A life in cars

Karen tells me that when she swims she sometimes zones out by trying to remember all the cars she’s owned in her life. Usually she forgets some. She’s never made a definitive list. We Americans, we go through cars.

I came up with my own list of vehicles in which I’ve had full or partial equity. Last night, it was 23 cars, this morning it’s up to 25.

I have no idea whether that‘s a typical number; while there are websites that say the average number of cars an American is likely to own in a lifetime is about six, based on my experience that’s far too low. Maybe the vast number of city dwellers who never own a car drags the average down, and younger people have less interest in cars and driving than we baby boomers did, but I think my friends and neighbors might go through vehicles at a similar rate. I kept my last car seven years.

I started earlier and went through a lot of cars quickly. The only one I didn’t buy with my money was a ’64 VW Beetle my paternal grandmother left me in her will. I was almost 14, more than a year from being able to drive in Louisiana. I remember that once a bunch of my friends came over to my house in the middle of the night, lifted up the Beetle and put it on our front porch, directly in front of the door. They tapped on my bedroom window to get me to come outside, and as I opened the door they switched on the headlights.

There were too many of them to fight, so I guess it was pretty funny.

I don’t know why I didn’t hold onto the Beetle. I passed the test for my driver’s license in a 1966 Dodge Polara, then traded that and some summer-job cash to my father for the family’s 1972 Ford LTD. I suspect my parents wanted me to have it rather than whatever death wagon I was considering. I vaguely remember reluctantly taking it because it made fiscal sense.

I know I had the LTD when I was 15, because that was the year I worked on an inventory crew that went from grocery story to grocery store in north Louisiana and south Arkansas, counting how many cans of peas were on the shelves and how many gallons of milk were in the cold cases of various small-town Piggly Wigglys and Mad Butchers. We would work from Friday night to sundown Sunday, with maybe twohour breaks between stores to nap and eat.

The closest I ever came to dying was driving back from one of those weekends, nodding off behind the wheel of that big floaty LTD. (I drove because I had the best car; my coworkers were largely 30-something wastrels who couldn’t find proper employment, though the team leader was a published poet of minor renown.) I still remember the sensation of having my hands slip off the wheel, my head jerk up, and my eyes open in terror as we slid down some curvy backwoods highway lined with old-growth bottomland loblolly pine trees.

Finally someone realized I was underage. I was relieved to be fired, though they told me I could come back when I was 18.

My next car was an almost new Ford Mustang II that looked great but was nothing but heartbreak. One day it stalled out in front of Bossier Medical Center and a young intern helped me push it off Airline Drive into the parking lot of a small law firm. There was a slight grade to the parking lot and the car rolled away from us, hopped a curb and gleefully dove—like a Labrador retriever in a dog food commercial—nose-first into a creosote ditch. And sank.

I’m not sure the insurance company believed me. The intern immedately hied back to his life-saving

mission across the road. But one of the lawyers watched (with, he later said, great amusement) the whole thing from his window and confirmed that we were merely idiots and not fraudsters.

This led to a short period when I was 16 and owned three cars: a yellow Toyota station wagon with a bullet hole in the hatchback, a ratty, rusty Toyota Hilux pickup that had to be push-started (I kept it parked behind a friend’s trailer a couple of miles away because my mother wouldn’t allow it at our house) and a ’69 Chevy Nova SS with a 427-cc “Big Block” Crate V-8 I told everyone I was “restoring.” (I didn’t do much work on it, but eventually sold the other cars to pay Lou’s Garage to rebuild the transmission. I loved that car; it got about four miles to the gallon. Every once in a while I’ll look at ’69 Novas for sale on the Internet—they run between $40,000 and $80,000—and sigh.)

I drove that car through college then traded it for another winner, a 1979 Audi Fox that could go 160 miles per hour. I might still have that car had it not been T-boned on Old Shed Road by a carload of children (I think the driver was 12 or 13) from Michigan who were visiting their grandmother and joyriding in her Pontiac. I wasn’t hurt, but the Audi’s frame was warped and neither door would open, so I had to climb out the sunroof. Considering the violence of the collision, it’s surprising that none of the crib lizards so much as bumped their widdle heads.

It wasn’t too long after that I bought my first new car (a 1984 VW Rabbit GTI, a glorious whip), but there had to be something I drove in the interim. Maybe I borrowed my father’s Chevy truck. (I remember driving a Little League team I was coaching games in it—the whole team crammed in the bed. The delinquent, a Bob Stinson-looking catcher, waving his nunchaku at passing drivers. “Put it away,” Coach Phil screamed. )

I just thought of another car, a fairly recent one I left off the list.

That makes 26. So far. Is that a lot?

I wouldn’t have a new car now had I not hit the pothole.

The pothole cost me a tire—$400— and a headlight. The headlight was going to run $1,000, maybe less if I procured the part off eBay.

The car was worth fixing—I was very fond of it—but used cars are worth a lot these days. Even with broken headlights.

I couldn’t sleep one night, so I got up and looked up one of those sites that buy and sell cars. They offered me a lot for my car. They had a new car I wanted—click this button and get it Saturday. If I’d taken an Ambien, I might have bought it right then.

I didn’t. I waited until the next day and sent a car guy an email telling him what I wanted and what I had to trade. Within an hour he texted me an offer sheet. Nobody tried to sell me undercoating.

That’s what good credit will do, Karen says. I just think times are changing.

Not all for the worse.