I’ve been having some car issues for the past two weeks. It’s cost me a lot of money. A lot of money. I’ve had to dip pretty deep into my savings to afford the care it desperately needs. What’s more, I got hit with a huge medical bill I thought was taken care of months ago, oh and my laptop died last week. To say I’ve been hemorrhaging money this month would be an understatement. Guys…I think I’m depressed.
When I think about car problems I think about Dennis. Have I written about Dennis before? He was my frist car. I paid $1 for him. He was a real piece of shit. Here’s a story I wrote about Dennis in college:
Dennis
Dennis was a legend. Never having stepped foot in a classroom during his time at Livingston High School, Dennis still managed to impress students and teachers alike. If you were driving around town, if you were stopped at an intersection — like the corner of Hillside Ave. and Northfield Ave. — car horns would blare as people from town recognized Dennis. He was never captain of the football team, he wasn’t valedictorian, but he managed to make a name for himself by being his own person and defying the odds.
Dennis was a beat-up 1985 Dodge Daytona. I bought him for one dollar from my aunt and uncle on my seventeenth birthday. I had never even heard of a car being named before, but my cousin Stacey was passionate about everyone calling the old Dodge Dennis. My aunt and uncle called me over one day, pointed me to the driveway and said, “It’s all yours, Evan.” They wanted to take a picture of me sitting in the driver’s seat, and when I opened the driver’s side door something fell off, and the door never seemed to work the same way again. The engine didn’t start either. We jumped it, but it stalled and died at every intersection on the way to the nearest gas station. That was Dennis. He didn’t care what anyone said. He lived life on his own terms.
All the kids at school laughed at Dennis. Parked between Lexus SUVs and BMWs, the rust covered white stallion was a fish out of water. He had only one hubcap, a few weird dents and scuffs that looked eerily like bullet holes, and an interior like Dresden after the bombing. But like his owner, Dennis had personality. Man, did he get a lot of chicks. I lent Dennis to the daughter of one of my father’s friends one summer when I was away, and she had the audacity to bathe Dennis. When I returned from my trip she handed me a garbage bag full of schoolbooks, baseball hats, cassette tapes and several bras of differing cup sizes.
My friends still love stories about Dennis. They remember the times Livingston police officers would hassle us because the car just looked suspicious driving around the affluent suburb late at night. Several times the battery died at school and they would have to help me jumpstart his heart. Most agree their favorite story is the night Dennis tried to run away from me at a local hangout.
It went something like this. There I was, moments from the perfect evening. I’d just left the house of a girl I was seeing. It was a warm summer evening shortly after High School graduation. Dennis and I shared a few post-coital celebratory hits from a joint as we rolled from the west side of town back east. I pulled into 7-11 for some munchies and found — of all things! — a large group of my former classmates who I thought I would never have to face again. It was the popular clique of kids. I didn’t even bother to look any of them in the eyes. No one said hello to me. I kept my head down.
I parked Dennis and went inside to pick up some Super Nachos and a twenty-ounce bottle of Pepsi. As I was coaxing the lukewarm waxy excuse for nacho cheese on my chips, a curious-looking black man ran into the store and started pointing and yelling.
“Yo! Man! Yo’ car! Is that yo’ car!?”
He was pointing at Dennis.
I looked at Dennis and tilted my head to the side. I quietly asked myself, “Why is Dennis getting smaller and smaller? Is someone stealing him?” I moved towards the store’s exit and quickly realizing that, no, he was not being stolen. He was rolling across the street into oncoming traffic.
I ran out into the parking lot — nachos and Pepsi still in hand — and watched Dennis come to a halt in a flowerbed in front of the Kings supermarket across the street. Traffic had stopped in both directions. My old high school classmates were all staring, mouths agape, as a smile spread across my face. As embarrassing as the scene was, I was happy my boy made it across the street safely.
I ran to Dennis through a flurry of car horns, hopped inside, turned the ignition (which did not require a key), drove out of the flower bed, over the curb, across the street, up onto the curb in front of the 7-11, and back into the lot where I re-parked Dennis. I opened the door, exited the vehicle, and returned to pay for my nachos and soda as if nothing happened. I felt dozens of pairs of eyes on me. The walk back into the store seemed endless. Though prompted, I did not say a word to anyone. I paid for my food and drove home.
Dennis died in the winter of 2002. He was trying to brave a snowstorm on the way to a concert in Philadelphia when he sputtered to a halt on the side of highway 476. As I left the car and trudged towards the emergency roadside call box, I kicked the driver’s side door shut. Panic sunk in as I heard a lock clicking into place. Finally, for the first time since I purchased Dennis, the driver’s side door decided to work. The manual lock clicked into place and left me — without so much as a jacket to keep me safe from the snow — to sit and wait on the side of a highway, in near-blizzard conditions, until someone could tow my boy and I to what would be his final resting place: a roadside Amoco station in Lansdale, Pennsylvania.
I hated that fucking car.
Sam Cooke – A Change Is Gonna Come [MP3]
