by Charlie Kondek
Do cars have souls? If so, what happens to the soul of a car when its body dies? If it ever really dies. You must have seen, as I have, mounds of junked cars in lots like kingdoms of crushed steel, or occupying somebody’s yard like an ancient, slumbering animal. Are the souls of such derelicts still with them? Or are they somewhere in the wind? Listen, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in being haunted, if you know what I mean.
Can I tell you? I’ve been driving since I was old enough to do so, but I didn’t buy my first car until I was 32 years old. Maybe it’s like this in other places, too, but in Detroit in those days everybody not only had cars, they had extra cars, and we grew up driving somebody else’s. My first was a red 1983 Chevy Cavalier that belonged to my aunt then my brother then me. A car means not just mobility to a person, it means freedom. Freedom of movement, of travel, or of roaming. It meant I didn’t have to walk to school or to work and I could, if I wanted to, go, I don’t know, to Saginaw. Or drive aimlessly up and down Woodward Avenue, from my parents’ house in Oak Park all the way to Hart Plaza and back again, up to Pontiac if we wanted. And we did. Cruise Woodward. Only I don’t think we called it “cruising,” and if we did we didn’t mean it the way my parents meant it. They meant it like some Beach Boys song, and I had an aging Chevy Cavalier, not a little deuce coupe. We were just taking a break from playing D&D or watching the VCR or whatever it was we wanted a break from, some movement, music.
You’ll never hear music the way you can in a car, especially if you’re using something that resembles that old pre-aux cord, pre-Bluetooth, pre-streaming technology, the cassette deck. In that way, you have to listen to the albums you'd brought with you—the whole thing, no skips, as God intended. If you’ve ever done this, especially if you’ve done it a lot, for hours and days, the same tapes or CDs, then you know the closeness you can achieve with music, the special love for an album so that when you say, “I love that album,” you mean you and the album have been through some things.
The Smiths and I have been through some things, incredible loneliness, heartbreak, humiliation. That same rusting Cavalier that carried me up and down Woodward also ferried me along I-96 to Michigan State when my girlfriend was a freshman. I have come to know that highway well over the years, and I know there are stretches that seem to disappear from anything that resembles civilization to a kid from the Detroit suburbs. At the end of it, though, was Amy’s towering dormitory, her crowded room, and—when we could be excused from her roommate, which we usually could by some candid, dirty understanding—her bed. That semester, I went almost every weekend, me and my red Cavalier.
I thought myself an unlikely lover for Amy and couldn’t have been more surprised when she took an interest in me. She'd typically been linked at our high school to preps and then guys in bands. I was an awkward theater nerd who hid backstage working props and sets because I was too shy to come out of the wings. I also worked at a grocery store and was saving up for college, although I wasn’t going to go until I had a better idea what I wanted to study. I guess you could have called it a gap year, except I think “gap year” implies you are going somewhere besides Meijer Thrifty Acres.
Amy was my first love. I would have been embarrassed at her having to teach me everything about it except I was too busy enjoying the lessons. Part of me screamed that you can’t expect much from your first girlfriend, but I ignored those screams and began to build my plans around her. I even began to wonder if there was a place for me, a thoroughly mediocre student, at Michigan State. When we weren’t together, I wrote Amy long, lovesick letters. I’m glad there was no email or social media in those days. I’d hate to think there is an electronic record of that boy’s gushing and pleading.
I was devastated when Amy told me she wanted to see other people. She told me this in bed, after we had sated each other. We weren’t breaking up, she assured me. “This is all just too much for someone so young. We have to open things up, slow it down. That goes for both of us. We’ll still be together but if we also want to see someone else, we should allow that.”
Driving home along the lonely freeway, me and the Smiths, I wondered if Amy, exposed to all those new people at that big, new school, already had someone in mind for “seeing other people.”
In contrast, I not only had no one and nothing new waiting for me but a lot of my friends were likewise gone to their colleges, leaving me mostly alone to trace the same old streets and landmarks. Me, my Chevy, and the Smiths. The album in heavy use that winter was Strangeways, Here We Come.
I have loved the Smiths, every album, every track, but that one is a relentlessly depressing album by a relentlessly depressing band. And as I came to visit Amy less and less at Michigan State (at her instruction), I experienced in depth another phenomenon that only happens in a car: going for a drive to clear one’s head, a mobile meditation enabled by a 2,000-pound symbiotic machine and by reaching the extreme ends of one’s usual boundaries. Drive by the old playground. Drive out to grandma’s house. Drive 8 Mile. Drive I-75. Drive to Toledo or Ann Arbor. Drive somewhere, and let Strangeways, Here We Come wash over you and get in you. The first song on side two is called “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” and I never want to feel again the way I felt when I was 19 and heard it for the hundredth time in my car in the depths of a profound misery—but I never want to forget it, either.
No one else was there except me and a kind of imaginary Morrissey, chorus to my tragedy, wondering how long, how long until I am enrolled in the ranks of the cherished. Or would I and my Chevy forever wander the streets among my childhood home, which had become like the paths in the cemetery where I first learned to grip a steering wheel and touch foot to gas pedal?
Listen. I don’t need to consult the catechism. I know cars don’t have souls. I’m asking because, as that sad boy gets further and further in my life’s rearview mirrors like some roadside accident, I wonder whatever happened to that old car. The last time I saw it was when I traded it to another student at EMU for a six pack because I’d been given yet another hand-me-down, a 1988 Pontiac Sunbird; the last I’d heard, that old Chevy carried on until it disintegrated one day in a puddle of oil and despair.
Although it didn’t, did it? Disintegrate. It was made of steel, finally indestructible, and it now likely sits in some junkyard somewhere (as previously described), stacked, sleeping, stripped of any useful parts, home to birds and possums, and when the wind is right and passes through the open mouths of its broken windows, it can still hear the piano in “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me.”
It deserved better. Remember what I said about being haunted?
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Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit whose work has appeared in genre, literary and niche publications. More at CharlieKondekWrites.com.
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