My Broke Ass Car

It broke. My car just stopped working. It might sound normal but this has been happening since I bought that same car when I was fifteen years old. It was old then and it is ancient now. It's a 1991 Honda Civic. LX I might add. That stands for Luxury... xylophone.

I was so excited when, at that ripe age of 15, amongst hundreds of other beaters that were on sale at the glamorous dog racing track, we found it. It wasn't really shining, it didn't look flashy, it didn't have low mileage, but somehow I knew it would be mine. It would have to be mine because we could only afford something for $3k or less. I had no idea that I would come to still rely on its feeble abilities some eleven years later.

My high school years were sprinkled with little shitty moments in my go-kart. In the summer time I would drive around with friends fill the car with the delightful odors of feet, beer, and pot. As winter rolled along I turned on the half-assed heater that would then pump the combined smells right into the faces of those same friends. It felt like a humid locker room confined to a tiny little machine.

I got a lot of much needed exercise during the winter months. My car putted along pumping out a hot garbage smell for about a mile before it decided it could no longer take the stress of working. School was only about two miles away and yet I had to start my mornings earlier so I could anticipate my car breaking down half-way to school. It would chug, chug, chug and stop. I would recklessly roll, unaided by power steering, into whatever nearby neighborhood I could make it to. I then cursed the car several times, kicked it and walked the rest of the way to school in the cold. At the end of the day I always had to find someone to hitch with so I could find my car that would miraculously start after a few hours of rest.

It did this for several years and that was just how I lived. I became accustomed to driving as far as I could before my car simply stopped and I had to walk the rest of the way. The smartest thing I ever did was realizing that it was best to drive through neighborhoods because they had an abundance of parking for those who needed to end up on some random street corner.

The car hit its peak the summer of my senior year of high school when I was driving it to my work in the middle of nowhere. It was 6 am, cold and right before I started to nod off at the wheel I noticed a plume of black smoke pouring out of the hood and through the floor boards. I managed to reach a randomly placed shooting range where I parked in the gravel lot. The range was closed at the time so I had resort to fists and kicks to show my disapproval of my poorly functioning shit-box as I was by this time calling it. I had to walk the rest of the way to work until a hippy in a windowless pervert van picked me up and talked to me about how his favorite fruit was bananas. Thankfully it was a short ride. I left my car at the range for two weeks before they finally called me. These kind gentlemen went to the effort of finding my information from the license plate and calling me to come retrieve it. It was going to be difficult to rid myself of this cursed automobile.

I left for college and then was gone two years more and I was free of my car. In place of the old Honda I recieved constant insults about how I never drove and how I had no right to call shot gun when I was never able to offer shot gun to others. I was content to take this criticism because I knew that had my car been with me it would have only suffered further from the weight of my beer bellied friends. (Myself included.)

So instead it was to my sister that this heap of metal went. She was perhaps not the greatest caretaker for this car, but it seemed to work in the same off and on manner for her. The new symptom that developed during these years was that the key would become frozen in the ignition in the winter and so my sister would leave there all day. It was never once stolen.

It seemed that despite all the invitations no one wanted this car and so it was once bequeathed to me when I arrived home again. And so I still drive this Honda and it still continues to be a piece of crap. The fact is I need that little thing to keep working. While it may not look good and it certainly doesn't help with the ladies, it does, from time to time, get me places.

It is now sitting outside my apartment, broken, dirty and with a flat tire. It looks sadder than those commercials where Sarah Mclachlan sings about dogs getting beat up. I haven't taken it to the shop yet because I'm afraid that it is gone forever. At least when it's rotting outside of my apartment there's still some mystery as to if it will continue to piss me off for another eleven years. Otherwise, I might just have to grow up and make enough money to buy a real car. We shall see.