Every new beginning...

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end"- Closing Time by Semisonic

My first car on our last day together.

In this story, the beginning was sometime in mid-2003. I was entering my senior year of high school and there was absolutely no way on this planet I was taking the bus to school. I wanted, nay needed, a car. My dad asked me what kind of car I would like to have. I told him, in so many words, that I had only two stipulations but they were of the utmost importance:

1) I hated coupes, and

2) I hated Monte Carlos.

So, on a Saturday morning, my dad and I loaded into his truck and headed off to his cousin's house. He was selling his son's car and knew we were looking. My dad figured that this was perfect. I could get a cheap ride and he and my mom wouldn't have to worry about too big a jump in car insurance. I remember being slightly excited by the prospect of having my own car but inside dire reservations were swirling. I didn't want to let go (a recurring theme of my life) of The Whistle - my mom's 97' Toyota Corolla. I didn't feel comfortable letting go of the car I had learned to drive in; the car that transported me, Andy, Corey, and Wittman to McDonald's for breakfast and then to school every Friday for almost two years; the car that for what seemed like a several mile radius, emanated an endearing screeeeeeee sound that my friends and I had come to love.

But it was to be my car. My first car! I could get over The Whistle for my own car, right? Of course, I could...

And then I saw the car. It was maroon. It was long. It looked, to me, like a fish. We got closer. I looked at my dad with one of those faces that I am sure all of those that are close to me are very familiar with. The 'what in the heavenly f**k is wrong with you?' face. There it sat, right in front of me. What was to become my very first car was, in fact, a 1996 two-god damn door, Monte-f***ing Carlo. Despite my apiculately simple, two (two!) criteria, my old man managed to violate both. I was sure, at this point, that every last particle of matter within the universe was against me. Their singular, collective purpose was clearly to destroy my happiness because here it was. A two-door Monte Carlo when all I said was I'd prefer not to have a two-door Monte Carlo. But, the butterfly flapped it's wings in Jakarta causing Event A, that lead to Event B, that lead to Event C, etc. until my dad's cousin's son had to opt for the two-door Monte Carlo and then had to be selling it at precisely the same time I was looking for my first car and god damn it I can't believe you just drove me all the way to Bethel Park to show me a f***ing two-door Monte Carlo!

But beggars can't be choosers and unfortunately, I was undoubtedly a beggar. So, in we went, me into the driver's seat and my dad into the passenger. I started her up and pulled out of the driveway on my first test drive. Although I can't remember where we went exactly, I remember finding a comfort zone really quickly. I was (and remain to this day) anxious driving something that wasn't mine. I went slow. Really slow, but by the time we got back, my dad had wisely explained to me the benefits of paying the $3,000 his cousins were asking for and taking this two-door Monte Carlo. Hell, we knew it was taken care of. His cousins son was a normal guy. He didn't take it off-roading or drag race it down Route 88 and at this point all I needed was something to take me from A to B. And as he said these things, and I remember this vividly, I just settled into my 'money position'. I leaned back and and rested my forearm on the middle console and gripped the bottom-right of the steering wheel.

Wow.

It felt good. My body was stretched out just the right amount. I wasn't nearly hunched over like I used to be in the Corolla. The windows went down at the push and hold of a button (had I only known...). Yeah, it was a little bigger but that was easy enough to handle...and what my dad said did make sense. I...I...liked it? I did. I wrote a check for 2/3 and my dad wrote one for the other 1/3 and it was mine. My first car. A two-door, maroon, 1996 Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

Outside of the car being a coupe and a Monte Carlo, it didn't have a CD player so the first line of business after the purchase of the car was to head to Best Buy for a cassette player adapter. You know those brilliant inventions for people that didn't want to/couldn't shell out the $300 to have a CD player installed, with the cassette tape with a wire growing off of it that connected to your portable CD player that you listened to with giant, 25-minute-hair-gel-job-messing-up headphones. The middle console of my car awkwardly housed my CD player and a stack of CD's that were smashed underneath two or three CD cases. I don't know why I had all of those CD's because the only two things I listened to apparently were Weezer's Blue Album and Yellowcard's Ocean Avenue. This according to Tom Klein, a friend (one of the five) that I picked up every morning. That's right...five. Andy, Corey, Tom, Bre and Chris. That included a lineman and a tight end on the football team. And when one wasn't there, my other friend Dave was a frequent rider as well. We were all one, big, happy family in my big boat of a car and we had a wonderful time on those ten or so minute drives we shared every morning that school year.

At the end of the school year, I drove the old girl down to the Best Buy at the waterfront for each of my interviews, and then to my first day of work there which coincided with my last ever day of high school - something I regret to this very day. She took me to my graduation and to whoever's house we went to to celebrate afterward.

Yes, that school year forged the foundation of my marriage to the car whose body type and make and model I originally despised, but it would be the next six that would define our time together.

Approximately 150 times over the course of four years, I drove my car the 25 or so miles from my house in West Mifflin to the campus of Robert Morris University in Moon Township and back. Through shitty weather, through shitty traffic, through that god awful intersection between 51 and 88, sometimes across the Homestead High Level Bridge down the parkway and through the Fort Pitt Tunnel; countless near-fender benders with idiots from Ohio that have absolutely NO BUSINESS operating a motor vehicle, humming down Green Tree Hill and up the other side of the parkway; numerous delays because of construction to the roads, construction taking place on the surrounding hillsides, construction taking place in friggin' Ogallala, Nebraska, presidential motorcades; you name it, if it took place on the parkway between Moon Township and downtown Pittsburgh from August 2004 to May 2008, my girl and I sat through it together.

We bonded. We more than bonded: we became as one. I became synonymous with her and she with me. It was right. She never did me wrong either. She may have skidded and slipped when the snow was thick or the rain accumulated, but we always made it. Even in my junior year she was pristine and smooth. Her only blemish being a film of dirt that coated the body from all of the construction taking place on campus. Regardless, she still looked good despite being 10 years old (approximately 68 in human years). But not everyone is lucky enough to avoid wrinkles forever and upon our return from Thanksgiving break of 2006, she got her first. I parked in our apartments parking lot. It is most unfortunate that the lot just outside an apartment building that houses, we'll say100 people, can only accommodate approximately 10.  As I was making trip number three or four of unpacking my car, a girl bumped the front end and left her with her first black eye - a moderate-sized dent. I look back at my reaction with a chuckle. I chuckle now because I was pissed off that someone had left a dent in my car. My car. The car I had wanted nothing to do with when we pulled into my dad's cousin's driveway three years before, now was the source of anger, tiptoeing the boundary of rage.

The first dent.

I got the girl's information and everything and eventually calmed down. But I felt bad for my car. I felt bad that it had to endure wise cracks about having a dent and how it was a crappy car. Well, maybe it was actually me I felt bad for but like I said before, we had become one and what she felt, I felt...and we felt a little pain.

Dent #2 was, without doubt, the most painful because it was the one and only blemish that was self-inflicted. It's been well documented that she was in bad shape when I traded her in a few days ago but I prided myself on knowing that only one of the 4,826 blemishes on her was my fault. I was trying to back her out from between two trees at the bottom of my friend Tom's driveway. It was dark and there were five other cars, a pop-up camper, a yacht, six horses, the Partridge Family Tour Bus, and a B-17 Flying Fortress all parked on his gravel, dead end street. It would have been a challenge for a professional driver, let alone myself to navigate that gauntlet unscathed. Needless to say, I cut the wheel too hard or too soon and hit one of the Sequoia Red Woods that, for some reason are growing across the street. I was embarrassed and sad. I waited there for Tom and the rest of my friends to come out and make fun. I guess they hadn't heard because they didn't come out, so I took off. I can't remember if I told anyone what had happened right away, but I do remember actually apologizing to the car. Not in any strange or dramatic way, ya know, just being goofy. But I meant it.

The second (on the right) and third dents. The second dent was the only of the four major dents that were my fault.

The other two dents aren't as interesting because I wasn't there when they happened and have never discovered who caused them because they were both hit-and-runs. I know one either happened in my gym's parking lot or at my friend Renner's house. The second one, however, I don't have any idea where it could have taken place or even when because it's on the passenger side and I hardly noticed that part.

Probably the most noticeable defect feature was the windows. At some point in time, the passenger side window dislodged itself from the track and wouldn't go down all the way...or go up into the door frame. So, it kind of stuck out of the frame at the top and left an approximately inch-wide opening on the backside of the frame. And yes, as I'm sure you've deducted, when it rained the seat, or cargo, or passenger got wet. In the summer it was no big deal. I could get the drivers side window all the way down and the passenger side about halfway. In the winter, and even on chilly fall and early spring evenings, the heat had to be pumped at full blast. Eventually, I got the window fixed and all was right with the world. Both windows went all the way down and all the way up again. That baseline of car-owner dignity apparent luxury was short-lived, however. On our way home from one of my cousin's weddings, my dad used the newly repaired, halfway opened window to leverage himself to torque his body around to look for, and this is ridiculous, to look for a pack of cigarettes that had fallen between the seats. I watched him do it and immediately knew something was wrong. I tried to put the window back up and...yeah, you guessed it. From that day in the summer of 2007 or 2008 until the day I traded her in, her right wing was clipped. I had to push out on the window from the inside to get it to go back up, out and over the frame of the door. Later on, after it was becoming more and more apparent every week that the old girl was slowing down, the drivers side window stopped going down at all; only making a nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh sound when I pressed the button.

The world-renowned passenger side window.

A few weeks before that, however, what I consider to be the event that broke my baby for good, happened, luckily for me right in front of my cousin Chris's house. For a few months, I had been noticing a clicking feeling/sound in the steering wheel. I didn't pay any mind at first, but it got worse seemingly every week until I felt a considerably more robust clicking in the steering wheel. I told my dad about it and expressed my concerns to him. He took it for a spin and decided he thought it was a strut or something like that. I don't remember really. Thinking it wasn't a big deal I continued to drive. Then, on my way to a softball game that I was supposed to follow my friend to, something dreadful happened. I was supposed to meet at my friend Mike's house and he would drive us to the game. This was even more important because the game was allegedly in a place called Liberty Boro - a place whose existence I playfully dispute because it is hidden between several other municipalities. I digress. I was unable to get to Mike's house on time so I called my cousin for directions, for he owns the secret device that opens the portal...anyway, he told me to come to his house and I could follow him to the field. I was parked on a hill and when I put her in reverse and turned the wheel, it spun almost all the way around, a la Regan MacNeil. The front-end rose up, awkwardly, and the brake pedal gave all the way down to the floor. I threw the emergency brake on and got out. I was scared. My uncle came out and looked under the front end. The ball-joint that holds some doohickey to a strut or something eroded through the Johnson Rod or something. For brevity: the car was f***ed. A small puddle of some kind of grease had been dispensed and lay on the ground beneath where the breach had occurred. It's a funny but apt analogy. She had aged from 68 year old retiree who was living it up as a semi-retired thrill-seeker to a 108 year old invalid who couldn't make it to the bathroom anymore. As my cousin observed, the car literally shit itself. I called AAA and had her towed to our garage. I thought that was going to be it right there. I breathed a sigh of relief though when I got the call from Karen at S&S that she was fixable and it wasn't totaled. That relief would only last a month and a half...

After the incident at my cousin's house (Photo courtesy of Chris Leber).

Had I been driving when the previous debacle happened there is a good chance I would have wrecked and probably sustained some serious injuries. I had never been embarrassed of my car. I always felt quite proud that I was still driving this beast after all of these years. I enjoyed showing up to places in it and hearing 'you still drive that thing?' The bond was complete. I loved that car. It was a part of me and it made the epiphany I had next that much more difficult: I was actually afraid to drive my car.

That traumatic experience didn't spell doom for her, but it wasn't too far off. When I took her in for inspection, I did so with the understanding that there was a good possibility she wouldn't be cleared for a return and sure enough, I got that call about a week ago. What finally did her in? The struts on the rear wheels were "rotted almost all the way through" and if I hit a pothole the wrong way or going fast enough, my "tires would end up in my trunk."

It was sad. My car was not going to pass inspection and at the end of September 2010, I would no longer be able to drive it. Karen was kind enough to tell me that I should start looking for a new car if I hadn't already. I told her I had been looking. I almost felt guilty - like I was cheating. Like I was giving up on a friend on life support. Should I pay for the repairs and keep her on life support one last time? Or should I pull the plug and move on to a more reliable mode of transportation? Who was I kidding. It was time.

My mom picked her up on a Saturday when I wasn't home. I drove her a few more times to the bus stop and to the gym and friend's house. I knew our divorce drew nearer with each battle to put the passenger side window 'up' after I parked. Just like when we bought the Monte Carlo my dad took me on a Sunday to start looking at cars. I had an idea of what I wanted; dad was there to answer my basic car buying related questions.

I don't want to re-hash the process of actually buying my new car. It was grueling. Buying a new car is a naturally grueling process. I had to go through it with the thought of my old car effectively being euthanized once I signed all 4,282,235 documents. Imagine how I felt when we got home after that. I felt dirty - like I had just cheated on my wife of seven years. That ickiness was nothing compared to the pangs I felt inside when I got into the drivers seat for the last time two days later...

On Monday September 27, 2010 I got into my 1996 Monte Carlo, tossed my bag onto the slightly rain-dampened passenger seat - as was morning commute protocol-and put the key into the ignition and started her up for the last time. My heart sunk. Just before I got in, I had my dad take one final picture of me and my first car. He looked at me like I was being ridiculous. I don't think I was being ridiculous. When I took pictures of the radio that sat on the back of our upstairs bathroom toilet for more than a decade because it finally kicked the bucket (no pun intended)...that could be classified as ridiculous. But hey, when you look at something three or four times a day, and it's in its spot every time for twelve years and all of a sudden it's jarred from your everyday routine, I think I'm slightly vindicated in wanting to document it before it's gone forever.

So, for the final time, I pulled her out of the driveway, around Huston Drive and onto 885. Down Lebanon Church Road to 51-the road I drove hundreds of times to and from college, to 88. Then through all of those goofy roads you're required to navigate to get to the dealership. I pulled into the parking lot and just sat there. I looked around. I looked around at the seats, at the windows, at the CD player Mike and Brain installed in 2004, the steering wheel and the slightly-more-worn section at the bottom that my hand automagically gravitated to on that first test drive; I noticed my beagle's hairs tightly ingrained in the fibers of the seats, I looked in the back and saw grocery bags my mom bought for me for the week, I saw my cloth laundry bag filled with cleaned clothes, I saw Tom, Bre, Corey, Chris, Andy, Dave, Phil, Scott, J, Jared, Baguet, Sean, Tony, Renner, Phil and everyone that ever rode with me in that beast, I saw my dog with his tiny head out the window and his big floppy ears flailing in the wind-sniffing at the air, I saw my soccer, softball and basketball bags loaded in the back, I saw my mom in the back on our way to the beach, I saw my dad moving the steering wheel up in the air and not putting it back when he was done driving it, I saw myself putting gas in the tank at the same gas station for four years, I saw myself defiantly imploring that 'no one drives my car but me!', I saw my car packed full to the brim with crap rolling down the parkway returning home for the summer, I saw myself driving to: church, softball, soccer, basketball, high school, college, weddings, funerals, friends' houses, the mall, work, the bus stop, Carson Street, Station Square, Ocean City, my pap's house, my grandma's house, my cousins' house, Scott's house, Scott's house, Scott's house, Scott's house, Scott's house, Scott's house, Scott's house, the vet, the waterfront. I saw seven years worth of travels in my first car. I took the key out of the ignition and opened the door with my eyes burning, holding back tears. Before I got out I took a deep breath, looked around one last time and said...

Thank you.

I will miss you.