Me and Cars: A Bridge Too Far (See What I Did There?)

As vintage Jerry Seinfeld, a noted car enthusiast who’s turned his fervor into a TV show, might have asked, “What is it about cars?”

Cars and I have a very simple, very comfortable relationship: I pay as little attention to them as possible, and they take me where I want to go. I don’t hurt their feelings by trading them in willy-nilly every year or so, and they reward me with reasonable-to-excellent mileage and reliability that I’d be surprised to find coming from anything or any person, for that matter. I’ve had the same Toyota Prius since 2001, and I’m happy with it. I’m not in love with it, I don’t adore it. I don’t slap it on its hood or pat it on its trunk adoringly. I merely drive it. It seems OK with this.

I don’t fuss with my cars overmuch. I don’t wash them (like making beds, what’s the point?), and I seldom clean them out. I generally park it under a maple, and sometimes little seeds float down and wedge themselves into the gap between the trunk and the frame, and little trees sprout. Strangers are inordinately enamored of this phenomenon. One couple in the ferry line was particularly charmed, and I tried not to take too much credit for it. My friend Ed said I had created my own little ecosystem.

But I’m not cavalier; I take them in to see mechanics more regularly than I visit my dentist and eye doctor. When something goes wrong, I don’t badger my mechanic for extensive explanations, as it’s generally pretty minor, and I don’t understand anyway. I suspect that Ranji at Rolling Bay knows this and indulges me. I’m not like a helicopter parent; I don’t embarrass my teenager Prius by hanging around the doctor’s office.

And I am not without sentiment. On the rare occasion when we trade in a car, I suffer the full range of emotions as the old car sits alone in the dealership parking lot. I feel guilty about the betrayal. I grieve that our years together are over. I can sense the old car seething and refusing to meet my eye, turning its trunk on me and ignoring the new car.

But change happens. Life goes on. When parts begin to fall off of a car, like they did on our 19- year old Volvo, it’s time to put it out of its misery and move on.

There’s no point, I think, in obsessing over cars. They either work or they don’t. I freely admit to having no aptitude whatsoever for most machines, and this one seems particularly absurd: somehow a petroleum product catches on fire in such a way as to create the energy sufficient and sufficiently manageable to be conveyed to other pieces of machine to propel the whole car forward or back as necessary? Right. OK. Whatever you say. A cellphone almost makes more sense.

So it’s beyond me how cars fascinate so many men. It apparently attacks them at a young age. A young classmate of Kate’s, Jackson, became so obsessed that he wrote Jay Leno, a noted car collector, of his fascination with Leno’s fascination. Leno not only invited Jackson to visit him when he chanced to visit Los Angeles, but, when the young lad did, Leno treated him to an extensive tour. I can barely imagine the kindness but not such an event.

I have a brother-in-law so tortured by the same obsession that he forces my sister to drive every year or two from the west coast to some midwestern state where there is, I swear, a Corvette museum. Wouldn’t one think that one needed to visit that museum, oh, never? I have to confess to an enormous case of schadenfreude when the museum developed a sinkhole and eight Corvettes were destroyed. Visit the museum’s website, a garish, red-headlined catastrophe, and view its devotion to this event, the story trumpeted as though something had gone absolutely right. (There’s a “Give Now” button for those weirdly inclined.)

In a not quite parenthetical expression but definitely as a settling of scores, my brother-in-law used to chastise me for driving somewhere after having a couple of drinks. In another completely distinct but contextually adjacent conversation, he averred that he had probably driven more miles stoned than sober. Welcome to the amusing world of hypocrisy.

Speaking of hypocrites, now Trump is wheeling back requirements on mileage. In this sense, cars are affirmatively Bad Things. The earth is going to die soon, and cars are a big part of it. Yet I read that the Chinese, new to obsessing about cars and excited by the possibilities, form driving clubs so they can drive 600 miles in a weekend just for the hell of it. We are doomed.

My nonchalance with motor-driven vehicles began early. A more than typically hare-brained youth, I regularly backed up into someone else’s car. I don’t recall what I did wrong first, but I do remember taking tall, blonde, blue-eyed Wendy Thornton (her real name!) on a date one Saturday night when I was 16, and, as we crossed railroad tracks in Ft. Lauderdale, I heard a thump and a click down in the innards of the car. Later Wendy let me put my tongue in her mouth, and, suitably gratified, I never took her out again.

The next day, I went to church—I would normally say, no, that has to be an inaccurate memory, as I thought I had quit all that by the age or 16, but whatever—and then I heard a thump, and glanced in the rear view mirror, and flames burst out of the back. So this must have been one of our Volkswagen Beetles, with the engine in the rear. At some point, appropriately enough, a priest came charging out with a fire extinguisher, hellfire being one of his specialties.

A good friend’s wife is very diligent about their cars, so it’s not necessarily a guy thing. She’s intent on having their cars “detailed”—now there’s an interesting term. I can be very firm on the details in a piece of writing, especially a contract. But “to detail” a car? Isn’t that a noun, not a verb? People are apparently very serious about “detailing.” I’m not sure what it means, but I know I’d never spend money on it.

Once, my friend Ed and I had lunch, and I mentioned that I had written a six-page single-spaced letter to Kate about money—investing, debt, finances. I’m afraid of an untimely, unexpected demise (I used to back into cars, after all), so I wanted to make sure to document what I’ve learned. We walked outside after lunch, and Ed gazed down at my Prius, with the dirt-darkened lower sides, the bashed-in driver’s side rear end (why bother doing more than making it vaguely presentable?) He asked, did you also write her a letter about car maintenance? Harsh but fair.

More on collectors: I would submit that paying $3.4 million for the Mustang that Steve McQueen drove in the movie “Bullitt” is taking things a little too far. I don’t pay anywhere near that much for my New Yorker, and I get a lot more articles than just one. I wonder how much Jay Leno would have paid? If he wasn’t interested, why not? It’s all a mystery to me.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/classic-cars/iconic-68-bullitt-mustang-shatters-records-and-sells-for-3-4m/ar-BBYQ2Ab

Think what else you could buy with $3.4 million: Chinese take-out for life, at a bare minimum.

Recently, my wife went to a reunion of band nerds from her high school. A recently-married woman brought her husband, who makes people uncomfortable. You can be listening to someone talk, and gaze at her, and if you glance at this guy, he’s staring at you, very intently. Maybe he’s wondering what kind of car you drive. Another friend got stuck talking with him. They’re both Republicans, and they’re both crazy about cars. They can talk to each other and not annoy the rest of us. Maybe that, in the end, is what cars are good for? If not, then I really don’t get it.