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I was not a car guy growing up. All automobiles were in my mind divided into three categories: trucks, vans, and then, simply, cars. I couldn’t tell one make or model from another. I didn’t know about foreign or domestic, about horsepower or chassis or suspension. I didn’t even learn to drive until I was nineteen. Two years after I got my license, I bought my first car, and it remains my favorite car I have ever owned.
It was a rust-brown ‘72 Saab 99, which, in 1986, did not make it that old. I had by this time learned just enough about different makes of cars to know that Saabs were cool, and, I was assured, well made. Which is to say, it should have run. In reality, it was on the road for about five of the nine months I owned it. The breaks were shot, the clutch was wonky, and the gear box was irreparable: I had to press the clutch once to shift out of second, and again to go into third. Once my friend Greg borrowed it and snapped the gear shift in half; to replace it, another friend had to ride with me to the mechanics, working the broken shaft with two hands when I shouted, “Shift!”
Every time I got into the car I wondered if it was going to start and if I would make it all the way to my destination. But every time I got into the car I also thought, “I’m so happy this car is mine.” It felt exactly like the sort of car I should own. It was different without being ostentatious. While I saw other Saabs on the road, none were shaped like my 99, which was compact in a way that implied a modest sportiness. It was a little sophisticated, but not unapproachably so. It was European, but it didn’t think it was better than America. If you glanced at it, you might mistake it for a Toyota, but it was okay with that. My Saab knew who it was.
I was never angry with the car. I never resented it for its many mechanical failings. I just wished I could spend more time driving it. Sitting in it wasn’t enough. The Saab was not some show piece to be polished and kept in a garage and taken out on Sundays. It wanted to be a sturdy, dependable, yet fun-loving friend. But it had been driven too hard for too long, and it had been too poorly cared for before I found it, and I hadn’t the means or the knowhow to give it the legs it needed to run as it was meant to.
The day finally came on a drive to South Kingston. I was doing 35 on Route 1, went to shift into fourth, and I heard a pop and the clutch peddle went straight to the floor. I pulled her over and got out and waited for a cop. I had been told how much a new clutch would cost and I had already overspent on her. The police officer told me he’d call a tow truck. I didn’t bother asking where it would be taken. I gave her one last look when I climbed into the cruiser. She deserved a better end than this, sitting broken and abandoned on the median, but at least she had gone out with her boots on.
That I had ever owned her always felt a bit like a dream. This was a tragic and romantic time in my life. I was still recovering from when the girl I fell in love with at the end of high school moved away. Everything was temporary, and you had to enjoy what you had before it was inevitably gone. This was a new enough perspective for me that I could still take a poetic pleasure in it, feeling at times like the protagonist in the modernist novels I liked to read.
That pleasure did not last long. The next car I bought was a ’78 Buick Regal–a great, yellow, steel tank of a car, with a front hood that could be measured in acreage. I roared around Providence for a couple years in that beast, smoking too much pot and feeling like somebody I wasn’t. I sold it to a friend when I moved it Los Angeles. She owned it a month before it died on her.
My brother and I drove to LA in a ’84 silver Chevy Chevette hatchback my mother had given me. The Chevette is what the Saab 99 would have been if the person designing the Saab didn’t actually like cars. But it always ran, and it got me all the way to LA and then, nine months after that, all the way to Seattle, where I married that girl. I never told her about the Saab, though I can’t imagine she’d have cared. She’s not the jealous type.
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