Drive of Shame

At the time, I was driving an 8-year-old domestic sports car. I’m too ashamed to admit which kind. 

When I got the car, eight years before, I thought I was pretty hot.  Dad woke me up one Saturday morning and told me to clean out my old car and get dressed.  He was going to buy me a car.

The old car was a poo-brown diesel embarrassment that was the butt of many jokes in my private high school class of 75 students.  Many of the kids were tooling around in Porsches, BMWs and Mercedes and here I was with my made-in-America-by-God (dad bought his second foreign car in 50 years and 35 cars about 3 years ago) four door family sedan that looked like the excrement of a very large, very square industrial complex.  On hills, the thing spitted and sputtered like a 98-year-old man trying to get up after a forced 90-minute run.  I sighed as I watched my classmates zoom past at what appeared to be very dangerous speeds but couldn’t have been any faster than a bike.

Dad had done some research and knew what he wanted me to look at, but it was all in vain.  I fell in love with the first car I saw, and it wasn’t on dad’s list.  I made a lot of whiny Veruca Saltian “I want it now” noises, but dad said we’d come back after looking at all the others. 

Nothing compared.  I drove home in my new car, my new love, after promising to pay dad $100 to have absolutely no impact on offsetting the cost.  It was his way of not spoiling me even though he was buying me a car and covering the insurance and giving me a gas card, as he had for all his children.

The next Monday, I drove to school with the top down, even though it wasn’t quite 60 degrees out, and zoomed into the parking lot blasting, “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel on the stereo.  I’m too ashamed to admit that too, but figured it was too funny to omit.

After rolling on the ground in laughter at my entrance, my friends oohed and aahed for about three seconds before going on their merry ways.  Little did we realize that this car would become a catalyst for so much amusement.

Like the time my friend and I were cruising the strip (ashamed and amused, again) and someone commented on the car, we ignored them, and they gave us some suggestion about making love.  After which my friend yelled “Fuck you?  No!  Fuck me!” out the window.  Or when, late in college, the power windows gave out and passengers had to push the window out from the inside a bit while pushing the power button in order to send it up the track straight. Or its many, many, many trips to the beach.

I was tooling down Cobb Parkway in Atlanta with a friend during its last year.  The car had become the Velveteen Rabbit of domestic sports cars.  The windows were crooked and couldn’t be closed properly.  The top leaked.  The muffler made an anguished grunting noise.  The paint was swirled and scratched and chipped.  The stereo speakers were cracked and handled bass poorly.

My windows were cracked open and I was blasting music.  At a stop light, I saw a guy standing just outside a car dealership who was gesturing and waving and pointing at me.  Probably a salesguy, I thought.  I smiled, thinking he was checking me out.  After all, I was the hot blonde in the hot car, right?  I rolled down the window a bit more to wave and make sure he wasn’t gesturing for something more ominous, like a forgotten item on my roof (as has happened before).

“Time to trade!” he yelled.