The car isn’t messy. In fact, the interior is pretty spotless compared to most of my friends’ cars. I even vacuum it sometimes and I’m not even a very clean person. The treatment my room receives doesn’t even come close to the daily purging my car undergoes. I keep my car clean because it is the only thing that I can do to disguise its other shortcomings, like a fresh coat of paint on a condemned house.
Almost the entire body of the car has been replaced more than once. Both the windshield and the rear-view mirror have spent extended, overlapping periods of time detached from the car. The sunroof hasn’t been opened since it broke on my sister when she first got the car her junior (my freshman) year of high school. The rear hubcap on the passenger side fell off and rolled away by the Shell station in Lake Oswego two summers ago. Last year the door latch stopped working and I spent the week awaiting repair driving with my right hand while my left handed clutched the door shut. It wasn’t just the thought of the door swinging open while driving that had me on edge. The car emits a sound not unlike the ring of the original Nokia cell phone, alerting the driver to the fact that the door is ajar and also that the car was built in 1995. Each time I weakened my grip on the door, it would queue the alarm.
One time the windshield wipers malfunctioned so that they were on constantly. (It was last summer, the only time it doesn’t rain in Portland.) This is just one example in a slough of electrical problems. The lights in the dash haven’t been illuminated since I’ve owned the car except for once when I gave the AC knob a hard turn and they flickered for a moment. When I left the country for five months, I left my car in a friend’s driveway. When I came back, the odometer and speedometer stopped working.
Airport runs are always fun. I chuckle a little bit anytime someone asks me to “pop the trunk.” It’s almost cute—how easy they assume it will be. To get the luggage out of the trunk, it is necessary that I turn of the engine. I prefer not to leave the car on in neutral with the e-brake set, because I don’t trust it to keep the car stopped on flat ground. Besides, I need the key to open the trunk. Maybe the button conveniently located in the center console once “popped the trunk” for the original owner, twelve years ago, but it surely hasn’t since.
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All deficiencies and hazards considered, one can imagine my lack of surprise when I left the house the other day and found a white strip of paper with the word “WARNING” printed on it in big, red letters tucked under my windshield wipers. I always thought that I would be the one to apply that label first.
The warning was twofold. First, I was parked the wrong way on the street. Second, I was parked with expired plates—this, it would seem, is illegal no matter which direction the car is facing. I recalled then that at some almost grotesquely premature time I received a notice in the mail that my plates would expire in something like three months. This notice was tucked into the stack of papers piled on top of my filing crate, the place where all the responsibilities I’m avoiding go to die.
Recently I’ve been on this kick to curb irresponsible habits like these, so I decided to deal with the registration situation immediately. I would take my car to the DEQ to have it smog-checked and when I came back, I would park it in the right direction. I checked the DEQ hours online and discovered that I had about a half hour to get out to the Clackamas center. This would be just enough time, maybe. So in spite of my campaign for greater responsibility, I set out for this errand like I do most errands: late and with a vague idea of where I was going.
I was feeling lucky because this trip fell into the twenty percent of the time that the speedometer and odometer function normally. This feeling, however, was negated when the car let out the most dreadful sound in its repertoire just as I was entering I-205. I recently had an oil leak fixed, but they were only certain to have fixed the majority of the problem. (This confuses me, because I didn’t realize there was a leaking spectrum. It seems to me a car either leaks or it doesn’t.) Consequently, the oil gets low and the car releases a harsh beeping sound to let me know. I keep a quart of oil in the trunk for just such occasions, but had used up the last one without replacing it.
“Will they even let you smog-check a car with your oil light on?” I wondered. Stopping to put oil in the car would cut into precious time, but so would blowing up on the freeway.
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A feeling of anxiety crept upon me as I pulled into the DEQ test station. I remembered my first visit two years prior.
“You know, your muffler’s been ripped off?” the man trying to affix a large hose to my absent muffler said to me.
“Yeah. I know.”
At the time I didn’t feel like explaining that on one of my famous exits, I emerged from my driveway late, with a vague idea of where I was going and with a trashcan that had somehow rolled under the car and attached itself to the muffler dragging behind me.
Confronting the state of disrepair that I have allowed my car to reach in front of the DEQ man, or anyone for that matter, is not a situation I enjoy being in because it forces me to recognize a side of myself that I often try to hide. It is the side where I keep all of the things that might not hold up against the standards of a realistic world or the standards imposed on me by the people who reside in it. Pulling into the test station, I couldn’t help but feel that the quality of my emissions wasn’t all that was being tested. My smog check was rapidly becoming a reality check.
This time, it was a woman who would perform the test. She said little to me—just scanned the barcode on the inside of my door and hooked my car up to the hose without mention of the muffler. She didn’t ask me any questions that would expose how little I knew about the status of the car or how to fix it. The roof of the cavernous warehouse didn’t open overhead and lightning didn’t strike me down, smiting me for my irresponsibility like I feared it would. We passed the test.
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My father has two expressions that he alternates using when discussing the car: “That car is a miracle vehicle” and “I don’t ever want to see that car again.” There is little chance of the latter happening, save for the times when my parents visit Portland. As for the former, it is absolutely true. I often wonder how a car that has received such little attention over its years serving two sisters throughout high school and college in three different states has managed to survive.
For explanation, I have to look to that hidden side of me mentioned earlier. The only reason my twelve-year old car with so many handicaps should still be running today is that it believes in magic, too. It knows that if I am supposed to go somewhere, it will take me there; that there is still plenty of going to be gone; and that we’re not there yet.
