T w e n t y S i d e d

This week, instead of my usual Sims content, I’ve just gotten home from a one-day eight-hour drive (four hours each way) to go buy myself ‘my’ ‘first’ car. I think because of this, I’ll take a break. Instead of writing a thousand words about the Sims, I’ll write…two and half thousand…about my cars up until this point. Right. Makes sense.

This’ll have to be in two parts. I’ll do one today, and one tomorrow.

Those of you who read my dad’s autobiography might remember that as a toddler, he was deeply neurotic about cars.  I was the exact same way growing up, but I never grew out of it. It’s strange, reading that portion of his childhood and remembering the exact same meltdowns I’d had when I was little. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that could be genetic, besides just autism but autism is very different from person to person, and we carried that exact same quirk. I’m almost entirely face-blind and I remember people on a few different factors, cars, hair, height, and glasses. I remember losing my mind as a toddler when any of those things changed. You couldn’t cut your hair, get a new car, shave, or take off your glasses without my pocket-sized self falling on the floor in complete meltdown.  I’ve learned to handle my emotions like a grown up, but I still recoil from the idea of those things changing to this day.

All this to say, I get very attached to cars.

When I was little we had ‘Daisy’, a something-or-other something-or-other with tape on the back window that broke down all the time. I insisted on naming her, much to the displeasure of my mom. I think I was really into Mario Kart at that point, hence ‘Daisy’. I was too small to really formulate super sturdy memories, but I remember when Daisy had to go. I was inconsolable. My grandma got her put into a demolition derby, which somehow helped. We got to go to an event and send her off. Weird way to cope, watching it get smashed, but cool, kid, whatever works.

Our next car was the Toyota Sienna, whom I was explicitly banned from naming. (Although for the first few months, I called ‘Birdie’ in my head.)  The Sienna broke down sometimes, but never for long or expensive. The Sienna was my first experience with a good car. My family got rid of her after I moved out, and I think she still ran then? I was really bummed when I visited and suddenly there was a new car, but what were they going to do? Call me and let me say goodbye to a car?

In my adult life, I’ve had three cars before this one, but this is the first I will ever have in my name. I got my driver’s license at twenty, meaning I will have been driving for five years now. If you do the math on that, you’ll discover I’m just over a one car a year ratio, which is…abysmal.

My first car was a 1995 Honda Accord. I named her Mercy, for how I felt when we got her. She was a gift from my in-laws, which allowed us to get to and from work without bumming rides off of people or borrowing their much nicer vehicle. We were trying to save up for a car but it wasn’t happening fast enough. She was old, smelled like my great-grandma’s house, and had a rosary in the glove-box when we got her home. My husband and I were ecstatic. The car was kept in my in-laws names because the insurance was already monstrous with two brand-new drivers behind the wheel.

Mercy’s name became quickly more of an ‘oh honey’ tone, though, as she leaked every single fluid possible within the first four months. I was stupid enough to try and drive her an hour away when a friend I should have been setting more boundaries with asked me to drive her to meet a guy she met on Tinder…Yeah, that went about as well as you could expect. It was a mistake on every single level I could have mistake’d. I fucked-up all the way up fuck-up mountain and fell off the other fucking side. Mercy overheated and after that became a…very special needs vehicle.

We discovered after breaking down on the side of the road many times that she would run for a little while as long as you blasted the heat on high while you drove with the windows down. As long as you topped off the leaking coolant every twenty minutes, you’d chug to a stop at least a mile within where you were trying to get. This was in deep west Texas, in the summer. But we didn’t have the money to fix her and so on we went. When Mercy finally chugged her last, she got sold for scrap, and we were without for a few months.

The next car was again a gift from my in-laws. I should explain real quick why we didn’t just buy ourselves a car, at the time.

Elliot and Peter were making 7.25 each on part-time hours, and most of it was going towards keeping us in basic needs and gas. The drive to and from town was 20 minutes each way, and jobs were slim, my full time job was to drive them to and from work. One was on day and one was on night shifts, and their boss was…not a very nice woman. My schedule looked like this:

– 6 AM: Pick Elliot up from work
– 2 PM: Take Peter to work
– 9 PM – Take Elliot to work
– 11 PM – Pick Peter up from work

This was never at a rate that let Elliot just take the car and bring it home before Peter’s shift. Their boss knew they lived together, but refused to put them on any sort of logical shifts that would facilitate carpooling, staggering, or even the driver getting a full night’s sleep.  This meant we were spending enough on gas for nearly three hours of total driving a day, and I couldn’t get a job myself to help make ends meet. Days off were random and often just sprung on us so they didn’t hit ‘full time’ hours and get benefits, so we couldn’t plan to do things. In any other city, you’d just change jobs, but the town we lived in had nine thousand people and was going through a crash. There was nothing else. For context, the nearest Walmart was an hour’s drive away. This was the best we could do.

So, my in-laws and Elliot’s grandparents went in together to buy us…Hiccup. Hiccup was my favorite car, ever. He was a 2005 Toyota Matrix, and it was love at first site. He was dark blue, and had hand crank windows and a CD player. I would, on a bad day, just go out and sit in the front seat and just sit there…I don’t know? Basking? We named him Hiccup so that when he broke down we could say it was just a Hiccup. We were prepared this time for him to break down a lot.

He didn’t actually break down all that much. We’d have the occasional ‘hiccup’, but at the end of the day, he was pretty reliable. That was…until the incident.

Bay Jubilee Oldest child of Shamus Young. They/Them