The White Menace

My first car was a white 1989 Buick Century. I loved that car. Because I was 17 years old and had a car.

My mother bought this car used from somebody we knew and trusted. He was very honest about the car. He had hit a deer with it but repaired the car afterwards. If my memory serves me, the car was also rolled over at one point in its life. And that's just the beginning of the problems this car had.

One day, my mom was driving the car and misted the windshield to clean it. And the wipers kept going. And going. For the next twenty minutes. This became a regular thing. The windshield wipers would turn on no problem, but after turning the switch off, they would continue to go for at least twenty minutes. Around this time, my mom decided "Nuts to this!" and bought a new car, giving me the Buick. Which was the coolest thing ever because I was 17 and had a car! A car!!!!

I drove my car to school every day. It took about two weeks before somebody keyed it. Not a nice little strip down the side of the car. Jammed their key into my passenger and went at it like a toddler drawing on a wall. Didn't make the car any worse, but dammit. That's my car, jerk. I love it; how dare you hurt it?

For the most part, we got through high school without incident. It learned some neat new tricks while I was in university, though. For instance, one day, the locks decided not to work anymore. Not just the power locks. You could manually slide the lock switch on the inside of the door. Nothing. You could put the key in the door and turn it. Nothing. Great. So now I'm going to uni in a city that is consistently ranked as one of the top ten worst cities in the U.S., and my car doesn't lock.

One day, my best friend Jocelyn and I head about two hours south to see a play for our theatre class. We get to the town early, and decide to go to Taco Bell and get something to eat first. I pull my car into a spot and shift it into park. And my keys fall out of the ignition. With the car still running. Jocelyn and I exchange panicked looks before I picked my keys up off the floor and put the ignition key back in. Timidly, I turned the car off. Then, out of half-curiosity and half-panic, I restart the car. Good, it worked. I turned it back off. Then Jocelyn reached over, removed the keys, and started my car. With nothing in the ignition. No key. No screwdriver. NOTHING. Well, shit.

At the time, Jocelyn was dating a guy I'll call Will. She and Will have now been married for two and a half years. Last time we talked about it, Will was still denying he was responsible for what happened next. Jocelyn and I still think he was the culprit.

Almost every day, I would go to university, park my car, go to classes, come back and my car would not be where I had parked it. This caused me to spend a lot of time wandering the parking structures at university, trying to find my damn car. Jocelyn and I are certain Will was moving my car while I was in class. I don't know why he won't admit it, because it's pretty funny.

Things really got ridiculous with my car when I was living and working in Columbus, Ohio for a summer internship. I'd come home for a weekend and was driving back to Columbus in the middle of the night. Somehow, I got off course. This was before everybody had GPS in their cars, so I stopped at a gas station and asked for directions back to the expressway. The guy at the gas station was really nice and gave me directions. I paid for my gas, bought a soda, and went back to my car. As I was starting the car, the guy ran outside and knocked on the window. Since the car didn't have electric windows, I told him to just open the door. He apologized profusely, telling me that he had made a mistake; I needed to make a right at Bling Blong Road, not a left. I thanked him, and he closed the door....only to have it swing back out at him. He tried to close it again, heaving it rather hard. It swung open again. The latch the holds the door shut was stuck in the closed position. All of my tools were in Columbus, 53 miles away. Somehow, there was not a single screwdriver anywhere in the gas station. So we grabbed some elasticized bungee cords from my truck and bungeed my passenger door to the passenger seat. For the next hour, every left turn I made resulting in my passenger door swinging open. Thank goodness it was three a.m. and there weren't many other cars on the road. I got back to dorm I was staying in, went inside, got my screwdriver, popped the mechanism so my door could close. At this point, I was tired and frustrated and was a little young and irrational. In my sandals, I kicked the bumper of my car in anger. And missed the bumper. And kicked out my own taillight. Damn.

I called Jocelyn the next morning while I was driving from the dorm to work and told her about the incident. She laughed for a solid ten minutes. Thanks for that, bestie. When I got home from work that day, I had an e-mail from her. It was an audio file of Adam Sandler's "Piece of Shit Car." Then it was my turn to laugh for ten solid minutes. That song made it onto every CD I made for my car for the rest of the time I drove that beast.

I finally gave up and left the car to die about two years later. I was visiting my grandparents, about 150 miles north of where I lived. My grandparents live in this fantastic house in a wooded area off of a US highway. Their driveway is an extremely steep incline. As I was pulling out of their driveway, the brakes went out. No idea how I didn't die as my car rolled carelessly into the road. Either way, I turned the car around, pulled it back into their driveway, and rode home with my mother. My grandparents sold the car for scrap and I bought a Pontiac Grand Prix.

EDIT: Since posting, I was finally able to remember the name I gave this car. Der Weiß Baron.