It is sad to walk down a poor street lined with $60,000 houses and to see, as one often does, a $45,000 car in one of the driveways. It is often some kind of macho Mustang, freshly washed, gaudy of hue, souped up, and glittery with detailing. What are these people thinking? Why not get a perfectly good car for $5,000 and put the remainder towards a $100,000 house so your first-grader doesn’t have to sleep in the utility closet? What George Orwell said of poor people’s miserable dietary habits can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to their taste in cars: “When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food,” he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier. “You want something a little
bit ‘tasty.’ ”
But I never found cars exciting. I didn’t own one until I was well into my 20s. Then I owned several in rapid succession. It was always the same. They’d steam, make noise, acquire nicknames like “The Old Shitbox,” and die. During the Clinton administration I had a 1983 Nissan Stanza with manual transmission, a driver-side door pocked with cigarette burns, and a back bumper that had been half clawed off by a pillar in an Arlington, Virginia, garage. I had bought it for $1,800 from a journalist colleague in 1992. “Careful on the highway,” she said as she left. “It sometimes loses power.”
“What do you mean, ‘loses power’?” I asked.
I found out one midnight in mid-January, near the top of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, driving back from New York with my girlfriend (now, amazingly enough, my wife). With the pedal to the metal I had the car growling loudly up the incline at its maximum speed of 53 mph when it made a foop! foop! sound and the life drained out of it. Had we made it to the top of the bridge, we might have coasted down. But we didn’t. So I put the thing in neutral, looked through the back windshield, said “Hang on!” and backed down the bridge as the highway traffic whooshed by us. At the bottom there was an emergency call box. The state trooper was cursing on the line before I could even tell him what was wrong. “You the guy we saw on the closed-circuit backing that Shitbox down the bridge?” he hollered.
Those days are gone. I own a limousine now. Almost 20 years ago my father—widowed, remarried, and intoxicated by the dot-com boom—took a vacation in Germany and got the idea he would buy a car there. Funny, it was he who had taught me there were better things to spend your money on than cars. What a collection of jalopies we had owned: a rattletrap Eisenhower-era Plymouth Valiant that he drove into the 1970s; a Kennedy-vintage seven-mile-a-gallon Buick Electra 225, which we got just in time for the first oil crisis; a Mercury in which the sun had baked cracks in the fake leather under the windshield, releasing runnels of cheap foam. I wondered what kind of Teutonic trashcan he would come back with.
But in the grip of an idea, my father was obsessive, imaginative, relentless. In for a penny, in for a pound. He got a BMW. Not just a BMW but an extra-long 740iL, with a car phone and a six-CD changer in the trunk. It was the most expensive object he’d ever bought, very much including our house. The thing was preposterous. The only people I knew who drove BMWs were certain of my rapacious college classmates who would rather talk about leveraged buyouts and debt-for-equity swaps than Wyatt’s love poetry or Botticelli’s oils. You could recognize them by the big-lensed goggle-eyed glasses that made them look like carp, by their margarine- and salmon-colored “power” ties, by their two-toned, white-collared “power” shirts . . . and by their BMWs, which they called “Beemers.”
When my father died last spring, it was my responsibility to dispose of the car. I loved having this little piece of him in the weeks after he died—the mints he’d left in the door, his golf tees in the glove box, a shopping list in his handwriting under the radio—but it was way too grand for me to keep. It was with a heavy heart that I took it to the dealers. I told my sisters we would share the proceeds. “The proceeds?” they laughed. The car oozed oil all over the ground! Its doors were rusted! It shook when you drove it in the city or in hot weather! I asked my wife if she thought it was safe to park such an elegant car in front of the house, and she looked at me as if I were out of my mind.
At the lot they offered me $1,800. Had this not been precisely what I paid for the Nissan Shitbox in 1992, I might have left it. As it was, I drove it home and parked it in the driveway.
