Long Goodbye
Twentieth century imagery of cars
For newer subscribers: This post is written in a style that I’ve not followed for most of this year. My book Thinking About Leaving is a collection in a similar style.
You can take a 20-hour flight to the United States but you won’t arrive until you buy your first car. In the in-between time, you are a half-alive, half-dead entity waiting on the banks of the river Styx. The word car comes from Charon, the ferryman responsible for carrying you to the land of the dead.
Cars are to Americans what jackets are to a walkable urban environment. You feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the city grid without one.
The most popular theory for why all the cars look the same is that designs have evolved to produce the most efficient car that standardized manufacturing, regulators and a global supply chain can produce.
The truth is: buying a car is a series of safe decisions. I saw people my age driving smaller cars so I narrowed down my choice to a list of small cars. Then I eliminated the Golfs (too expensive) and Mini Coopers (too sapphic), and ended up with a toss-up between a Kia and a Mazda. I knew Kias got stolen more often so I ended up with a Mazda 3. Buying a car is like runaway sexual selection, but instead of randomly attractive traits, you pick the safest set of traits.
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The first time I went on a long road trip in my Mazda was to West Texas. I had the sunroof open. It was a time in my life when I was listening to a lot of movie soundtracks. Probably because I was depressed. I played Ennio Morricone while driving 95 mph. The desert sand of I-10 blew in through the sunroof. I couldn’t hear my own thoughts because of the sound of the Mazda cutting through the air.
J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island is a postmodern adaptation of Robinson Crusoe. Instead of being marooned on a tropical island, Ballard’s Crusoe has crashed his Jaguar and is stuck on a traffic island at the intersection of three major highways.
I’ve always wanted to write a modern version of The Odyssey about a man who is trying to get from one end of Houston to the other without a car.
I’ve had one accident in my Mazda. I was on Adderall reminiscing with a friend in the passenger seat about my two years in Houston and bumped into the back of a Ford F-250 that remained unscathed. Lucky for me, because I realized that my car insurance had expired the day before and I had forgotten to renew it. Adderall was not for me.
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I drove for Uber and Lyft for about 9 months in 2019. You’d think this would be character-building or give me interesting material to write about, but unfortunately all I got was back pain and an inability to listen to any podcasts or music for a few years. On my tax return that year, I was able to claim some deductions for wear and tear to the body (of the car).
An interviewer once asked Ursula Le Guin if she knew how to sail because she describes it so well in her book The Farthest Shore. Le Guin said it’s all just imagination.
When it comes to writing fiction, life experience is overrated. Reality drowns you in so much detail that you forget to notice the truth.
The immigration crisis is caused by car dealerships. The easiest person to sell a car to is a new immigrant. Someone who watched the first five Fast and Furious movies growing up. You can sell cars to them at high interest rates because they have no credit. Your low interest rate Doordash is brought to you in a high interest rate car. There is in fact a market for lemons; it is selling cars to immigrants.
My father got his first car in 1998: a second-hand forest green Maruti Suzuki. He was still learning to drive. That weekend four of my neighbors showed up to teach him how to drive. They all got in the car and then crammed me in there too. They took turns giving my father instructions.
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In Burglar’s Guide to The City, Geoff Manaugh writes that Los Angeles was the bank robbery capital of the world because the banks were mostly by highways which provided an easy escape route. Unfortunately none of those banks carry cash anymore and you’d probably get stuck in traffic all hours of the day, thus bringing an end to the last American dream: The perfect heist.
Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is filled with set-ups and jokes about driving in Los Angeles. The LA in the Blade Runner movies does not have highways. But there are flying cars. Phillip K Dick could envision a city without highways but not self driving cars. Mythologies imagined chariots with flying horses but not the mechanical engine.
Hole in the Ground Gang: A bank robbery crew in LA that staged escapes through expertly dug tunnels which led to storm sewers and culverts that are hidden by the roads and highways. They learned to inhabit the negative space of the city grid. May be I can find truth in the subterranean landscapes of LA.
There is a straight line highway connecting Dubai to Abu Dhabi. 120 kilometres of hot asphalt banked by the desert on both sides. My cousin drove me down that highway once. I saw a streak of black tire marks, dusk and then a yellow corvette overturned on the side of the road with a man wearing an all white robe and white headgear crouched by the car, on his phone. Car crashes are one of the last spectacles. May be thats why JG Ballard was obsessed with them.
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I didn’t know my Mazda had seat warmers until the first time a woman got in the car.
Before I sold my car, I used to get it serviced at Gene Johnson’s. The place used to have only five-star reviews on Google. Gene still requires face masks when you come in. Now its rated 3.5 and all the bad ratings complain about masks.
I was 16 when my father’s brother’s wife died from a heart attack. It was the first time I witnessed people wailing at a funeral. Until then, wailing was a cinematic concept employed at the end of the second act of a Bollywood movie, a kind of threshold beyond which the hero became an unstoppable force of revenge. I was 34 years old when I moshed for the first time, to the lyrics “There’s a bomb in my car” by Geese. I was called to it. I was wailing because of the imminent loss of my car.
When I said Land of the Dead earlier, I meant San Antonio. That’s where I met my girlfriend who does not like being inside cars. An aerial view of San Antonio looks like Dante’s circles of hell. She lived right in the middle of it.
I sold my car. It was unceremoniously lifted up onto a tow truck and driven away. Afterwards, I felt the same way I feel when my friend’s cat, who I occasionally look after, returns to her: like I did not spend enough time with her or care as much as I should have.