The head gasket was blown. I drove it too hot, and now the engine is dead. Repairs too unwieldy to do on my budget. The coolant would just boil over in 10 minutes.
Also, there was a sound like a rake being dragged across the undercarriage when you made a hard right turn. Or too hard a left turn. The front windows didn’t roll down. Or they did, but they would just drop into the door at a diagonal. The stereo was stolen. The driver’s side seat belt didn’t work; you’d have to reach over and stick it in the passenger side and if you had a passenger you’d have to entwine their seat belt with yours and explain this rather unsafe-seeming process to first dates you were getting to go back to your house. The sunroof was stuck closed. The back rear window was always open about four inches because I’d replaced it myself while drunk; I had shattered it with a rock when I locked my keys in the car. Also drunk. Unbeknownst to me the left rear door lock didn’t fully lock and I could have just opened the door. The hood latch didn’t open. Or it did, but you had to reach into the innards of the car with vice grips and yank on the hood latch cable. Eventually the cable would have come off its moorings completely and snaked into some impossible rusty depth of the body and the hood would have been sealed shut. The brakes were going. The master cylinder. The vacuum pump was going. There was no heat. There was no air conditioning. There was not a god damn motherfucking thing you could do about it when it was a hundred nine degrees and the car, with half its windows not rolling down, was like a greenhouse, and you were basically microwaving yourself getting in it on an August day in Los Angeles. It didn’t want to start when it was cold. The starter just cranked over and over and over, first slowly, then quicker and quicker with a horrible metal-on-metal grinding until it turned over and spat out a huge and weirdly stationary cloud of white smoke that smelled like parts of your car that you really need burning, and then you had to lay on the gas for a minute or else it stalled out when you put it in gear. It needed a paint job. I always meant to get a paint job over that worn out silver that looks like primer gray. The signals didn’t work; they didn’t flash and you had to flip the lever up and down by hand trying to keep a rhythm. I got a ticket for a burned out license plate light and it was impossible to fucking fix because every time you tried the bulb just got sucked up into some weird hole behind the impossible-to-get-your-fingers in soot covered bay for the license plate light. Continue reading
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