Take Her Out for a Spin
I never thought I’d fall in love like
this again.
Gleefully giddy and blushing when I think
of her, I’m in the full throes of a mad affair.
Don’t phone the National Enquirer, Bonnie
not only approves, but she introduced me to her.
I’m in love with my car—head-over-heels
about my previously-owned, gently-used six-year old BMW. I’m on cloud 9,
as well as parked in front of it.
I swore off woman-car love in the disco era
when my silver-blue 1964 Corvette convertible was hauled off on a flat bed
truck, its back wheels having fallen off. We’d been together through
thick (often) and thin (not so often), but the speed bump I hit that day
ended it all. I’d known her most of my life.
I was there in 1964, on Lincoln’s
birthday (when we actually celebrated it on Feb.12) picking up my
mother’s new sports car from the dealer. It cost a whopping $4,000 and
everybody thought my father was nutty for buying it for his wife.
By 1968 I was permitted to drive the car to
college, 250 miles from New York City to Washington, DC. Sadly, I’d
learned to drive in Manhattan, meaning I could parallel park like a champ
but had never driven over 30 mph. You can imagine what happened when I hit
the Jersey Turnpike. By the Delaware Memorial Bridge I’d lost count of
the number of middle finger salutes I’d gotten for creeping along in the
right lane. It took me nine hours to get to DC and I arrived on campus
shaken and needing controlled substances. Fortunately, in 1968, campus was
awash with them.
I re-learned to drive in that sports car,
and adored her, even as she fish-tailed away from stop signs, skidded
wildly in the snow, and, in her later years, required an entire roll of
Bounty Quicker-Picker-upper paper towels stuffed above the visors to keep
me dry on rainy days. It was true love.
Together, we campaigned, then cried for
Bobby Kennedy, drove to the hinterlands of Wilmington, Delaware to see a
friend play the Dupont in Hair and sat transfixed by the car radio as men
walked on the moon. My love drove me to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to march
against the Vietnam War, waited outside countless theatres while I
rehearsed shows, honked for joy when Tricky Dick Nixon resigned, witnessed
the dawn of disco, and breathed her last just about the same time my
heterosexuality did.
After that, my personal affairs turned
happy, but I pined mightily for that car. What followed was a succession
of unsatisfying relationships—a station wagon I called the Trash-mobile;
an old Dodge that was so broad in the beam I once ripped off the door
handles on both sides getting into a parking space. Then I had some kind
of American Motors contraption with no braking system whatsoever, which
had me doing wheelies at red lights. Enter the cute little blue 1980
Chevette Bonnie drove when I met her. The very name Chevette, so near and
yet so far.
By then I was out and proud, with Martina
Navratilova telling me to buy a Subaru. I liked the Lesbaru. What followed
was a bout of serial monogamy, as I purchased one Subaru after another,
winding up with a 1998 anniversary edition Outback. We were comfortable
together. Not exciting, but a marriage of convenience.
But one day that damned Subaru turned on
me, blew a head gasket and left me in the lurch. For a while I made do
driving Bonnie’s Tracker, but it rode like a farm vehicle, skated across
multiple lanes in the wind, and was, to be honest, above me. So far, in
fact, I had trouble climbing into the cockpit.
But Bonnie and I couldn’t decide what
kind of car I should get, and frankly I was not about to pay what it used
to cost to buy a house for a car that didn’t send shivers up my spine.
“I want my old car back,” I’d whine and Bonnie knew I was talking
about a 42-year-old Corvette.
One could be had, alright, but only at the
cost of a new Lexus. Besides, the phrase “high maintenance girlfriend”
clearly applied.
Even if I could have paid the ransom for a
mid-century Corvette, the thing would have added twenty minutes to my
daily commute: ten minutes to get myself down into the buckets and another
ten minutes to pry myself out. Those were the days, my friend, and they
were over.
Finally, one morning we stopped at a
well-known luxury used car lot. The salesman, who, by the way, now has his
own very successful luxury car lot on Savannah Road (You go, Bryan!)
introduced me to a sweet little sea-foam BMW convertible on the lot. One
look and I heard violins. I instantly wanted to load it into a U-Haul and
have it move in with me.
Surprisingly, its price tag was less than
I’d pay for a new General Motors sedan and a loveless marriage.
So off we went, my Beamer and I, on our
honeymoon—a drive to Broadkill Beach as I recall. Along the way I
realized the two of us had some issues.
First, my garage was impenetrable. Subarus
and Trackers are hardy outdoor machines, not requiring the designation
“garage-kept” after their names in ads. But for the new baby, shelter
was a priority. And our garage was a solid waste landfill. I called
1-800-Got-Crap and divested ourselves of eight years of pack rat debris.
Then I determined that my love and I needed
prophylactics—protection from the still over-stuffed tool and
book-filled garage. A Beamer condom?
Bonnie and I headed downtown to find the
next best thing: noodles. Not Chicken Lo Mein, but the Styrofoam noodles
that keep me afloat in a swimming pool. At the store, we picked out
several pink and purple perpendicular noodles and marched to the cash
register. ”What kinky things are you girls up to?” We just smiled.
Back home, I stapled the noodles to the
pertinent book shelf edges, blunting every possible surface where a car
door could connect. I gave
her wide berth. Then I screwed my decorative Schnauzer plate to the front
bumper and adhered the rainbow cling-on to the back.
Having spent the past two decades driving
unloved and dangerously unwashed vehicles doubling as trash cans and
fast-food wrapper repositories, I’d have to change my foolish ways.
I vowed there would be no trash in my car.
No eating. No coffee drinking. No scratching off scratch-offs. I would
wash the car weekly and have it detailed frequently.
And I’ve done pretty well. I get a senior
citizen discount at the car wash (my first, but I’m so cheap, I don’t
mind). I remove all debris from the car nightly. And, as soon as my
auto-obsessed friend Julie tells me I need to get the dirt off my wheels,
I attend to it.
I
love my new car. Long may she wave. If you see me driving around, you wave
too, please.
Fay Jacobs is the author of As I Lay Frying—a Rehoboth
Beach Memoir and Fried & True—Tales from Rehoboth Beach. Contact her
at www.fayjacobs.com.
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