Used Car: Memoir of a Year

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If I wake up early enough there’s an owl in Ditmas Park. Its lilted double call is doubled again in the rhythm of a distant siren, dopplered in recession. The streets are dangerous. Under changing leaves, the family minivan passed away at thirty, a violent and heroic death out-of-doors. I heard it in my dreams, sideswiped by a bulldozer as it slumbered towards senility. October is the best month for sleeping with the window open. The midnight gibbering of sidewalk maniacs, the desperate hilarity of nocturnal teenagers, the pre-dawn honks of impatient commuters, stunned by the outrage of the hour and desperate to drag sleeping strangers into unhappy consciousness by the self-righteousness of the suffering, were joined by the deep grumbling of heavy machinery, the piercing and erratic eeps of their reversal and the savage ribbing of construction workers hollering in two languages. Enfolded in this cacophony: an errant crack. What did I expect? The slow grace of hospice, the machine sputtering out only when the repetition of alternate side parking made life or death identical, when the hour and a half a week of illicit double-parking ceased to excite at all. The only inkling of the minivan’s heroic ambitions was the implication of its fading beige pinstripe, the erect posture of the captain’s chairs. The sound did not wake me, so steeled am I against the din: it is lost in a dream I forgot, that I never remembered.

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So began the season where my insensitivity became apparent. How I actually get around the city is this: I bike. Unlatching my helmet to reveal by its relief that I was being lightly strangled, or slamming the Citibike into its dock and noticing, only then, the stiffness of my neck held too taught, I found that I could not remember my bike ride. Eleven miles and an hour passed between the leafy streets of Ditmas, the speckled shade of elms and the blaring glass and steel canyons of Midtown: empty miles, an empty hour though I know it passed all across the earth, that an apricot blossomed and a chestnut rotted. Commuting is amnesia. I vowed to experience these omitted hours of my life. Wasn’t there wonder to be found in the whole panoply of interconnected infrastructures, the streetlights and the fluid flows of traffics through the ordered streets? Biking home that day, my nervous system entered a new state. It may be that all systems are nervous, certainly the ones that rule this city’s locomotion, that systemicity itself is a kind of exposure always nervous to its own vulnerability. The state was called: panic. For how little are my fellow human beings willing to throw away my life: either for the selfish shaving of a millisecond off their ride or the brute obstinacy of adherence to idealized rules and rights of traffic flow, categorical imperatives to motion, over the corpses of their brothers. Panic was my response, and rage. Though the furious, scowling cyclist is a stock image of lampoon, I am a nice guy. Previously I glided through the ballistic morass of the streets in a state of smiling stupification, myopic for my pleasurable heart rate alone, for the felicities of breeze. Rage perverted exercise into fantasies of vengeance, the previously ignored erosions of my wellbeing became wounds inflicted by the people of the road; and the menace of buses, trucks and cars became the rendering of all outside into a keening casino of doom. My sense of justice was made vertiginous by this everyday exposure to the plain injustice of mass, the might is right principle embedded in Newton’s unimpeachable mechanics.

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I do not understand that rage is associated primarily with driving. Driving is simply sitting plus twitch. Road rage is, in its most capacious sense, true. The road implies a public; the public, the jungle of society here sans any tenderness that human recognition could supply. I am a human being, you are a bicycle, you are an automobile, you are a pedestrian, no more than a soft and presumptuous bollard. Even the iconic urban exclamation, “I’m walkin here!” is answered by the final articulateness of the horn. Is this why the death of the Previa so upset me? Because I had lost the upper hand, my possibility of invulnerability on the killing streets?

The Previa, despite being distant from the typical profile of a libidal hot-rod maintained for the nostalgia and thrill of a bachelor, was considered a “classic car” by insurance agencies due to its age and its collectability by admirers of obsolescence. The coverage thereby supplied allowed the value to be set at the worth it has in one’s heart, knowing that no blue book could contain the ledger of sentiment in which worth is, finally, calculated. It is a perilous conversion, though familiar: deep feelings breed larger numerals.

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When asked, I sympathize with the view that maintains the idiocy of machines and opposes them with the vital undulations of the organic or animal, for which we are supposed to reserve our love. I have tried to resist the myth of the open road, the long echo of fire worship heard in the turns of the combustion engine, the thrill of such close domestic association with a bomb that drives the American glorification of the automobile. And yet, more than a machine, these are interiors, these are portable sitting rooms that supplement the apartment and are as impressionable as any. My childhood bedroom was converted into a guest room with only a minor shrine, my amateur pottery, to commemorate its former use, my stuffed animals distributed across the boroughs at Goodwill, even those who I had promised to love forever: a red frog, a plush unicorn. I have lived in thirteen homes, during this short life and, until it was towed away, the only constant dwelling of my conscious years was this seventeen by five and half foot reserve of space carved out on curbs from Brooklyn to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The mat on the driver’s side was worn clean through by my mother’s heel, the dashboard pocked with the various adhesives of obsolete GPS, and the cassette player, though still operable, had gum around its slot, like marmalade gilding a pancake eater’s lips, by the reel of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band melting through the windshield one summer, left protruding like a lolling tongue. The smell was not bad—but I am an improper judge, its association completely occluded its sense. These old, lush and high pile interiors, fabric upholstery over permeable foams: it is as if they were designed to trap our trace, to absorb and darken by our wear. These homey beige and browns of the cars of our youth have given way to onyx blacks, to leather, faux or real—and these age without grace or gradation, suddenly giving up their white foam through a rupture like ivory maggots bursting open a roadkill’s corpse. When I went to inquire about the possibility of repairing my grandfather’s violin, a luthier determined his teacher must have been Czech by the wear on the fingerboard and bow, the hand position it implied, and with that implication, a whole school.

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Then there are the conscious alterations, the custom paint jobs or flashy rims, that betray the car as an article of clothing. Folks cloth themselves in two tons of steel and plastic, carapaced as a stink bug to whiz themselves through the boulevards. “Does this make my ass look big?” “You’re really gonna leave the house wearing that?” The bumper sticker, easiest ornament, is more than a mark of individuation on an essentially repeatable form—in a society where increasingly one’s only public appearances are vehicular, they serve fashion’s functions, replacing the subtle social signs of say, sack suit vs. Italian broad shouldered or distressed jean as opposed to the carpenter pant. They are more concise and overt—often their concision is expressed in the extreme binarism of a political affiliation, the logic of the lawn sign set in motion. The rapidity of politics is no more apparent than in entirely defunct slogans and endorsements fading in driveways: these bumpers have outlasted some of our once most precious ideals. Other uses, to commemorate a mountain’s summiting or announce the presence of a baby, attempt to puncture the anonymity of the highway and still the aggressions of cars that are, after all, as wolves to cars. These are heirs to the almost antique, more elaborate, decorations of a “just married” mobile, jangling with spangles and dragging cans, cars decked out like a temple elephant, container of aspiration and fulfillment: ritually avowed.

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A new dandyism was born. I came up in the era of Pimp My Ride, where staid, middle class dreamers from the suburbs of Southern California would have their fantasy manifested by the rapper Xzibit, who converted, as a surprise, their worn family car into a kind of wackadoodle minstrel mobile, very often approaching the mechanical equivalent of blackface. Surely these “pimped” vehicles were unusable in their owner’s leafy, desperately striving neighborhoods where their function was to deploy children to pastoral frolics or school, to facilitate the gathering of groceries, or transport themselves numbly to an office park in narcoleptic dawns and exhausted clock-out commutes. Still, the owners would review their transformed automobiles with a deep, astonished pleasure—they possessed something extravagant and useless that touched some originary desire, invested in this automobile, heretofore eroded by the niceness of their life. The overblown reactions at each episode’s “big reveal” was shaped by this ambivalence. The wholly urban culture of the strutting car, which was more a methodology of inhabiting a street than a means of transport, parked and leaned on or slowly rolling, bouncing, or operating as a boombox to furnish a transient corner with revelry—here it was uneasily metastasized by the suburban monoculture to tame and excite naked dread.

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The car is inextricable from danger. Transport itself is danger to a homesteader frontiers people who must grit themselves against the stranger, practically knowing how they themselves, as strangers, behave. It is no coincidence that films, that movies whose name contains their basic tenet, have logically extrapolated violence to be the base expression of their principle: motion. The car crash is one of the most rehearsed forms of violence, containing a convergence of the elements maximally hypnotic in media. Nothing, in daily experience, more resembles jump cut or montage than the car crash or replicates its miracle in the retina’s retention than whizzing through the roadways, watching the frames serrated between the passing streetlamps or pylons of powerlines. The sudden eruption in the quotidian which, in its most basic sense, is the definition of plot, here appears in microcosm; the screenplay’s two fundamental organizing principles, interior and exterior, intersect. A car crash.

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The golden age of Hollywood coincided with its mastery of the car chase form, which itself coincided with vehicles whose design accentuated the drama of their collisions. Overpowered, elongated, open-top, seat-beltless machines made before the advent of the crumple zone to sacrifice their occupants to maintain the integrity of their frame. These are the beloved cars of the classic era, “built to last” to such a degree of triumphant temporality as to shame the soft and dying organic life they contained with the pent-up resilience of industrial steel: here, perhaps even more than the latent power of the engine’s ever-incomplete explosion, was the thrill for fragile bodies. I was watching Wild at Heart (1990), one of David Lynch’s most perfect expressions of the belief in love’s existence as a material and moving force in this world, sex too. With an almost statistical dedication to realism, the central road trip of this film brings its characters past numerous devastated sites of car crashes, homages to cinema’s epic period of Westward expansion, the tabula rasa of the open road, the auspicious implication and menace of the horizon, and the automobile’s dialectic of freedom, being beholden to roads. Brains are falling out of people’s heads, bodies expelled through windshields lay in pools of gore in the brush, mysterious innards suddenly exposed and oxidizing in the outside. Smoke rises from the dented machines in plumes that trick the camera’s light. For the Greeks of old, burning a sacrificial offering of dismembered goats or oxen, the ascending smoke from pyre to sky was sign of human junction with the heavens. There are no cell phones. The characters helplessly rearrange the corpses, a man dies in one of their arms, and they get back in their car and continue.

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In the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, parts of this creature’s body would metamorphose into the tools and gadgets it required to overcome the obstacles placed before it in the ruined and savage world—this comic figure announced the dissolution of the human being in two simultaneous directions: machine and animal. The runaway popularity of these cartoons was attributed to the yearning audience’s desire to inoculate itself against the pain of this selfsame transformation, taking place inside them, at school, on the honking and screaming streets of cities, in their cartoon factories, in traffic. Mickey Mouse established the cartoon paradigm of unlimited perseverance, that lives today beyond Looney Toons in the unkillability and inexhaustibility of protagonists everywhere and the dream of resilience that powers epic lives of toil, misery, maiming and pain. Samuel Beckett’s famous ultimate utterance “I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on” was popularly anticipated here and is rehearsed contemporaneously in even the stupidest action films where bullet wounds are grit through, unlimited grief; where bodies exit flaming cages of mangled cars. The unreality of violence’s effects is cinema’s most pleasing dream. That is the dream I wavered on the threshold of waking from, riding my bicycle home.

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It was not, therefore, only the leg-up in the battleground of locomotion that the Previa gave me that was the source of my love: home, outfit and armor. In fact, it was the other way around. The Previa’s charming silhouette was deadly: its sloped snout, semi-space age (it resembled Buckminster Fuller’s utopian Dymaxion car) but also Neanderthalic (its descending brow), left its driver and front passenger half hanging into the roadway in the event of even the most minor frontend crash. The engine’s detonation was, to save space in front, placed directly under the driver’s seat with an inch thick plate of steel alone protecting the reproductive organs of the machine’s operator: not too reassuring in an 7-seater vehicle that begged for fertility and children. Indeed, when the minivan was underpopulated, the weird weight distribution left the thing perilously prone to rolling over during too-sudden turns or when exposed to gentle breezes on side-less bridges, particularly bad being that it lacked side airbags, the heads sent wobbling on frail necks smashing into sideglass and frame. It was completely uncharacteristic of my sober, practical family to overlook this deathtrap. My father sweetly wanted it maintained as his sarcophagus, the glorious container of his years of childrearing that seemed suitable for his thoughts of eternity because of how close the idea of having children is to the idea of immorality.

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The nostril-searing tinge of danger is introduced into the sleepiest suburbs of this land, the greenest, most serene lawns populated by milk-fed tottling babes, by the way of automobiles, sly and wild predators like coyotes released to cull the overpopulation of a grazing prey that does not yet know it is one. The suburbs, or any place in Brooklyn where one could plausibly find a parking spot. In the last decade, manufacturers have emphasized the overt evil of vehicles, reacting to the global bad feeling of climate change, emissions, pollution: nothing could be more of a boon to the already-suicidal implications of driving than its monumental elaboration to the scale of life-on-earth. Instead of shying away from this reasonable admission, American car design has embraced the villain-hood of their products and affixed each vehicle, from the luxury sedan to the family minivan (let alone the “sports utility vehicle”) with increasingly sinister grilles and silhouettes, sneerings slants, dramatic diagonals around the anthropomorphic headlights to make the portrait of the vehicle read, by the human instinct to and evolutionary genius in scrying instantaneously expressions, as rage or defiance. There are some pastoral bicycles that we conceive as having moustaches by the curvature of their handlebars. Older, miniature cars peer wide-eyed from their parking spots, with the disproportion of a toddler, exuding innocence. We know too much for these formal euphemisms: even electric vehicles are burdened with the blood of the lithium mine, with the stupid compromise with privation that morphed stranger danger and sprawl into fear of the bus; small, distant hands corroded in the steaming depths.

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Even with this wholesale embrace of danger, Americans aspire to win car crashes. Despite the innovations in safety, which primarily consist of punitive beeps and automated abdication of ethics by the replacement of reflexes with scattershot calculations, fatalities see a steady creep upwards as car fronts are raised and flattened, the frank logic of mass—and the victim of these “accidents” (again the naturalness of vehicles is shrugged into reality as an instant of cosmic chance or the equivalent to bedweeting) are propelled from biology to physics. Americans are maimed by cars, which cripple the new category of life, what we used to call a human being, naked as Adam: that is, the pedestrian, already in common parlance a slur. This makes us more subject to cars, participants in the mangled arms race of necessary locomotion. Indeed, when I am most sure I am weak is first climbing into bed, that horizontal release from the howling labor of the spine, sighing—I am weary of the burdens of bipedalism, an old, old invention.

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Car-less, during the following months I took the rare taxis of my life, when it was really impossible to get somewhere otherwise. That is not true. I will always consider taxi-taking a humiliating indulgence, I will always construct justifications of theatric exigency to cover mere convenience and obfuscate the power of my credit which could allow me to be lazy forever. That is to say, I am trying (for reasons I do not know) to resist the lapse into the confessional indulgence present in cars’ wholesale embrace of their planetary evil—and yet, because to live in this world one must follow its customs, I can do no more than garnish my accession with shame, that simulacrum of resistance. How easily we forget: shame is always an option.

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I have been attuned to the taxi driver’s dangling saint, the cross dangling from the Uber’s rearview mirror. Close proximity with the casino of mortality, driving, sitting above the mystery of automobile innards, inspires religion. We do not know how cars work, as a species—and so pour our soft mastery of verbiage into the black hole of a car’s operation, as diverse as the interpretation of triage testimony. A clever nurse must determine the meaning of “I’m catching chills”—and so close to corporeality are the knocks, burrs, whines and squeals, that we use indeterminate subjective descriptors of smoothness, power, drag, control, bumps, whirs and squeals—these humanize the vehicle, in their heights and declines. I have been to the junkyards where husks await vivisection, wearing serried wounds on their hulls in grooves and rub like trilobites clawed there in ancient seas; exploded airbags clumped as sunken hot air balloons, wearing the exaggerated drapery runs of Hellenic statuary, Aprodite’s ruined dress, cracks in fluid, limbless torsos, noseless busts—dried redbrown blood on upholstery.

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Machines are a way to remember how we lived, for the future. They hold not just our traces but the earth’s various climatological declines from factory uniformity—the sunbleach and burnt paint of southern cars; sagging dashboards, caught mid plastic weep as all industry’s material crumbles under brute obstinacy of sun, or the snow states sloshing of corrosive salt on fragile underbellies that eat metal brittle, gushing rust wounds like a slaughterhouse hog cut hoof to snout. It’s amazing the duration of a human life, the incorporating persistence of organic healing, and how fragile his most beloved creations—I write this in contradiction to my marvel at the longevity of old steel. With a squinting view of my Brooklyn street, packed on both sides with rows of cars sniffing each other’s bumpers, I see those thin plates manufactured just for the purpose of shattering en masse at a Greek wedding.

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Cars are future patches for other cars. The pick and pull junkyards housing sprouting car husks in the great becoming-scrap of the home economy of outside are monuments to some coming making-do, the permanence of all decisions taken on this planet, the ceaseless momentum of inheritance. They are the material for that genre of jigsaw masculinity, the “project car” of meditating into parts that has devoured many men’s yard hours, bearing themselves against the flight of mainland manufacturing with amateur cost-cuttings, genuine pleasure at the understanding that takes place in the hands, and stubborn defiance against expertise. I have tasted the horror of malfunction, where the complete obscurity of the machine under my ass becomes apparent: an internal failure, a wordless mechanical groan from tolerances exceeded—or on the side street of a foreign town under strange streetlamps and pissed-on curbs, the engine failing to turn over. Before its sudden death, I felt its mysterious decline, forecasting catastrophe. The Previa, despite its danger, survived thirty years without collision. Previa, what a beautiful word. Its latinate hybridity was a stroke of genius: before and go. Toyota stated officially it was directly Spanish, meaning “preview” as in, a preview of what minivans could be capable of, the future of families. Previa. Previa. Previa. I believe we were seduced by the beauty of its name.

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The Previa was auctioned as scrap on Long Island and a buyer in Texas won it for peanuts, to dismember. My insurance payout, I believed, I would use to justify taxi-taking, and to rent cars, only when needed, as owning a car in New York City is famously inconvenient, selfish and unnecessary. Traumatized by the price of renting, I found a 2015 Corolla that a place in Midwood would give me for a week and a half at a fraction of the price of the conglomerates, to get to Massachusetts when a festival for woodland Klezmorim demanded my presence. The Corolla is the bestselling car of all time, it is a cultural icon and, also, beautifully named. In its cramped interior I felt the aura of its myth. Lil’ Wayne once rapped somberly to his fans, “You never been in jail, I never been in a Corolla.” The proper name of our machines: it is easy to recoil at the vulgarity of these appropriations, torn from their homes in botany, geography, and dark and glorious histories for vehicles of all types. How wide a gulf will we allow between the spirits that hummed along the Tiber on those Roman marches and the ennobility I feel by the charm-word Corolla, knowing its secret source? The Corolla: a collection of petals forming whorls, within the flower’s septals, that is the green and leaflike outer growths, typically surrounding the reproductive centerpiece.

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In 1955 the Ford Motor Company required a name for a new car they were producing, their first in over ten years, meant to bridge the gap between their existing, more affordable, options and the larger hot-rod vehicles of their competition, mostly Mercury and Chevrolet. The wife of an employee in the marketing research department, Robert B. Young, happened to know socially the poet Marianne Moore, 65, who had won the Pulitzer Prize four years earlier and was publicly admired for attending Dodger’s games and boxing matches in her lace collars and tricorne hats as a poet whose eccentricity was traffic with the popular, despite the occasional derision aimed at the “obscurity” of her poems. Her name was passed along to the executive David Wallace who wrote Moore a letter requesting suggestions for the name of this car, desiring something that could rival the extreme evocativeness of Ford’s wildly successful Thunderbird, that would trump the “embarrassing pedestrianism” of the names his department had already rejected (from various sources apparently over 6,000 potential names total were solicited). His request shows all the marks of a deep understanding of the cutting edge of Modernist poetics, of Imagism even.

“We should like this name to be more than a label. Specifically, we should like it to have a compelling quality in itself and by itself. To convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design. A name, in short, that flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people’s minds.”

Her responses are an incredible artefact of a poet at the height of her powers wading into poetry’s increasingly only remaining relevant domain: use, in the service of our era’s most powerful consciousness-shaping force, advertisement. Moore’s proposed names (a selection): The Impeccable, Symmechromatic, Bullet Lavolta, Mongoose Civique, Anticipator, Regina-Rex, Varsity Stroke, Angelastro, Cresta Lark, Pluma Piluma and Utopian Turtle-top. These were all rejected for a name of wholly sentimental resonance for the Ford executives: it was named the Edsel, after Henry Ford’s only son.

The Edsel became a standard lesson in the annals of business failures, flopping supposedly due to poor market research and misarticulated visions: it was presented as both a family car and a single man’s speedster, appealing, therefore, to no one; it was a medium-sized car introduced in a market then oversaturated with them and needing, instead, a compact. It pleases me to think that with another name, with one of Moore’s sonic gems shimmering with allusion, the average American who, after all, still cowered in awe and power before epic lines of poetry at least every Sunday, marvelling in the pews, or had their heart wrenched by hymnals or whatever Ed Sullivan had on, later that day; who, for better or worse, were still vulnerable to English, properly deployed, and its mongrel depths of Latin and Saxon—that they would have wanted a poetic machine. It is only with a kind of nihilistic sense of superiority that I could admire the sanity of market choices, gloat over the squashing of an antique sensibility.

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I was reading Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss and, writing of his preconceptions of Brazil, whose anthropological study was to be his life, there he admits, “I assumed the atmosphere to be permeated with the smell of burning perfumes, an olfactory detail which had no doubt crept in through an unconscious awareness of the similarity of sound between ‘Brésil’ and ‘grésiller’ (to sputter in burning), and which is more responsible than any actual experience for the fact that, even now,” that is, even after twenty years of living there and study, knowing its air and its people, “I think of Brazil first and foremost as a burning perfume.”

My own invulnerability to language is occasionally shattered, as when I made a trip to Walgreens on the way home from the subway to purchase a nailclipper, to replace the one that had broken in my hands the night before, and in those grey aisles, comparing their selection, something in my attention misfired and I heard completely the music playing over the loud speaker, the way stores, cafes, restaurants, everywhere seems to be playing music, to cover the mastications of one’s neighbors, to excite commerce—it was “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” by Kate Bush, a song I was basically unfamiliar, as with most of what is played: “There is thunder in our hearts.” From what I understood, this is an anguished song about the mortal difficulty of human connection and a plea to the supernatural (God) to make love possible amid the constant heartbreak and unbridgeable gulfs of individuality. Are you hearing this? How jarringly, how nonconsensually was I moved, was I wrenched into feeling during this dull chore? It’s amazing that music such as this, of grief and love, violent libido, rage and resentment echoes in half-populated corridors, in department stores and waiting rooms everywhere crashing against the drywall, the shabbily upholstered chairs, the rows of glistening commodities behind their windows of plastic, gaping outwards; occasionally striking the soul of some poor sap with broken focus.

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This was the same dangerous turn of the sensory kaleidoscope that brought the murderous streets to the burning foreground of my early winter bike rides, bloodred gems emerging from the mirrored tumble in the tube. Winter passed. One day, the air was sweet from a honey suckle exhale and pollen landed yellowgreen on the last rockhard slabs of soot-blackened ice surviving in a crevice of curb. The air everywhere had the heavy emparticled stillness of after a sneeze. What was sneezing? It seemed the Earth was. Spring was here, I was birthed into it completely a pedestrian. Between my subway stop and my apartment building a new deli opened, where I would stop in to listen to pop music and be riven with feeling and schmooze with the neighborhood. There lived a pure bred white Persian, a “four thousand dollar cat” I was told by the proprietor, who oozed luxury and commanded privileges and alternated between watching enviously the preparation of sandwiches on the hot top and standing watch (no one could confuse it for guard it was so tranquil and blithe) outside by the sandwich board sign; named Snowy. He was kidnapped, one evening, picked up from the sidewalk and placed inside an idling car by a man and a woman in what appeared like a premeditated act, from the blurry CCTV footage captured of the event. There was a period of desperate search, posters hung at every crosswalk of the neighborhood. Snowy was among those icons of the pleasures of the sidewalk, the treats afforded those who traverse the city on an animal scale. I believe, more than anything, it was Snowy’s absence that made me secretly desire a car again, that planted the obsessional seed that sprouted into my search, not long after, for a replacement to the Previa. Sure, there was the near-simultaneous defrost of the hemisphere, which promised green delights in every direction, waterways in which my skin ached to be engulfed, my spine to be relieved of its gravity in. But the tolerability of city life in any season is so tentative that my most trod stretch of sidewalk’s sudden deprivation of Snowy’s perplexing vitality left an opening in which the fever of motorism could enter, could spread.

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When I drove the rented Corolla, I felt a presence polyphonic and enveloping, not just from culture’s long elaboration of its word but from the quality of its employment. When an object or place is used by so many different people, it takes on an anonymous face of its own—not diminished but with another life, as if polished on the level of use, not surface. No car could match the deep personal poetry of the Previa, whose name was as entraced as its interior and paintwork, which had been murmured throughout nearly every period of my life with increasing density around those critical moments of moving, journey, quest or change like some watchword, like some circadian prayer. The former quality would birth the latter: my insurance payout was modest though miraculous—the new car would have to be used to be afforded. My job, if it can be called that, is as a scholar of Modernist poetics. Indeed, I am a true believer in what could be said to be its tenets and its aesthetics. It was with a kind of vertiginous horror that I saw the dictum that high culture had been toiling under, to “make it new,” the triumph of novelty, as an uneasy anticipation of WalMart-speed lightning-fast production and the hyper-iterability and disposability of just-in-time manufacturing and supply chain management.

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Around 2030, the United States will enter into service its new generation of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, the centerpiece of the so-called “nuclear triad” of deterrence (land-based, submarine-based, and bomber-deliverable warheads). Its name was recently announced by the Air Force Global Strike Command: the LGM-35 Sentinel. These are smaller and faster than their predecessor, the LGM-30 Minuteman III, which served for over fifty years as the cornerstone of the United States’ nuclear arsenal—their range is the entire globe. Announced, as it was, during the sober era of Obama’s administration, there was some question over whether it would be named at all, beyond its acronymic designation, its cool facade of technical jargon—the name seemed a kind of vulgarity in a decade of detente. Beginning around the end of the Vietnam War there has been a progressive euphemization in the naming of weapons’ systems, a shying away from the primal dread whose inspiration was, after all (we were promised), their purpose. The famous Reaganite missile name “Peacekeeper” announced a new era of deterrence, where it was no longer a strategy in a conflict but instead the condition of life on earth, aiming as it did for the rhetoric of totalizing stability. Only its specialized reference maintained the horror and glory for those in the know, to the Colt 45 with the same nickname that was the most popular revolver of the wild West’s genocidal expansion and final settling. Old missiles referenced Homer. Atlas and Titan were the original land-based deterrents; the submarine-based missiles were named Poseidon and, after his own weapon, Trident (still in use, in its second generation). In 2023, Russia began replacing its Soviet-era supply of missiles with the RS-28 Sarmat, named after the Samaritans, a sly reference to modern day Iran. Colloquially, and by NATO, this missile is referred to as the Satan II. France has a missile named Hadés, another named Pluton; Iran names their missiles after passages in the Qur’an, Shahab meaning meteor, Fateh meaning conqueror; China has a series of missiles named Dong-Feng or East Wind, a striking mythic image conveying the relativity of hemispheric war. Tanks are named after great generals. Helicopters are named after Native American tribes. The Apache attack helicopter is the most well-known: the Sioux began the convention in 1947 and the Lakota is the latest, christened 2012.

Note: Much of the information about weapon names and naming conventions, as well as the spark for my interest in them, comes from the well-argued and insane opinion essay, “Sing, Missile Muse, of Gods and Heroes: America’s Most Fearsome Weapons Need Better Names” (2021) by Tom Karako.

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No machine or fear can go without a name—the gesture of naming is the first sign of an unconscious, before even dreams. Some vehicles, ships especially, beg naming emphatically, and even reserve the use of female pronouns; a piece of grammatical baggage originating in the analogy of womb as containers of men on dangerous expedition. In New Orleans, I knew a captain who sailed in Lake Pontchartrain; he owned a boat that had no name. He shrugged and smiled away my complaints and questions, he tutted at my suggestions generated through profound attention to the specificity of his craft. The eerie recoil which I experienced against his stubborn refusal dawned on me as rank sanctimony when I was made aware of my heretofore absolute ignorance of cars, trucks and vans; not only their familiar names, born from private affection, but even their generic ones, of species and genus. I mean all my life I had encountered them as unpleasant and embarrassing ways to decorate every single street in this country, as failures of beautification that must be meticulously ignored, like how whole marriages can function only by the lifelong suspension of realizing consciously one spouse’s bad breath; or how one can preserve deliberately the beauty of a beloved’s face by making sure to never glimpse its profile whereby its freakish distensions would be irrevocably known, and somehow knowing enough to know this but refusing to know that. Strolling down the sidewalk, biking in the cramped corner of the road scrying for signs of a car door’s sudden explosion outward, even driving—I viewed the vehicles as blurred and indistinct masses, practically floaters in my eye, that served only as potential signs of alarm or blots on the landscape, annoyances among the trees, the beautiful walkers and funny dogs, the streetside tableaus, the coloration of the sky bleeding into the edges of allusive clouds. Their particular existences came to me in a deluge of appellatives, prompted by the most important impetus for discernment in someone who wishes to survive our world: the flood of extreme attentiveness that overtakes one before a major purchase. Not to get ripped off! To assure oneself that the decision to part with money, in every instance a disaster, is undertaken with a clear-eyedness whose clarity is, unfortunately, infinitely refinable. That is to say: to obsess without end. Many times have I experienced these spasms of hysterically acquired expertise: about air conditioners, desk chairs, pillows for those afflicted with scoliosis, mold treatments, shoe inserts, computer screens, linen napkins. Paradoxically, the more one descends into the depths of research, scouring online forums, technical documents, sifting experience from testimony from advertisement, the more one’s final purchase feels like an arbitrary leap or a coercion of circumstance, a concession to convenience or exhaustion, a step taken in the throes of panic. The anonymous testimony of aggrieved internet users echoes in my skull for each and every one of these eventual purchases, which are scattered around my apartment like so many portals to regret, so many magic mirrors waiting for the tears of their princess to reveal their glass was like as water, their horrible vision of otherwise. During these periods of research I remember how monomanically inflated these objects became in my attention: any trip outside would become a montage of visions of various air conditioner set-ups, through-the-wall sleeves, window units and their diverse braces, central air exhaust pumps—I could identify each brand by the pattern of their heat sink, at forty paces, each era of innovation or misinstallation, or clever or irresponsible modification. This would be replaced, then, by people’s shoes, by their brands emerging from the dull haze of a rush hour subway ride concluding the thicket of commuter legs. I recognized, now, the cars on the road, strange and angular acronyms: RAV4. CR-V. CX-30. And names. Forester. Golf. Sonata.

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It is a staple of Facebook melancholia, a supposed retelling of the results of study that demonstrated that children recognized the logos of more brands than they could identify species of wildflowers. Children perform an irreplaceable task for the species: they render the monstrosities of progress bearable by matter-of-factly incorporating them as native born proclivities. I had missed even this self-education: I barely could identify the makes of cars, I had thought Honda and Hyundai were slurred mispronouncements of the same word. Now each name became more than merely legible but, indeed, constituted incantations that summoned to my mind the chorus of recalls and malfunctions, images of undercarriages dismembered by rust, catastrophic failures of head gaskets or rear trailing arms.

There are those alluring and attractive people for whom we seem to understand that any closer association than our initial, sudden admiration would result in this same kind of disappointment by depth. Whereas previously I could, on rare occasion, be halted on the street by an automobile painted a stunning shade of teal and revel solely in the singularity of that shade, on that afternoon, in that tree-speckled light—like the striking beauty of a strange woman’s jawline or, say, her very sexy midriff, or the sight of her reading Kleist on the Q train, all this pleasure could be obliterated by learning, from her lips, if I made the error of engaging her, that she was a stockbroker and a party animal, or watching her too long and witnessing her produce a vape; and the entire edifice of stereotype, no matter how broad-minded or tolerant I presume to be, overtakes dumb admiration and replaces it with something like worry, about the incoherence and fundamental unreadability of the world, the unreliability of my perception and the fault in my judgment, my vulnerability to the stupidest seductions—it was a 2016 Subaru, yes teal, but prone to early and expensive transmission failure due to the unrefined CVT. I knew the names of some wildflowers, having neglected, until now, my generational duty.

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These are two murkily divided genres of names, that teeter on the edge of the private and public. Anyone who I do not call Boobah, or Peepoo or Bobs, I am not really in love with them.

In Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, he writes of his friend’s mistress who had “acquired the habit of saying of a picture, if it were Impressionist, or an opera, if Wagnerian, ‘Ah! that’s good,’” one day when a young man had kissed her on the ear, and, touched by her pretence of being thrilled, she had affected modestly: ‘But really, as a sensation I call it distinctly good.’” This calling things good had become a kind of shared property of her and her new lover, Saint-Loup. And the narrator marvels at this and other similar expressions pronounced between his friend and his mistress as if they were peculiar, “as though they had been a necessary form of speech, and without any conception of the pointlessness of an originality that is universal.” That “good” a word so common and dull could become a word of private endearment, a marker between two (however, in the novel, unhappy and incomplete) lovers of a shared habitat is consistent with the uses of language, of judgement, of naming. I think of the way that I pronounce the name of my own beloved, not an uncommon one, when it happens to be appended, the same syllables, to a person other than her. It could almost be a different name, though probably there is no sonic variation, no shimmering rings of adoration visible by the air disturbed by an utterance of love.

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The Previa’s name performed double duty as its generic and its sobriquet, among its family. I needed one new car to emerge from a monstrously inflating encyclopedia of nomenclatures fed to me by insomniac scourings of the internet: to be my own. Every day, many times, I check a little box on the screen, I identify the trucks, buses and stop lights and, thereby, I verify that I am human. I am training automobiles to drive without me.

There is a hallowed figure in our society, a magician, a necromancer, who imbues inert and unmelodious products with the halo of intimate destiny—they are almost an obsolete type but persist, for the most part, exclusively for the purpose of distributing automobiles; to provide the drama of purchase that impregnates cars with tenderness with the rigamarole of sale. Ancient air, you breath, from the market place: the perfumed bazaars of Calcutta, oasis souks, the fairs of Limerick, delft laid out on a rug, the Medieval Saturdays of commerce, the used car salesmen that line American highways, behind plywood desks, under posters of Indian chiefs and pinups. I have met these men, in Springfield, MA, Troy, NY, North Hackensack, NJ—they are famous, their personalities are schlock fodder for burlesque, and I have witnessed their necessary magic. Their sleaze and dishonesty is universally suspected—among themselves there has developed a culture of self-help, and it is more to actualize their personalities by demonstrating their limitless powers of coercion than precisely to make the sale that they operate as they do. Their reputation is as visible martyrs to the universal scam of commerce: yea, and the world cries for gift and sacrifice, the only moral trades, defunct.

The ability of these salesmen to employ language in contradiction to the senses was most fascinating to me: “There is no rust,” they would say, as we stared at the same spot of orangebrown. They would construct fantasies of speed, and invoke the promise of family. Every SUV I looked at, I would be pinned into my place in the reproductive chain of life: “Plenty of room for the family.” Some employed techniques of performative candor that took my breath away: they staked their reputations, it seemed their life on the extravagant guarantees made to me: “Trust me. You can trust me.” One tried humiliation: “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” applying the pressure of etiquette so that I would demur from the only legitimate response to his claims, the accusation that he openly lied. Many tried a frenzied and compressed orgy of amiability, binding us with confessional disclosures and proddings, wondrous displays of hospitality. It was amazing how quickly common ground could be found between me and a used car salesman from Hackensack, a first generation Jordanian immigrant from Springfield, a former farmer from Hill County, Texas in Troy, New York—if cosmopolitanism lives, these men are its emblems. Everywhere I heard the universal assertion of hospitality: your money is good here.

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In Newark, I was sold on a 2012 Honda FIT. I was sold by the stray calico kitten that slept in a small plateau of the car’s body in the wheel well. Inspecting the scrapes and indents that made the car affordable, I disturbed the kitten’s sleep and it rose stretching, tumbled to the pavement and wobbled away on still-sleeping legs, pins and needles. I tried the FIT over the profound potholes of Newark, amidst the slackened and informal interpretations of right of way that are in effect there and while reckoning with the creativity of pedestrians in presenting their bodies as bargain against the rigidity of grid. The three people who worked at the dealership, a gravel lot whose office was a quarter of a shipping crate fitted with a window AC through a sawed-off square, were too embroiled in their interrupted and now resumed conversation, about the sex lives of football players, to perform the noxious maneuvers of sale. Actually, I believe this was a technique of supreme sophistication. They let me stand with the car, still spotted with raindrops from that morning’s storm, crawl under it, finger its innards, and listen to its tiny engine rattle with the hood ajar. They let me sit with this thing, under the canopy of their distant attention, until I could say to it. Stranger, what myths will we write?

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It was summer, the car meant Jersey Shore, the blue hills of Massachusetts, as blue as those that background Florence in the oil surface of the Renaissance. I don’t like driving: it is sitting still made mandatory, the nightmare of my childhood; it is consequence amplified immediately to fatality, a perversion of an ethic of fertile failure I was cultivated into by my most generous teachers, by the artists of art and life I most admire. Any attempt at self-expression while driving is irresponsible and this daily and necessary homogeneity frames the outbursts of selfhood permitted Americans in condensed orgies of feeling, at stations along the long roads of getting to life.

What makes driving bearable is the manufactured bleakness of roads: to prevent the urge towards pastoral frolic or amorous sociality, roads are, at best, decorated with dismal median flower boxes and huffing arbors intoxicated with vegetable overdoses of carbon dioxide, soot on green leaves. More often you find dilapidated clovers, retaining walls, crack-riven asphalt and the bordering remnants of bisected neighborhoods or blasted woods. If the city has become the icon of alienated life that is only because the road is not even considered a place. It is no accident that the road is reflexively mentioned always as the cosmic justification for government, for taxes or against unlimited libertarian selfishness: who maintains the roads? Who, along those roads, will pick up the trash? The road binds Americans to their civil society, and the car is what gives access to it. Our entire official identity is oriented towards the automobile—even those who may be pedestrians for life, we acquire our identification at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I am the man on my driver’s license.

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That is not all. If the reader is off put by the tone of this critique, they may ask. All that fear and all that complaint, why buy another car? Surely being a presumptive critic who rails against the ecocide of the automobile-wrought climate disaster, your position is harmed? This is an understandable question. In the year where I did not own a car I expected myself to feel a sense of moral superiority, I imagined myself as being able to more emphatically, with more personal authority, make my case: against death and smog. Quite the opposite. I had even less a chance of being understood, I found, having lost the essential element that binds one to society: hypocrisy.

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Snowy was back on the street. There was a whiteboard laid outside for passersby and children to write their messages to the cat; homages and exclamations. One evening in early August, about three months after his return, Snowy was struck by a car and died immediately on Cortelyou Road. The whiteboard became an ad hoc shrine. Crayon drawings and treats were left on a plastic table, exposed to the rain; new drawings, new treats were placed alongside the ones soaked and squashed. Just yesterday, I was outside to move my FIT from one side of the street to the other, to allow the street cleaner to stir the neighborhood’s dust. A black and white kitten was slinking outside Snowy’s deli. I went in, with exclamations for the owner, with honest hyperboles on how adorable this cat was. Newborn and brave, he said, the cat’s name is Prince.