A Suburban Romance
Detroit works in strange and mysterious ways. For the same money we could have bought a subcompact for every kid in the house. But we were possessed. Some inner voice kept whispering, whispering: “Urban . . . assault . . . vehicle . . . “
Oh, it started slowly. It was maybe five years ago. We had just come from a Christmas party at the home of my husband’s cousin, Steve. Steve sells big custom wheels, so Steve likes big custom cars. That year his car was a truck.
Specifically, it was a Suburban and it was--well, there was just one word for it: Big. The men ogled the bigness. The women pretended bigness didn’t count. The kids climbed inside and laid down on the rows of big seats and counted all the big compartments where you could store all your big stuff.
All the way home, everybody talked about the Suburban: How you could just pile those kids in that baby and hit the road. How you could use it to haul lumber and animals and barbed wire and stuff. Next thing you know, my husband’s brother was driving a Suburban. Next thing you know, so were we.
This all took place over the course of a couple years. It takes time for desire to blossom into a full-grown trend. Bit by bit, we became covetous. Our mere station wagon began to feel cramped. With a Suburban, we sighed wistfully, we could stretch out. With a Suburban, there could be an end to what we had come to think of as our official family motto: “Make her quit bumping my knee.”
Finally, one day, we stopped “just for kicks” at a dealership and let the salesman escort us onto the lot. There, we stood for a long moment, mouth-breathing, an entire family addled with lust.
It was a GMC. Forest green. Barn doors in the back. Fawn leather interior. Stereo speakers fore and aft. CD player. Cup holders. It was hypnotic. We had to have it. The kids climbed inside and laid down on the big seats.
*
Who knows why people do the things they do? Certainly, we weren’t the only fools in love. At last count, sales of sport utility vehicles were running at something like 2 million a year, and half the cars on the road fell under the gas-sucking classification of “light truck.”
Never mind that the things could be dangerous. Or that the prices were insane. Or that, on the way out of the dealership, the salesman warned us to keep our “sport-ute” away from the mall because it was coincidentally the vehicle of choice for car thieves, drive-by assassins and Mexican drug cartels.
No, never mind because love is blind. This baby said something that we wanted to hear: We were a family. A grown-up family. A cool, sporty grown-up family. In a cool, sporty, grown-up family car.
Ah, the price of grown-up sporty coolness. It was, specifically and with interest, $766 a month. Not counting gas. And not counting the occasional bit of bodywork. Two months after we’d bought it, I drove the Suburban to the bank. It was so huge, I could barely squeeze it into the lane for the drive-up teller, and as I pulled away with my two little twenties, the big concrete pillar next to the ATM scraped an $800 gash across the driver’s side.
Later, we learned that the massive wheel rims of sport utility vehicles do something weird and alluring to small animals. Dogs and cats, rabbits and ‘possums hurled themselves in suicidal frenzy at our tires.
And that was just the reaction we got on our street. When we drove into the city, we felt like shock troops in the invasion of the ugly suburbanites. Mothers yanked children away from the curb as we rumbled past. Pedestrians froze, too petrified to jaywalk even in Westwood and Chinatown.
Still, nothing cooled our ardor until the spring of 1996, when--perhaps you remember--the price of gas unexpectedly shot up. “Two bucks a gallon?!” we shrieked at the pump. “Get used to it,” the smug attendant replied.
As we topped off the 42-gallon tank, the shock apparently drained the very blood from our heads, because we experienced a kind of clarity unlike anything we’ve felt before or since. We hauled ourselves up into the fawn leather seats and stared at each other in sudden astonishment. “What in heaven’s name,” we asked, “are we doing in this truck?”
*
With the sadness that accompanies the end of any romance, we brought the Suburban back to the dealership. They took it for $6,500 less than we’d paid for it 10 months before, and resold it for close to the original purchase price within the week.
Ah, the road trips left untaken. The animals and lumber and barbed wire left unhauled. Plus, to add insult to injury, the price of gas was back to normal within a few months. Still, these things build character. Never again, we vowed, would we be suckered by a slick paint job and a big set of tires.
Poorer but wiser, that’s what our vehicles say about us now. Which is annoying, but how do you tell a car to shut up? Besides, what’s a “cool sporty grown-up?” Answer that, Mr. Smartypants Inner Voice. And don’t even think of whispering, “Humvee.”
Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com
