By Sy Holmes
My car was a beat-up 2000 BMW that I got from my buddy TJ, who bought it from his buddy down in Dallas who had gotten it from someone else who had probably stolen it. He gave it to me, along with a couple tools, a pair of boxing gloves, and a set of Texas plates registered to a Prius “in case I had to handle business.” I got it for a song for him to get back to Houston. It had a white rattle-can paint job that was flaking off and showing silver in places, the oil was self-changing, and the seats got scorching hot. I loved it, even though my girlfriend told me it made me look like a failed molly dealer. It overheated one night in September for no apparent reason.
I went back in the morning and limped it over to the closest thing I have to a mechanic, my buddy Gage, who had full use of his landlady’s garage while she was away in Florida. We took a look at it, checked the codes, and decided we didn’t know shit so we should probably order the most likely parts and see what happened. In return, I reassured Gage’s girlfriend that the headache she had probably wasn’t brain cancer, my area of amateur expertise.
Two weeks later, I had a thermostat and water pump waiting for me at home. We popped the hood, changed the parts, and started to put it all together again, only to realize that one of the tensioner mounts on the serpentine belt had sheared off the engine block itself. This meant that we would have had to take the engine out, do some welding beyond Gage’s skill level, and trust the rest to Jesus.
“If we pull some real fuck-your-cousin engineering, we might be able to find someone to fabricate a new mount, reroute the cable, and stick it someplace else,” Gage told me, as I tried to overcome my sadness with a sandwich. I didn’t know. It seemed beyond both our ability and inclination.
Over the next few days, I scoured central Montana Craigslist for any suitable vehicle. Broke down enough to be affordable, but not too broke down. I finally found a late-’90s Ram that looked promising. Gage was out of town, so I called my friend Skycrane to help me look it over as a sort of combination mechanic and attorney. We showed up to test it out, and the steering was a bit wonky, but it drove. I said I would take it.
Once the price was settled, I had to figure out how I was going to pay the owner, since I realized I hadn’t had a checkbook in a good two years. Because I’m a dumbass, half of my life has been consumed by finding sketchy ways to do legit things. I suggested a couple different ways, which made me feel like a scammer, before we settled on PayPal. I didn’t need to worry, though, because when I met him to sign the title over, he told me that if I stole some government plates I could probably pass myself off as a federal employee and go where I wanted, since it seemed like to him the whole government drove white Rams. He might have been joking.
By the time that was settled, Gage’s landlady was back from Florida, and I had to find a way to offload the BMW. I put it online as a parts car and promptly got offered loot like a sketchy Mossberg rifle, an ancient Honda Civic with anime stickers all over the outside, and a couple gold chains. Anything but cash, which was what I needed. Finally, a guy from up near Fort Benton came down with his wife, who he told me over and over was “sickly,” and bought it. We pushed it out of the garage into the snow and up to his trailer, which had a frayed Harbor Freight winch that may as well have had an OSHA VIOLATION sticker on it.. I sat in the driver’s seat and steered as he pulled it up the equally-sketchy ramps he had brought, and looked at the gray sky that stretched over the plains. I pictured myself ascending, Grease-like, into the heavens above the river, entering the DIY gates of redneck valhalla in my broke-down chariot. Then it was on the trailer and off to a fitful retirement in a front yard. On the way home, my radio got stuck on the Christian channel and I listened to how God wouldn’t let the devil touch you if you just had faith. I don’t know about all that. Maybe he could stop the devil from fucking with my cars.
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Sy Holmes is a writer from western North Carolina. He currently lives in central Montana with other people’s dogs.” Thanks again!