Some morning in the 7th or 8th grade, around 2007, the big story at St Rose of Lima was that someone had crashed their car in front of the school. A low silver 4-door, identical to the kind you would find in every parking lot in the waning days of Bush’s America, had crossed four lanes of traffic straight into a telephone pole. I probably didn’t think much more of the accident after a teacher shooed me and my classmates away from the window. It was odd, but not especially dramatic. There were no flames shooting out, no carnage on the road. It was a glorified fender bender.
I had probably forgotten about it entirely until I learned after school that it was my grandmother’s car. She’d had some kind of blackout, possibly related to a neurological disease that would more gradually affect her for the rest of her life. In just a couple of years, she wouldn’t be able to drive any more, and that car passed to me. I’ve been driving that 2006 Ford Taurus for half my life. Now, at long last, that car’s time is up.
Before this gets too sentimental, it’s worth mentioning that this is the biggest piece of shit car possibly still in existence. Let’s paint a picture of what my daily life getting from A to B looks like in the Taurus. There’s the usual stuff; the key fob hasn’t worked for a few years now, so the door has to be opened with the physical key. Not a problem if the lock isn’t frozen in place. If the weather is too cold, say below 30 degrees, the driver’s side door won’t latch. Nothing some bungee cords stretched across my lap between the two front doors won’t fix!
Pulling out can be challenging since the power steering stopped working. This is only really a problem in tight parking lots where I have to turn the wheel back and forth a few times. Pulling out of the Shop’n’Save takes about two minutes of laying all my weight on one side of the wheel. Gaining speed seemed to fix this problem. As one friend recalled when asked for memories of his survival in the Taurus: “I remember going left then right then left again very quickly and in succession once in the span of about 2-3 seconds. Good times.”
The rubber hose that carried washer fluid from a reservoir to the windshield long ago dissolved into an unidentifiable paste. I found this out one day when laying on the button, cursing and hollering as nothing came out of the nozzles, then discovering a puddle of fluorescent blue poison under the car. The headlights consistently had about two or three inches of standing water inside of them, despite how many holes I drilled, giving the impression of driving around in a Victorian cab by candlelight.
In true 2006 fashion, there wasn’t much of an entertainment system. Just a built-in CD player and a radio. No problem, I thought! Until I learned that the CD player had the unfortunate habit of scratching every disc that went into it. Access to my dad’s media library was restricted after I returned his copy of Superunknown gouged and permanently unplayable. At some point, the mechanism just didn’t work anymore. There’s been a bootleg copy of In Rainbows stuck in the slot since 2013, dooming me to a decade of NPR and local radio country music until somebody finally had mercy and stole the antenna off the car in a Goodwill parking lot.
The car did not smell great. No amount of gas station air fresheners could mask the lingering scent of lizard shit. I once helped a friend move houses without realizing that he had a collection of pets I can only assume came from a zoo. I remember clutching the wheel in fear while a pissed off savannah monitor screeched at me from the passenger seat.
In its final years, pieces just started falling off the car. Panels from the interior, bits of metal and plastic from the undercarriage. There was exposed wiring in the ceiling. At some point I stopped caring about what the thing looked like. The backseat was fully inaccessible because of a growing pile of Commodore computer pieces, protest signage, books, Legos, a collection of arrowheads, plus artifacts from my ill-considered phase of deciding I was a survivalist: scattered bits of a first aid kit, flare guns, tent stakes (without the canopy), and sleeping bags. When my future partner first saw the car, she pulled me aside to politely and quietly ask me if I was living inside of it. This triggered a cleaning frenzy. When the inside had been excavated, I took the thing through a car wash for probably the first time in its life, where I learned that the seals around the doors were not waterproof.
So how did this car stay roadworthy, loosely defined, despite God’s sincere effort to kill it? I can explain it with only two things. 1) The Evil Dead-esque sentience that inhabits the car and is sustained through its immortal and endless desire to cause me inconvenience, clinging to me like a curse, and 2) the charity of my friends. Mechanically inclined people in my life have to come to expect a late night text, sent from the Bellwood Sheetz parking lot after I’ve ran over a pony-sized animal (distressing) and the car won’t go into park, or when I’m stranded on the side of the interstate, or ass-backwards in the treeline after my brakeless car rolled down a hill – a text that says “what is wrong with my vehicle?”
There’s a great example of this from West Virginia in 2022. A friend and I were driving on a back road and were run off the road into a ditch. The car was fine except for a length of the intermediate pipe now dragging along the road like a pole vault. We’re smart, we’re resourceful. We tied the pipe up into the undercarriage using a phone charger cable. This worked for about a quarter of a mile until the hot pipe melted through it and stranded us again next to a mountainside transmission tower. The logical next step was using a Sawzall to carve out the entire exhaust system. When we realized the giant length of pipe wouldn’t fit inside the car, we hacked it into 3 separate pieces and tossed them into the back seat.
It was a working class vehicle. I got a call one morning from a friend of mine. The board president at the museum we both worked for had just flown in and desperately needed a ride from the airport. Could I do it? Absolutely. The conditions were set: our board president, the retired CEO of a regional shipping conglomerate who still had about $92 million in that company’s stock options, would have to ride 45 minutes back to town as the passenger in the Taurus. I refused to swap cars or clean it; I wanted him to know. Our director squashed the plan when he realized that it meant a hungover suspected communist would be alone in the rabbit warren of my car with his prized benefactor.
I guess this all begs the question – why would I drive this deathtrap for so long? I don’t have a great answer for that. Laziness, some weird inferiority complex, and fear of change probably all play into it. In trying to understand why I didn’t just leave it on the side of the highway, I consider the half dozen trips I’ve taken along the spine of the Appalachian mountains to southeastern Kentucky. One of those last trips happened after a flood that killed 40 people in my old community. Imagine the worst day of a person’s life, they’ve lost their home, the community is devastated, nobody is answering 9-1-1. They see a cloud of dust rolling down the hill towards them. Help is on the way. They squint, and who is coming to their aid? The worst car they’ve seen in their entire life. Most of the motley volunteers in those bad first days after the flood drove cars like mine. Chopshop pickup trucks with scrap metal welded on, vans wrapped in clingfilm to keep their occupants warm at night. I saw a lot of garbage cars driven by haggard and well-meaning people. I didn’t see anyone worth $92 million. I don’t know if that answers the question, but it’s as close as I’ll get.
Towards the end of its life, there was only one guy who would overlook the obvious decay and pass the Taurus for inspection. Bart’s garage is a gravel lot set behind a methadone clinic outside the city, a fitting place for this unholy work. I could always rely on my own personal Dr. Frankenstein to breathe some life into the desecrated corpse of the car and slap a sticker on the window for money. But even he couldn’t justify it this time around. The tires, as he described them, looked like bologna skins. Nothing new there, but the “time for a new car, buddy” text came because of a series of rusty holes that had appeared in the frame. In the end, I feel good knowing the car wasn’t brought down by some mundane mechanical problem, but that the actual structure was breaking down. The accumulative disaster of what this thing and I have done to one another has finally destroyed it in totality. But here I am, mourning.
I cleaned the inside of the car a couple months ago. It wasn’t my usual rummaging triggered by something starting to smell or my partner wondering what happened to all our coffee mugs. The car had ants, so I spent an afternoon doing an actual cleaning, the kind that hadn’t been done since probably 2007. (In hindsight, I wonder if the ant colony was holding the car together.) I shitcanned the detritus of my whole life as a teenager and young adult. I vacuumed the floors and cleaned the ⅛ inch of grime encrusted on every surface, the equivalent of chewing some gum to beat a Breathalyzer.
While scrubbing the center console, I felt a latch under the air conditioning knobs that I hadn’t noticed in 16 years of driving the things around. When I pulled the latch, a tray sprung out towards me. The tray was filled with a whirling mound of fossilized cigarette ash. It was left over from my grandma. She died in 2009, not too long after she crashed this car in front of my elementary school. Strange to think that I had unknowingly spent all this time driving around with her own contribution to this mess.
Briefly, I considered keeping the ashes there as some kind of memorial, but decided against it. It was time.
