Wrecks
I have to be sure I have the right insurance—that is, collision as well as liability. I simply can’t afford not to be able to pay for whatever car repairs I might need, and I’m afraid that sooner or later (and probably sooner) I’m going to be sitting in a mechanic’s waiting room, right there next to the Coke machine and the faded road maps, flipping through some weathered copy of Time or Popular Mechanics, waiting to be told what my insurance will and won’t cover.
This is very important to me right now because I always have an automobile accident after a break-up, and Sandra, my lover of five years, just left me for some babe who lives in San Francisco, the promised land of fruit and nuts. We were one of those couples everyone envied—good-looking, funny, successful—so I’m still trying to figure out how this happened, and why. Sandra’s dark, jealous, and bird-like, as impatient and breathtaking as a nestling, and the new babe is tall and wooden. I know I shouldn’t dwell on it—it’s not good for me—but I know they don’t fit.
Since Sandra moved out on me in order to pump up her phone bill and become a free and frequent flyer, I’ve been trying to take the bus and train everywhere—to work, to the post office, even to the grocery store, which I hate doing because, since I can’t carry ten bags of stuff with the same ease with which I can pack them into the VW, I end up having to do some shopping every time I leave the house. Since I’m trying to be environmentally conscious and use paper bags, which don’t have handles, this is doubly tough on the five block walk from the store to my apartment.
The last time this happened was about seven years ago. It had been three and a half years of utter hell with Loretta, but I still couldn’t believe she’d really left, so in my grief and disbelief I wrapped my car around a tree in a south Chicago suburb. I did it the minute Loretta left for Los Angeles, a city in which no one is actually born but to which millions are drawn like moths to a fire. Loretta was lithe, a singer with an immense and angry voice. I’d always thought we shared a cosmic connection of some sort: after all, we fought and fucked like minks. But she said she had to go because she’d imagined women would be kinder than men, and my sarcasm was wearing on her sense of sisterhood.
To make matters worse, after I’d wrapped my car around the tree, I refused to believe it was inoperable, so I did my damndest to start it, sending the fan blades tearing through the radiator, which had been pushed up a good six inches. The entire mess cost me around two thousand dollars, including the towing fee back to the city. I should have just chucked the car—a beat up mustard-colored Dodge Valiant—but I didn’t. I just kept going. So did Loretta, who married the corporate lawyer for Hughes Aircraft. They have two daughters now, one inexplicably named after me. I confess it does give me comfort: it’s evidence of sorts that I had an effect on that girl after all.
Before that, when Doris left me for membership in a lesbian separatist living collective somewhere in the hills of Arkansas, I made a point of not seeing the steel post holding up the chain around one of Chicago’s lakefront parks. I knew Doris and I had problems living together—she smoked with the same fatal simmer of an arsoned building, leaving powdery ash sculptures everywhere—but it seemed extreme that my nagging should drive her to repentance in a place where no cigarettes, polyester, or dairy products are allowed.
After Doris left, I’d wanted just to drive leisurely and miserably through the park, which was—wisely, I suppose—closed for the winter. I just wanted to get a look at the lake, frozen with the waves mid-roll. I knew they’d remind me of all those little ash tubes, gray and mindless, that Doris had left around the house. But I never made it to the lakefront. I ended up sliding on some ice on the road and sort of hopping onto one of the little posts that held up the keep-out chain, ramming the post through the transmission of my car and causing total vehicular loss. Ultimately, I didn’t mind so much. I hadn’t yet noticed car accidents as a post-relationship pattern, and I’d never much liked that car anyway, a green and white Gremlin that looked like a pimp shoe.
To be honest, I think the whole accident/relationship thing really started after a brief affair with a former sports writer for the Chicago Sun-Times whom everybody thinks is bisexual but who is really a lesbian. She’d cover Bulls games by watching them in her peripheral vision on TV while lying on top of me on her bed. After she moved to Washington, D.C., to cover society happenings, I ran my old Chevy van into the line of taxis waiting across the street from the Sun-Times building, giving the domino theory a whole new twist.
I don’t drive anything as lethal as a van now, but rather my more benign, if not just plain cartoonish, VW bug, one of the original Beetles, red and rusty, but still dependable. Of course, I don’t actually drive it much these days, since I’m convinced that getting behind the wheel will be eventually, inevitably, disastrous.
The fact is, I can’t stay away from cars when I’m heartbroken. Even when I tell myself I shouldn’t drive, I end up hanging out at fancy used car lots, where they use terms like “vintage” and “pre-owned,” just staring at those fine machines and dreaming about getaways.
A few days after Sandra left, I saw a 1956 vanilla-colored Porsche 356, the same kind of car in which Jimmy Dean spun right out of this world, and I swear I would have sold my mother to get it. But my mother’s dead, Sandra was gone, and with her, every technological gadget I might ever have hocked for more than a hundred dollars, so I didn’t have much with which to bargain with the devil, much less a car salesman. So I just balanced my two paper bags full of groceries and stared at the Porsche. I touched it a few times until, finally, one of the sales guys came out to the showroom and told me to go home. He said I looked like I was going to cry and offered to get me a cab, which he even paid for. That was very nice, but not as nice as driving myself would have been. The thing about cabs is that even if you’re rich enough to pay the meter, they still have their limits.
And the idea after a break-up, of course, is to have no limits. I think that’s why I like the notion of cars when I’m going through emotional angst. They provide this very cool, very American answer to pain: Even if you follow all the right directions from Chicago to San Francisco, all you need is one wrong turn—one little fuck-up—and you wind up in Mississippi, where there are no lesbians. It’s so inevitable that you may as well enjoy the ride—the wind in your hair; the truck stop waitresses who’ve always been curious but have never been with other women other than in their fantasy letters about threesomes to Penthouse Forum; the radio blasting away with great rock ‘n’ roll songs, then great tear-jerking Country and Western songs, and then, when the tinny static stuff comes on while you’re daredeviling through the swamps, you can always pop on a Philip Glass tape and think yourself really courageous.
I’m no fool, though. I know all this romantic posturing about wide-open spaces, the adventurous South, and on-the-road possibilities; all these images and metaphors for freedom are inspired by men, jaded men like Jack Kerouac—that repressed homosexual who never really found love and died a pathetic mess of a human being. It’s all a cover-up for just one thing: desperation.
I know from personal experience that, ultimately, no matter how many road maps I study, how many pairs of lacy underwear I pack for travel, how many times I tell myself that there are girls with Creole accents just waiting for me in New Orleans or Miami, all I’m going to do is drive around my ex-lover’s house and have an accident. Sandra may pine for San Francisco, but she only lives one block away from me now. That’s how crazy this is.
Of course, I’ve seen a therapist about this but all I remember is that she recommended I not see Fatal Attraction, which offended me terribly because, as a lesbian and a feminist, I would never resort to that sort of thing. Instead, I drive around and around and around Sandra’s building, like a crazy wind-up toy that’s toowound up and careens off into the furniture. I always want to throw up, but I don’t—my stomach knots up and short-circuits the whole idea. It’s like everything else about her and me: one false start after another.
We met through a mutual friend, a woman we were both crushed out on but who didn’t want either of us. It took Sandra and me two dates to kiss, which is pretty typical by lesbian standards but a little slow by mine. By the time we made it to bed, it was more formality than desire: we already knew we were completely incompatible and went through it, I think, just so we could say we had.
Six months later we were both still prowling performing arts spaces and foreign movie houses as single lesbians. When we ran into each other again, we both seemed to glow with the right aura, kiss with lips that fit perfectly into each other’s mouths, and make love with complementary rhythms. At first, even though it was very nice, I thought that it would be not a casual affair, but a transient relationship; I just wasn’t sure we’d fall in love. But after another six months, even though I still had doubts about our romantic possibilities, she’d packed her little pointy boots, ...
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