I once owned a shitty Corolla.
It was given to me by my folks.
It wasn’t shitty at first. It was just a regular, champagne-colored, 1996 Corolla. Not shitty, but I recall it having been wrecked and rebuilt once before my dad bought it. Four doors, cassette player, manual e-brake. At some point I added a CD player with a removable face that I didn’t remove often, if ever.
Before my parents gave me the Corolla, they’d given it to my brother. He drove it while in college, and then when I moved to Chicago, we traded cars. I took the Corolla, and he took the 1989 5-speed baby-blue BMW 325i that was probably the nicest car I’ll ever call mine. I said that a lot back then, in the late 90s: “This’ll be the nicest car I ever drive.” It still holds today. That car had my whole heart. Its silhouette was boxy—of course; this was the 90s—and its sunroof manual. Its instrument panel glowed a orangey-red in the dark.
I found it difficult to summon a similar level of affection for the ‘96 Corolla. Can you blame me? An automatic, beige, with beige upholstery and plastic hubcaps. No pickup to speak of. Zero allure. But it did the job, which is all I needed a car to do in Chicago. It got me from A to B along the many-potholed streets of the grid. At least once, while parked outside my apartment in Logan Square, it got egged at Halloween. At least once it got towed, and I had to rescue it from the pound. I was in grad school at the time, so I wrote a flash fiction called “Auto Pound.” Here it is, dredged up from the bowels of my hard drive. I don’t know for sure but I reckon the dialogue is swiped from real life except for the last lines:
auto pound
I met my love at the auto pound. We both had friends whose cars had been stolen, and we were standing inside the fence waiting for them, next to the lot attendant’s tiny booth. Our breath was visible and we kept our hands stuffed in our pockets, but we were comfortable enough in our coats. Tightly packed rows of cars stretched deep into the distance where, the lot attendant told us, “rogues” scrabbled around in the dark, stealing parts. “Yeah, it’s real crusty, out here,” he said. He told us about a fellow worker who crossed one’s path and got stabbed in the head with a screwdriver. Then he went back inside his booth.
We stood silently for a while, gazing out into the lot like we were waiting for ships to come in. We were hoping for headlights, and not a lone figure carrying a box of jumper cables and hazard equipment—the only useful leftovers in many recoveries. As we waited, tow trucks pulled in one after another, delivering cars that would never leave on their own. Some had been doused in fire, some were battered and stripped to the bones. The tortured skeleton of a LeSabre rolled past on a flatbed tow, and in its backseat we saw the twisted remains of a child’s bicycle. The lot attendant came out, wrote something on a clipboard, and shook his head. “This morning there was one had a toilet dropped in it,” he told us. “See some crazy shit out here.”
Then my love muttered something, and I asked him to repeat it.
“My friend’s car’s a LeSabre. I bet it looks like that one, too.”
I told him I was sure it wouldn’t, but I wasn’t sure at all.
After some years in Chicago, one of the door handles stopped working, and three of the four hubcaps fell off. The bumpers gathered scratches and dents. Rust clung to the wheel wells and underbelly. The A/C stopped working. The heater always worked real well, though, and I would blast it.
After I got married in 2006 and we left Chicago a few months later, my husband and I drove that Corolla all the way to Birmingham, Alabama, where we started our new life together and soon had a child. My husband started driving the Corolla back and forth each day to work in Tuscaloosa, 45 minutes away. When we decamped to Nashville in 2009, the Corolla came with. But soon we sold it to some guy who gave it, I think, to his son.
In The Come Apart, Maggie Corbin drives a shitty Corolla—also given to her by her dad—and when we first see the car, it’s been through more than just a decade of Chicago winters. It is, shall we say, worse for wear. But it gets her back to Nashville in the winter of 2010, with a duct-taped bumper and its backseat piled with clothes, Maggie’s Epiphone SG, and not much more.
Maggie blasts the heat all the way through Indiana and into Tennessee.
I don’t feel any nostalgia for my time spent behind the wheel of that car, bumping along those long city streets and gassing up in the bitter cold. Truly, it didn’t win a place in my heart the way the little Beamer did, or the way my 2016 Honda HRV did (RIP). But it’s the car, so far, that has entered the realm of my fiction. It’s the car that I’ve memorialized, I guess you could say. It held up in a harsh climate, it rarely let me down, and it never got stolen—though it did get ticketed. Many times.
Some time last year, I heard the song “Salvage Title,” by the band Friendship, for the first time, and felt a little thrill. I am not the only one to have memorialized a Corolla, perhaps? The song goes like this:
0, ’02,
’02 Corolla
Blasting the heat
Oh, would you help me out
With some papers
For the DMV?
Oh, let me tell you
What nobody
Told me
Nearly everyone
You chance to meet
Is gonna want a piece
Just heard this new Steve Gunn EP today. Super chill, super good:
Thanks for reading, listening, comin’ along. If you enjoyed this field trip, please consider tapping the ❤️ button, or share it. Or both! 🤘
THE COME APART will be published by TriQuarterly Books in June. Pre-order here.
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