This is no Grand Prix

Our beaters are breaking the bank





Damon Hodge: Henry Ford can kiss my naturally black ass. If not for vehicles, we wouldn't need highways and without highways, we wouldn't have smog and congestion and carbon dioxide, and without all those life-inhibiting pollutants, we wouldn't have global warming ... see where I'm going with this? I guess I should also tell you where I'm coming from. That'd be the Goodyear store on Meadows Lane, where I just spent $157 on a new tire for a truck I just finished paying off (the worst-spent $23,000 of my life) ...


Joshua Longobardy: That—$157—might be enough to cover the dysfunctional windows on my coupe, neither of which can open and close without manual assistance. You see, my car is a BMW 318ti, and it's a real piece of shit; and in the two years I've owned it thus far, my greatest misfortune is not the latter, that it's a real piece of shit, but the former, that it's a BMW, because I've learned that even if a man buys his Beemer used, and at a bare-bones price, he is still assumed, when he goes to the mechanic, to be as rich as the man who bought it new. Which is why I had continued to drive it without a reliable stereo system, with the Check Engine light permanently on, without the hatchback working, with very low oil, and, to my misery, without an air conditioner.

But at least then I could drive it. Now, it's quiescent. For the head gasket is screwed; and if you know anything about head gaskets, it's that they're expensive as hell to fix on any car.


Julie Seabaugh: Truck you and your measly $157. After flagellating my possession-packed '97 Pontiac over 26 hours' worth of Rocky Mountains and amber-waved grain plains, I shelled out $874 for a complete radiatorectomy. Then $398 for something involving power fluids and/or spark filters. Then $96 for, yes, a new tire ...


Damon: Man, pipe down. That $157 is approximately ... ain't shiznit compared to the $14,000 I've spent in the last three years repairing two arthritic, convalescent-worthy 1996 vehicles (a Nissan Sentra and a Pontiac Sunfire) and a 1999 Cheep, er, Jeep Cherokee whose tires seem magnetized to nails, whose fuel system leaks more than a diuretic's diaper and whose slipshod brakes make me wish it'd had holes in the floor so I could use the Flintstone method of braking. That's right, you whiny babies, $14,000. That's more than the gross domestic product of some small third-world country. That's a college education for a Nevada student with a Millennium Scholarship. That's more than you pay in rent a year. That's probably more than the Kelly Blue Book value of your '97 Pontiac, Juelz Santana, and way more than you've plunked down to fix your busted-down Beemer, oh-my-Goshua. I could've bought a new vehicle, started a 529 plan for the expected litter of little Hodges, covered the now-defunct Café Roma's rent for a spell, got bailed out of jail after being found near $80,000 worth of weed, put a down payment down on a condo, took nearly four months off without pay ... need I go on? Y'all can come holla at me when you've seen your credit score become inversely proportional to your vehicle repair bills (they go up, it goes down).

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