(no subject)
Today is a sad day. I retired my first car for good. The little black Ford Probe is no more.
It was the first car that was truly mine, and the only one with a manual transmission (O how I miss thee!). I spent countless freshman and sophomore hours curled in its back seat when I was too tired to drive home from school, from the bar, from a friend's. Its hatchback trunk fit items I never would have believed possible: floor lamps, a reclining chair, and even a desk, once, with the back seats folded down. One year, it carried me and xellchiri on a road trip through North Carolina, from the foothills all the way to the coastline. It made the hop from Atlanta to Birmingham innumerable times. But I suppose the car couldn't last forever; it saw the brunt of my teenage years and had been totaled an amazing three times -- once in a wrestling match with a telephone poll off Cheshire Bridge, once near the old fire station museum at Auburn and Boulevard, and most recently at the hands of a drunken, jacked-up motorcyclist.
The night of the incident with the motorcycle, I managed to drive the limping Probe to Nicole and Bradley's old apartment. I had to tie various pieces of the bumper and wheel well together with shoestring and network cable, but at least I managed. After that, the car would start no more. It was badley damaged and had an eletrical short. I began debating whether I should put some money into repairing the Probe in the hopes of selling it, or just salvage it for parts and make (maybe) $200.00. Soon, Bradley and Nicole moved in with me at our new apartment about five miles north. I busied myself moving into the new apartment and didn't give the car much thought.
Here comes the bad part. It turns out that someone at the old apartment complex had the Probe towed in early January, pegging it for an abandoned vehicle. I did not make it to the towing yard to take care of this situation until today, for the following reasons:
- I did not learn the vehicle had been towed until mid-January
- I loaned my functioning car to a roommate for a short period of time
- The address listed for McCullough Towing on Roswell Road is only an office -- the actual towing lot turned out to be 45 minutes away in FUCKING DULUTH
- My cellular phone is disconnected, making it difficult to contact people and businesses
- I'm a lazy piece of shit
I ended up allowing the towing lot to keep the car in lieu of payment and recoup their expenses by salvaging it. It probably saved me money, in the long run -- the bill had ballooned to a gi-normous $365.00, which is more than I would have made salvaging the car myself.
That settled, it remained only to remove any personal belongings from the Probe and take them home. I had brought Patrick along to help extract the CD player from the car, and we picked our way together across the sea of badly abused junkers.
Now, I have been to towing lots before. They all leave a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach. But this place was almost indescribable in its evil. There was no system to the pile of cars they called a "lot." There were neither rows nor columns for the storage of vehicles. My car was sandwiched in the very rear of the lot, all four tires popped, sporting a number of scrapes and scratches from where it had been carelessly slid along the bodies of other vehicles. I had to climb on top of the car adjacent and shimmy in through the window just to clean the fucking thing out.
I found a lot of things I'd forgotten were even missing: two pairs of shoes, several good books and CDs, my Alice in Wonderland ashtray, a Scrabble set. Then, like a dumbass, I yielded to the urge to sit in the driver's seat one last time. I was flooded by memories. I'm telling you, they hit me hard. Amongst the jumble of images that filtered through my head, I remembered how I was afraid to stop on an uphill slope for the first many weeks that I drove the Probe. I remembered cramming the trunk full of sleeping bags and marshmallows for the huge party in Robbinsville, NC, and how I took the curves of those Smokey Mountain roads with absolute reckless speed. I remembered wailing lonely songs out the window at eighty miles an hour.
Last of all, I remembered kicking the driver-side door in fury that snowy January a.m. long ago, and I remembered how the car had seemed to understand.
Rest in peace.