A CLUNKER MENTALITY : Time to Break Down and Replace a Fine Four-Wheeled Friend
The old carcass, with mileage piling up like the national debt, begins to falter. The steering jitters. The lights flutter. If the bird doo can be cleaned up at all, paint comes off with it. And the only way to stop the windshield wipers is to sling one end of a rubber band around the wiper control and the other end around the flasher button.
At a time like this, what do you say to yourself?
A) I want to buy a new car.
B) I have to buy a new car.
My answer is B. Give me a tattoo. A root canal. But please don’t make me buy a car.
Friends are astonished when I confess this; buying a car is something I’m supposed to rejoice in, a happy rite of passage, like getting married or moving into a new home. But for someone who finds a new hairstyle unsettling, new-car trauma can be devastating.
My present car dates to the first Reagan Administration. It is acclimated; it is fearless. In this car-mad city, it is so chewed up, so down-market that its message is: “I’m above all this.” It’s Jerry Brown’s Plymouth in a Beamer world.
Inside are traces of spilled coffee and that faint, ineradicable whiff of scared, carsick dogs on their way to the vet.
The outside has been thoroughly bulletproofed. The taillight covers have been cracked by runaway shopping carts. The hatchback is bent from heroic service, hauling a whole fence’s worth of lumber or an Edwardian mahogany sideboard.
The doors are thoroughly banged and pranged--nothing really ugly, merely chipped and worn in the line of duty. So I can park next to any behemoth that has decided to ignore the word COMPACT painted on the concrete below.
Mine is a leper-mobile on freeways full of pretty cars. Their drivers give me wide, terrified berth. Valets pretend they don’t see me and must be summoned with the wave of a greenback.
It doesn’t have air conditioning or tinted glass or power anything. No one seems to want to steal it. Yet I have been reluctant to give up the liberation from worry for a car that may turn me into one of those fussy, flinching, fretting owners who install rude alarms, glower at adjacent parkers and stand at the carwash, pointing out motes of dirt to the poor man with the cleaning rag. Can I bear to go through it again--the inevitable dread of that first ding, when a brand-new car loses its virginity, that first step down the slippery slope to jalopy-hood?
Once I was resigned to the change, I studied. I refused to be one of the seduced who walks into a showroom in ignorant bedazzlement and drives home in a red two-door convertible. Car facts filled my head like that annoying Disneyland tune “It’s a Small World (After All).” I compared torque and braking distances. I knew city and freeway MPGs, model by model, automatic vs. stick.
“You,” said a friend whose son sold cars for a time, “are what they call in the trade a propeller-head.” But what was the first question that every single car salesman asked when I went in for a test drive? “Do you know what color you want?” (Why don’t they learn to ask some gender-neutral questions, like “What kind of car do you have now?” or “Where did you hear about our cars?”)
Oh gosh, I would say, smiling. “I really don’t know about that. But what I would like to know is how the multi-link suspension system compares to the double wishbone . . .”
Virtually the only thing I learned from the salesroom boys was that they are about the only people left who actually write thank-you notes.
Six weeks into this project, I’m still agonizing. A sofa on radials? A four-wheel-drive quake-escape vehicle? It may come down to the car that fits in my abnormally small garage.
But at least now I know what color I want.
