Finding the Keys to Surviving Divorce

A friend given to accurate overstatement once remarked that one did not have to read the gossip columns to know that the divorce rates in Los Angeles were dangerously high. A glance around any busy intersection would do. At the time, we were watching, in horrified fascination, as a man in a glistening black Mustang convertible, silver wrap-around sunglasses and an enormous cigar raced his engine at a stop sign on Laurel Canyon. Stevie Nicks blared from the over-amped stereo. “She got the house,” my friend said knowingly. “He’s still living in the Oakwood, and this is his consolation prize.”

In a time when “Pamper yourself!” is the standard advice for any emotional disturbance, from a death in the family to post-election ennui, the purchase of an expensive automobile has become an expected method of coping with the ruthlessness of life. I know people--OK, I know people who know people--who have bought fancy new cars right after they were fired, or passed over for a promotion, bought cars that were in direct inverse proportion to their profit margins or their romantic success rates.

When my knowing friend was diagnosed with AIDS, his partner asked if anything at all would make him feel better--nothing, he answered, except perhaps that cherry-red Corvette he had seen at a dealer on Sunset on the way home from the doctor. The car was delivered the next day.

Here the car has long been idolized, anthropomorphized and endowed with mystical properties--”in this city you have to drive the car you deserve, not the one you can afford,” an otherwise sane woman told me, the implication being that, when confronted with a hot set of wheels, life would have no choice but to straighten the heck up. This self-improvement through superior accessorizing is by no means limited to Los Angeles. All over America, 50-year-old men, and women, are wedging themselves into sport cars with the vague belief that if they drive fast enough, they can literally turn back time.

But the post-divorce car is, perhaps, the most ubiquitous, because for many of us, cars were our first encounter with the erotic power of things.

In seventh grade my friend and idol Sonya Leister informed me there were only two cool cars--Corvettes and Camaros. And so for a year or more we would stare through the cloudy windows of the school bus, calling out in exultation every time we saw one or the other. In college, a group of us were walking rather drunkenly home from a party when we passed through a parking lot. One woman threw herself over the hood of a blue Mustang and announced, to our uneasy laughter, that she wanted to have sex not in or on, but with the car (a sentiment I did not truly understand until many years later when I saw a Jaguar XJ8 for the first time).

So when it came my turn to go post-divorce car shopping six years ago, it was not too difficult for the salesman to convince me that the first step in improving my life would be improving my car. As we passed a tricked-out Camaro convertible, I took it as a sign. Not only would I be fulfilling a childhood dream, but I figured this might be the lifetime equivalent of all those bubble baths and pedicures everyone kept suggesting.

It was expensive, sure, but wasn’t I worth it? Test-driving it, I felt the power trapped under the hood, power that I wanted to consume, to embody. For a moment I surrendered to this possibility, of admiring glances from the sidewalk, of the approval from parking attendants, of an image that seemed so much better than the confused reality of my life.

And then the car bottomed out at 6th Street just east of La Brea Avenue. Just a small scraping noise as I drove over a slight bump but loud enough to seem stupid. Because a car that can’t handle a few bumps is useless, no matter how great it looks.

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Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com