My car died last weekend. It was a quiet death, sudden though not unexpected -- she had given me 149,941 glorious, palindromic miles; but I miss her just the same. Actually, I more than miss her -- I'm terrified at the prospect of life without an automobile.
I'm a child of the suburbs, and we, as a breed, are distinct from city dwellers and farm folk. People who grow up in the city don't have cars; half the places they go are a stone's throw away, parking is a nuisance, and they can always take the bus or subway. People in the country live so far from everything that getting there and back is a chore; as an economist friend of mine would say, their utility-per- mile ratio is low, so their interactions with automobiles are major events. But suburbanites are just the right distance apart: too far to walk, and near enough to make driving easy.
So we drive everywhere. To the city, to the movies, to the 7-11 for milk. We spend so much time with our cars that they're the fourth part of our psyches: id, ego, superego, and automobile. We have to have cars, because without them, we're cut off from humanity. Man is a social animal, and being carless is distressing stuff.
Unfortunately, this isn't the first time I've suffered a car loss. When the tow truck rolled carefully into the parking garage at the mall last Sunday to carry my dear departed away, I had a flashback to four years ago, when my first was taken from me.
Late in my junior year of college, a friend asked to borrow my car to drive to an interview at the Project for the Republican Future in Washington. "Sure," I said, smiling. "Just bring her back in one piece."
A few hours later the phone rang. My friend was worked up. "So," I asked eagerly, "did you get the internship?"
"Well, uh, yeah . . .," he answered nervously.
"Great!" I said. "So where'd you park the car?"
"There has," he said deliberately, "been a problem."
All sorts of horrible images flew through my mind: my Oldsmobile with its front bumper dangling from the body, held by a few colored wires; my Oldsmobile with a dent above the passenger rear tirewell. What if, I thought with a gasp, the lovely brown car that took me to my prom were to wind up disfigured by one of those dreadful replacement body panels whose color doesn't even approximate a match?
"Okay," I said, steadying myself, "what happened? Did you blow out a tire? Tires are fine, I can replace a tire."
"Jonathan," he said, "it blew up."
Relieved, I laughed. Cars don't blow up, so he must be exaggerating. And normally when people exaggerate, I thought, the problem isn't that serious. "What do you mean it blew up?" I said. "What happened?"
"It blew up."
"As in the muffler fell out or the engine stalled?"
"As in fire trucks and explosions. Blew up," he said quietly.
I was too shocked to speak, but I could listen, and in the course of the next ten minutes, he explained it all. He had been driving home on I-95 when he heard a loud pop, followed by a steady stream of smoke from the front end of the car. He pulled over and got out to take a look at the engine, but before he could open the hood, he saw orange flames lick out from the underbelly. He calmly walked back, grabbed his things from the passenger seat, and stepped away a few paces. Then that Oldsmobile, my beloved first car, exploded. Just like on the A-Team.
Within minutes, two fire-engines arrived on the scene and hosed her down. A mechanic from a service station just off the next exit showed up and explained to my friend proudly that he had called the fire department when he "seen the pillar of thick black smoke all the way from my garage." He said he "just knew something was exploding on the freeway!"
"But I got the internship," my friend added wanly.
It was a difficult time for me. Coping with the loss was hard enough, but, worse, the corpse of my car was waiting for me to identify in an automotive morgue in Maryland. Then, adding insult to injury, the New Jersey DMV spent weeks arguing with me. They kept demanding I return my license plates.
The final battle with the DMV came almost two months after my car had passed on. "We have to have those plates before you can register your new car," a squat woman wheezed at me with a voice that only Philip Morris could love.
"I honestly don't have them," I explained. "My car blew up."
"Cars don't blow up," she snapped.
"You would think so," I answered, "wouldn't you."
JONATHAN V. LAST