of its two knobs when a furious girlfriend kicked it to death with her red high-heeled boots. By chance it had been set on a country station when it was attacked, and so it never played any other music but the haunting melodies of America's vast sadness.
The LeBaron broke down in nearly every town in New England. At first it broke down only in Massachusetts, but then one day it broke down in New Hampshire and after that came the deluge.
Once it broke down in Maine, not a mile from the gas station where I'd just had it repaired for nearly $500.
"You just fixed this," I said to the mechanic.
"Well, it's busted again," said the man, politely. His name was stenciled in red thread on his blue shirt: BOB.
I never met another Bob among gas station mechanics in New England, but I did meet John, Enzo, Angelo, Billy, Vikki, Vinny, Dave, Simmie and the Zwicker brothers, Sol and Hy, whose motto was, "You blow, we tow." The best mechanic among them, although I have no real means of measuring this, was probably Enzo, who sold fireworks, enjoyed digging up shards of Colonial pottery in his yard, and charged me the same amount no matter what he did to the car: $110.
It was Angelo who had the best sign over his garage: "We Specialize In Foreign and Domestic Cars." Angelo once repaired my friend Bill's car, a domestic. The problem was deep in the bowels of the engine, and so Angelo removed a good deal of the engine. When he put it all back together again it didn't fit properly, and Bill could never get the car's hood closed again, although it ran fine. Bill never went back to Angelo.
I did, though. I liked Angelo, an exuberant fellow from Turkey. His garage smelled like my uncles, and his mechanics made rich muddy coffee that they offered to their customers with great pride. They were always glad to see me, and after a few visits they set aside a chair in the corner of the garage for me to read in. I read Boswell's Life of Johnson in that garage one summer, in four long visits.
Once Angelo came to tell me that the LeBaron was ready, but I was at the end of the book, when Dr. Johnson is very sick, and I wanted to finish it because by then I felt close to him and was sad to see him go. I remember when I finished the book it was twilight, Dr. Johnson was dead, and the mechanics were waiting quietly for me in the dark auto bay.
Since the LeBaron I have had two cars, a Chevy and a Volkswagen. Both have been circumspect. The Chevy only broke down once in its life. This was in the middle of an apple orchard in Oregon. The car died as my wife and I were coasting down a hill. We slid slowly to a halt near an apple stand. I was in despair, sure that we would now be stomped to death by passing killers, sure that the car would never start again, sure that we were doomed to spend the rest of our days in this forlorn orchard, probably with ice picks in our heads.
My wife, however, was not displeased that we had broken down. The apple stand was open and she jumped out and bought several bags of freshly-picked fruit. At the time she was enormously pregnant and could not carry much else but the baby, so a parade of helpful people carried the bulging bags to the car, where I was sitting with my head in my hands, thinking about ice picks.
"Is your husband alright?" asked a gaunt apple man.
"He's okay," said my wife. "He just thinks the car will never start again."
"We'll jump him," said the man, curtly. The hair rose on the back of my neck. But he brought back jumper cables and hooked them up to his tractor and electrified us and we drove home, eating apples.
The car we have now, the Volkswagen, is a very fine car. It has started every time I asked it to, so far. Once it stopped running right in the middle of the road, causing me great despair, but it turned out that we had run out of gas. My wife recognized the signs. "I've run out of gas plenty of times," she said, airily.
She was less airy two hours later when I finished pouring in a gallon of gas fetched from a nearby station. We had called a taxi to get to the gas station, and while I was splashing gas in the tank and on my shoes she was listening to the taxi driver, a man the size of Utah. He had a knife collection, a pistol collection, a snake he was trying to sell, and an intense interest in telling astrological fortunes by computer.
My wife and I drove home in silence. As we turned into our driveway at last, she spoke. "That man tried to sell me a snake," she said.
My friends' cars, in which I spent a great deal of time between the ages of 14 and 30, were representative of our itchy masculinity, general penury and status as second and third sons in large families. Mostly they were onions handed down from above. At the low end were station wagons no longer serviceable as family buses; at the high end were now-flaccid muscle cars abandoned by older brothers gone to Vietnam, to college and to careers as cops or firefighters.
The names of these cars is a swashbuckling poem: Nova, Skylark, Impala, Gremlin, Firebird, Fairlane, Corvair, Rambler. In them we larked and rambled from town to town, beach to beach, bar to bar. We drank as we drove, we drank before we drove, we drank too much altogether, but none of us died in flaming car crashes. Friends of friends died, kids at our schools died, but we didn't die. When I drive now, with my elfin daughter belted in to her car seat, her hands filled with ginger snaps, her mouth filled with song, I stare at the faces of other drivers, wondering which one is drunk, which one doesn't see me, which one will crash into me and take my daughter away.
A friend of mine named Dennis died in a flaming car crash recently. He wobbled over the double yellow line of a Florida highway and hit another car head-on. Dennis was killed instantly. He was 23 years old. The other driver was killed instantly, too. He was 27 years old. It was about 2:45 a.m. when they crashed. Dennis was pronounced dead at he scene at 3:06 a.m.
It was the day before Mother's Day. At 8 a.m. his mother, who had six sons, answered a knock on her door in Boston. It was a local policeman who had known the family for 20 years.
"Ma'am?" he said.
"Which one is it?" she asked.
That remark stays in my heart.
My sister, now a Buddhist nun, had a car that refused to go faster than 35 miles an hour. This quirk fascinated mechanics and boyfriends alike. The car, a black Ford Falcon, lived long and prospered until one bitter winter morning when my sister got in, lit the joint in the ashtray, took a puff, and started the car. The engine block cracked in half, perhaps because there was neither water nor antifreeze in the radiator, and the Falcon died. I believe it was crushed.
Crushing a car, Toady told me, is a difficult task. Before the blow that flattens it there is the Draining Period, during which all fluids are drawn out. Then there is the Stripping Period, during which the car is shorn of all salvage -- tires, mirrors, handles, antennae, oddly sized pieces of glass, interesting detail work, bumpers, radios, the engine, the gas tank. Then there is the Searching-for Loose Change Period, which may have been a ritual peculiar to Toady. He told me he averaged about two dollars per car, although he once had a 10-dollar car, an Olds 88.
He also told me that small cars and beaters were most likely to be change-producers, a fact which has sociological implications, in my view. Toady thought it a simple lesson; rich people don't lose money on the floor, and poor people are more likely to be mishandling change in the car. "Big-car people break dollar bills and don't lose the change," he said, his right eye rambling here and there.
I had wanted to keep the LeBaron after it was reduced to a thick sheet of steel, but Toady didn't like the idea. "First off," he said, "I don't like it on principle. This ain't a gift shop. Secondarily, the thing is too f-----g heavy. That's why your Japanese buy it, so as to make it into their cars, which don't weigh rat shit. What are you, going to put a fern on it? It looks like dog barf when we're done. Plus, what, are you gonna carry it home? You don't want to do this. Trust me."
Toady had the goods on me at the time -- he wanted to charge me to crush the car and I refused to pay another penny toward servicing the bastard, even in euthanasia -- so we bartered for its death; he agreed to crush it and I agreed to leave the right front tire, brand-new, with Toady. I took from the car the one remaining knob to the tape deck. It was dangling crazily from its axle and was easy to remove. It popped off like a grape.
Before I left Toady that day I made him show me other crushed cars. He crushed about a thousand a year -- about average for a small salvage shop, he said; a big outfit would easily do 2,000 cars a year. The array of former cars in his yard was astonishing. It was a museum of dead cars, a mausoleum of arrested motion. I remember a few other Chryslers and felt stupid about purchasing a car that was crushed so often until Toady told me that he, like most wreckers, specialized in a handful of brands, so that he might specialize in those parts. "You need Chrysler parts, you come to me," he said, proudly.
Right after that I noticed a former bright-orange Volkswagen beetle, but it turned out that Toady didn't specialize in their parts; he had wrecked the thing as a favor for his niece. The bug had crumpled up like a paper bag, he said, and it made him leery of driving the little things. He had prevailed upon his niece to buy a Chrysler as her next car. "They're tough bastards, and I have parts," he said.
Since Toady crushed the LeBaron, I am more attuned to dead cars, useless cars, car hulks in ghettos, cars with trees growing through them. I know of one Ford truck in Oregon with an alder tree through the cab, and I know a Ford Fairlane penetrated by an oak in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I could also lead you to a DeSoto completely covered with blackberry bushes near the Oregon coast, but winter wrens are nesting where the flywheel was and it does not seem right to disturb them twice. The first time I disturbed them they shot out of the car like souls freshly released from their bodies.
It calms me to drive. Perhaps this is a peculiarly American therapy, this racing along asphalt in a mobile living room. Perhaps it is the motion, the sheer forwardness of driving, that attracts us so; we seem to be accomplishing something even though we are only shifting scenes, letting the movie reel by. Outside the tinted window the documentary films fly past -- desert films, mountain films, urban dramas, car chases. The soundtrack waxes and wanes. When the song ends we change tapes; when the car dies we get another and begin the second feature.
We eat, sleep, smoke, make love, make phone calls in cars. We bind our children to them with complex straps. We bathe them and oil them and give them drink. We drape black masks over their eyes. We plaster them with our politics and affections and obsessions, our emotions reduced to phrases suitable for reading at 60 miles per hour. We drive our cars off cliffs and into rivers and lakes, we leave them in the forest to be pierced by green things.
We read magazines about them, attend shows where they are featured, clean them and feed them and bring them to a priesthood that ministers to them. Their priests and doctors speak a special tongue impenetrable to the masses. They speak of pieces and parts, hoses and tubes, but what they are really talking about is torque, power, fury.
The fastest I ever went in a car was 112 miles an hour, at about 3 in the morning on a flat stretch of beach highway in New York. I remember the uncontrollable shivering of the car (it was the LeBaron), the angry twisting of the steering wheel, the chattering of windows, the roar of everything. I remember my fear, which tasted like chalk. On the way home, at 55 miles an hour, I thought about the sudden swerve -- for a rabbit, for a bird -- that would have left me meat by the side of the road.
I see meat by the road every day on my way to work: opossums, raccoons, squirrels, cats, dogs, jays, sparrows, wrens, swallows, pigeons, snakes, chipmunks. Occasionally there is a crow or vulture that didn't hoist itself up quickly enough to avoid a car. Here in the Pacific Northwest I sometimes see major meat by the road: elks, deer, antelope, even a cow once. Once I saw a doe splayed across the road in two pieces, a front and a back. The pieces were about 20 feet apart. The car that hit the deer was overturned in a ditch. I stopped to help any men or women or children who might be in the car but it was empty. It was a Subaru, I think, and there wasn't much left of it.
I thought a lot about that car over the next few days. I thought about how it would be towed away to a wrecker specializing in Subarus, how the wrecker would carefully strip and drain it and search its crevices for change, for the five-dollar bill folded into the glove compartment for emergencies, for the ginger snaps in a little jar for the baby, for the new sunglasses miraculously undamaged. I thought about how the car would be crushed in five seconds by awful jaws bigger than the car used to be. I thought about how the car would be sandwiched with five or six other former cars to be shredded and smelted and sold, how it would be melted into other cars or bridges or girders.
Essentially the same thing would happen to the deer. It would be towed into the woods, stripped and eaten by insects and birds and a bear, and melted into other creatures. Nothing ever dies completely, and we melt into other creatures, leaving behind a story, a knob with a dent and a scuff, a pair of sunglasses, a mirror with the memory of your face, the ripple of syllables that was your name.