It was a ’78 Buick Road Master, like this giant raging white Dildo of a car. We got it from this kid who’d gotten it from her grandfather and it was something like 12 hundred bucks. I don’t know. Baby may have talked her down. I remember that when we went for the test drive she had two dudes with her and then she saw me and the two dudes went home. Because I guess women never commit fucking crimes, or whatever. I guess nothing bad is going to happen to you if the guy test driving your Road Master has his bitch with him. Baby says a white man in a suit can get away with anything, but I feel in most cases a uterus will get you by. People tend to underestimate you if you have to sit down to pee.
So the girl asked about why we needed the car and Baby said, “we may have to live in it,” and everyone laughed like it was funny. We had to borrow her license plates to get back to our neighborhood and then walk them back. She was a pretty trusting girl. Sometimes at night I worry about her.
I don’t know. I think if you ever have to live in a car then you are never not wild, not even for a minute. There is no re-entry into civilization after that. If you live on the diet of the stupid and young (discounted Peeps, cheese and crackers, peanut butter and crackers) there will never be a time when you are not symbolically shoving these ghetto delicacies into your maw, because you know that the need exists, that the bottom won’t hold, that even after you both have jobs and a place and cable television there will still be some ghost of yourselves inhaling leather seats that have cradled a million strange asses, picking gangrene coins from the matted pubes of rust colored shag carpeting. This is your life: what you have lived through. It is happening forever and ever on a loop like some terrible station identification. I lived in a car, I slept in a car, I fucked and ate in a car- that is your name. I stubbed my toe on the ceiling of the backseat. In the end the engine wouldn’t start unless Baby was jumping on the hood. Jumping on the snow slick hood with a cigarette dangling from his mouth like a dare: you see a thing like and you don’t forget it.
We sold that bitch in ’09, on the day I went into labor. It was a Saturday and snowing and the dudes picking it up for scrap weren’t in some big hurry. By that time we’d gotten a newer, bigger car- a mini-van, yes, fine- and the Road Master was just sitting there in the middle parking space like the ugly one in a prom photo. From the house, I watched a guy in coveralls count off ten bills and slap them into Baby’s hand, and there was Baby saying, “My Wife is in labor!” in a happy, flummoxed way as though it had just occurred to him, and the car left our lives in the way that all good things should, safe with flashing lights and immigrants wishing you luck, carried off into the night like a sleeping child.
