A Life in 10 Cars

8a. 1964 Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible. Really good vintage cars are rarely available for $600 in the Weekly classifieds, and this primer-colored beauty, which may be less a Cadillac than a vaguely Cadillac-shaped chunk of Bondo, is no exception. There are chemicals, I discover, that can technically get a car to running when you spray them into the carburetor. The hitch is, of course, they don’t keep it running very long.

8b. 1968 Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible. $1,800 vintage cars from the Weekly classifieds are somewhat nicer, I discover, and the Romanian boyfriend of the aspiring actress who is selling the car is almost persuasive in his description of the car’s cream-puff provenance. It chugs like a motorboat and has the turning radius of the Queen Mary, but you can fit eight people into it on a trip to the beach or a drive-in movie, and a Marshall stack plus a drum kit fits easily into the trunk. It is in this car that I romance the woman I will eventually marry. We drive through a cloud of butterflies on the Tejon Pass on the way to see the wildflowers, and they splatter on the windshield like balls of paint. When I pop the hood later, the radiator grille is encrusted with a butterfly mosaic Gaudi might have envied, hundreds of interlaced bright wings iridescing in the early-morning sun. The next New Year’s Eve, outside my apartment in Koreatown, close enough to midnight that the sound of the collision is masked by the sound of AK-47s fired straight into the air, a drunk guy plows smack into the side of the parked vehicle, bending the rails of the frame into what a mechanic would later describe as seagulls flying in tandem.

9. 1986 Ford Thunderbird. My father had always said that I would drive his car over his dead body. And when he is felled by a massive heart attack in a Canadian parking structure, I do. The ashtray overflows with his cigarette butts, which I can’t bring myself to throw out. The trunk bulges with magazines and newspapers containing almost everything I had ever written, stories he claimed he’d never read. In the cassette player is a radio performance of the Verdi Requiem he’d taped a few weeks before his death. It seems significant somehow, so I drive up through the San Gabriels and snap his tape into the deck, but after a few bars of Verdi’s magnificent trumpets the music deteriorates into degraded static, then into silence. If this is a message from beyond, I have no idea what it means.

10. 1998 Dodge Ram 1500 Quad Cab. Ram tough. With a baby seat in the rear.