Photo: Pictured are my two most recent hunks of junk, a 2000 Nissan Maxima on the left and an enormous metallic boat of a car called a Mercury Grand Marquis on the right.
I've never owned a new vehicle. I've never even owned a nice vehicle. Heck, I've never owned a vehicle with a working CD player.
So, this is the history of the pieces of junk I have driven for all these years.
I learned how to drive on my mom's Ford Aerostar van, which had the peculiar shape of a greyhound's head as it tries to scoot under a fence. I didn't even get my driver's license until I was almost 17 because I couldn't drive, and when I finally did learn, I wasn't exactly a heartthrob with the ladies driving around a vehicle fit for a soccer mom, as if my mom's son had played soccer.
I moved on to driving my dad's Chevy Silverado pick-up for most of my time in high school. It wasn't so bad, really, except that my dad insisted I keep the camper shell on the back of it. When he used it, he kept tools and what-not in it for his job repairing boilers at sawmills. But to a high school student trying desperately to look cool, the camper shell guaranteed I failed at every attempt.
One incident I remember with this particular vehicle was when we took photos for senior superlatives. Each year, at Irwin County High School, the senior class votes for the best male and female in certain categories: Best Smile, Best Sense of Humor, Most Likely to Succeed, that sort of thing. I was voted Most Creative or something, although I wasn't at all shocked I didn't win Most Athletic considering all the sports I didn't letter in.
We went to a nice house and dressed in fancy clothes for our senior superlative photos for the yearbook, but as I went to leave, I accidentally backed into the pick-up truck of a classmate I will call Arnie. This left a huge dent in Arnie's truck.
Now, I don't know what senior superlative Arnie was, but if I had to guess, he was voted either Most Violent or Most Likely to Assassinate Someone with a High-Powered Rifle. He was the kind of guy who was always trying to toughen me up by doing fun things to me like stabbing me in the wrist with a pencil. You can still see the mark. He was one of my best friends.
He wasn't exactly mad about me wrecking his vehicle. Instead, he was opportunistic. He said that he would not make me pay for the repairs if I would fight him. And I got to choose the weapons. Imagine me fighting someone with nunchucks, because that's what I imagined.
Anyway, I paid for the damn repairs. My classmates also didn't vote me Most Courageous.
As a graduation present, my parents bought me a gray 1985 Chevrolet Blazer. I loved this vehicle, even though it was 9 years old when I graduated in 1994. It had a good tape deck, and I put in a nice speaker box with 10-inch woofers that sounded great even without an amplifier. Heck, I even had a CD Walkman that I could plug in to the tape deck, even though any bump in the road caused it to skip. It was almost like having a CD player.
I totaled it three days after I graduated.
Me and three friends were driving around, drinking, but I wasn't drunk after only three drinks. Like most 18 year old boys in the South, I was essentially a functional alcoholic at that point, so I could hold my liquor, or in this case, I could hold the flavored alcoholic malt beverage Zima, pretty well.
Kids, drinking and driving is bad! Don't do it! Especially, if you're drinking Zimas.
Anyway, rain was drizzling down, but only barely, which cops say is the worst because it is just enough wetness on the road to slicken the oil from tires, but not enough to wash it away. So when I dropped either a cassette tape or a pack of cigarettes in the passenger-side floorboard (the stories varied on whether I was telling my parents or my friends), and I reached for that fallen item, whatever it was, and I rose back up and saw I was about to hit a mailbox, I jerked the steering wheel and hydroplaned.
The Blazer twisted around completely as it slid across the slippery road, and it's true that life slows down in these deadly moments, even if they only seem deadly. I remember feeling like I was on one of those spinning teacup rides at an amusement park, only in slow motion. My life was in peril, but I remember enjoying it.
Yet still I'm a coward.
The Blazer skidded all the way to the edge of the ditch and then began to roll over, and I don't know if it was due to the compressed sense of time, but the SUV seemed to teeter in almost a perfect balance for a moment before falling over gently and landing on its roof in the ditch with a crunch of glass and wheezing metal.
Yes, kids, vehicles were often made of metal back in those days.
I was the only one wearing a seat belt, so I was left suspended in the air. Everyone else was left groaning and cussing on the ceiling. No one was hurt, aside from one scratch, I think. In that odd moment, I reflected on the oddity of how perspective relates to language as we climbed out of my rolled up window.
Then, we started throwing Zima bottles into a nearby cornfield. We told ourselves that the reason we hid them was that we didn't want our parents or the cops to know we were drinking. The real reason was probably that we didn't want our friends to know we were drinking Zima.
And yes, I know I probably should have been charged with a DUI, but if it matters, I probably drank and drove far less than most of the folks my age in the 22 years since, if only because no one wantsed to hang out with me at bars, and I never drink and drive today.
So, the summer after graduating from high school, that wistful time written about longingly in songs by the likes of John Cougar Mellencamp, I was left without a vehicle, and my parents, to whom I admitted that I was drinking that night, would not let me borrow theirs. In fact, I spent most of the summer hitching rides with a girl I was dating, not knowing that she was also dating the guy I almost fought with nunchucks, too.
I worked through the summer and saved money, and I used it to buy an almost exactly identical gray Chevy Blazer to replace the one I wrecked. The only difference was the new one was slightly newer, a 1986 model, although it was still 1994. My radio system wasn't quite as good, and I still didn't have a CD player, but we did salvage the speaker box from the other Blazer, so it sounded OK, even though there was an occasional short somewhere.
And frankly, the Blazer was a well loved vehicle, even though it got terrible gas mileage and the air conditioning was so shoddy that it started a long tradition of me rolling the window down. I drove that second Blazer until about 2000, and though it was mostly dependable, it did break down at some odd times.
When you're driving around, you don't realize how far 10 miles is. I was living in Tifton and having trouble with a girlfriend so I decided to go driving at 2 a.m. listening to Pearljam, which at the time was one of my favorite things to do when I was feeling upset. Between my hometown of Irwinville and Tifton is an infamous amateur Grand Prix event called descriptively the S curve, since it is a curve shaped like that particular letter. Taking the curve, I heard something softly explode in the Blazer's engine area, which I later learned was my water pump busting.
The vehicle lurched to a stop dead on the side of the road right in the middle of the S. Since the curve is roughly exactly in the middle of my parent's house in Irwinville and the house I rented with friends in Tifton, I could have gone either way. I chose Tifton because I didn't want to face my dad with more car troubles when I was already having girl troubles. I don't like troubles.
So I walked to Tifton, which was about 10 miles away, in the pitch dark. I passed by a yard full of dogs and they snapped and snarled at me. I prepared to defend myself with the Blazer's key poking between my middle fingers as some improvised stabbing utensil. Those dogs howled at me for about an hour of my trip until I guess they couldn't smell me anymore, and I'm man enough to admit that I was a scared little boy then, even if I was a 21-year-old man.
By the end of my three-hour journey, I was bone weary, hungry and achingly thirsty. No wonder someone invented cars.
I didn't even want to deal with my car at all, because I thought the engine had blown because I didn't change the oil. I thought it would be a problem too expensive for me to fix and I would be forever walking the rest of my life. As it turned out, my parents saw it on the side of the road, got it towed and fixed it for only a few hundred dollars, but I didn't know it at the time because my roommates and I did not have enough money for a phone.
(But somehow I did scrape up enough money at that time to rent a friend's car to drive my girlfriend to the airport to see her other boyfriend. Yes, you read that sentence right. I tell most of that story in the blues song "
That Damned Ol' Plane." Consider it an intermission.)
Anyway, over the years the miles extracted their toll from my trusty ol' Blazer and its gauges stopped working. I had to guess how fast I was driving by the wind rushing in my open window. The worst was the lack of a working gas meter, as I've always been the kind of guy who puts $10 in his car no matter the price and never fills up. So it was always a risky guessing game I played and sometimes lost and had to do more walking.
One of those times I lost the bet was when I lived in Athens and I was driving a couple of friends home to South Georgia. The trip was already memorable because we passed a truck on the way down the interstate and saw a couple inside engaged in a sex act.
Kids, driving while engaged in a sex act is bad! Don't do it!
Anyway, shortly later, the Blazer shut off and I coasted to the side of the interstate. I was very nearly out of gas. You know when you make that gurgling sound with a straw at the end of a drink from a Styrofoam cup? Well, that's where I was at with the gas tank.
This created a conundrum. From experience I knew that I could still get another few miles out of the Blazer, but it would sputter and cut off, and when it ran completely out, we might be stuck in the middle of Interstate-75 with hundreds of two-ton 70-mile-an-hour bullets headed our way with no way to dodge them.
We looked to the north and looked to the south, and there were no exits nearby. None of us had even paid attention to where we were, so we might have been 10 or more miles from civilization. I wasn't going through that kind of walk again, especially not on a hot South Georgia afternoon.
So we cranked up and risked it. And the ol' Blazer did us proud. It cut off a few more times, but it kept starting back up, though there were some tense moments when we were halfway stuck in the road and the engine wouldn't quite catch. Soon we saw an exit in the distance and with only fumes remaining we somehow managed to reach the top of the exit hill. Just as we crested, the engine cut off for a final time.
To our right, at the bottom of the hill, was a service station, so we were able to cruise, gasless, down the slope to the pumps.
My dad bought my mom a brand new 2000 Nissan Maxima for Christmas one year, so I got her hand-me-down 1992 Mazda 626 in the deal. This meant better gas mileage, working gauges, and for a short while, a working air conditioner, but eventually that went out on me, as they always seem to. I am destined to sweat, despite my valiant attempts to avoid hard work at all costs.
Of course, it only had a tape deck.
There was something cool about my Blazer, but there was nothing cool about this all-white mouse of a car. I hit a deer with it once and the deer just rolled over a complete 360 degrees and kept running, which shows the kind of power the Mazda had. I wrote a rap that included a reference to it once. "I can't get chicks with my 626 with my no-name clothes and my off-brand kicks."
Once, someone rear-ended me, and the other driver was at fault. Since my dad still owned the Mazda, he billed the guy's insurance company but then didn't pay to fix my car, and I never saw a penny of that money. Later, at the same exact spot, someone else rear-ended me and I told the guy who hit me not to worry about it, just to save the poor guy some money and me some time.
I never told my dad.
In March 2005, almost exactly 12 years before the day I wrote this, my dad, Jim Vassey, died on the west coast of Mexico, where he was working at a furniture factory and living like a runaway cowboy. While he lived there, he once called me and said, "I want you to help me write a country song. It's called 'I'm dating a hooker, a stripper and a married man's wife.'" I don't know what kind of radio station would have played that song.
As you can see, my dad was a bit of a rogue. And he was serious about his misadventures, too. When he died, he was living with a gorgeous exotic dancer who was my age. For all we know, that may be what killed him.
My sister, Dena, and I flew out to San Diego to claim his body and retrieve his things, including his Chevy pick-up truck that would become my next vehicle. It was the most harrowing three days of my life, and worthy of its own story, so I won't go into great detail. Suffice to stay, a grieving pair of siblings should never have to drive a pick-up across the entire length of the country towing a gigantic trailer with dry-rotted tires and a motorcycle slowly slipping through the many straps haphazardly tied to it and threatening to fly off the trailer at any moment and become a deadly missile that will end in the nerve-wracked drivers incarceration for life.
Also, I freaked right the hell out when we tried to take a nap at a truck stop because every semi I heard pulling in was a serial killer bent on out destruction, at least in my paranoid, nerve-wracked mind. I watch too much true crime.
Somehow, we made it home alive without killing anyone, and the pick-up became mine. I really loved that truck in a lot of ways, especially since it was my dad's. It even had a CD player, but you couldn't really say it worked properly. It would randomly spit out CDs like a toddler forced to eat broccoli.
Of course, the truck was notorious because I literally used it as a rolling garbage dump. It typically had a bed full of garbage bags, and for a while, the Google street view of my house showed that white truck with a pile of trash filling the back. Now I typically use my front porch for the same purpose because I don't have a pick-up to even pretend that I'm eventually taking the trash to the dump.
The truck finally died, and I was out of work at the time, in 2009, so basically I just walked around Irwinville. Then my mom called me one day from Augusta and told me that a little old lady was selling her Mercury Grand Marquis for cheap. Sight-unseen, I told her to buy it because in my mind I was picturing a sort of sporty Pontiac Grand Prix. Instead, I got just what I was told: A grandma car.
This enormous, metallic, boxy monstrosity of a car became my ride for the first 4-plus years that I worked at
The Ocilla Star, so it was a familiar sight around Ocilla, puttering around. The car drove well, but that was all I could say nice about it. The air conditioning didn't work right, of course, and toward the end of me driving it, the drivers side window wouldn't even roll down, and this was during the hottest summers I've ever experienced, so it was pure torture to drive more than a few minutes. Of all the vehicles I've ever driven, this is the only one that I kind of actively hated.
The most consistent problem, aside from the AC, was that you needed to know a trick to keep the battery from running down. If you opened the car door without putting the key in the ignition and turning the car on, the interior light would stay on for some damnable reason. Probably dozens of times I went to get something out of the car, forgot to do the trick and found a dead battery the next day.
In 2014, I had pneumonia and appendicitis at the same time, and when the ruinous pain in my torso got too intense, I called my mom and told her I needed to go to the emergency room. I planned to drive across the street to her house, but the Grand Marquis wouldn't start because I had obviously forgotten to do the trick.
That day, I dropped two bad habits. I smoked my last cigarette across the street from the hospital, and I've never driven the Grand Marquis again either.
Remember the 2000 Nissan Maxima my mom got for Christmas that year? Well, because I wasn't well enough to worry about fixing the Grand Marquis, I started driving the Nissan and eventually I took over ownership of it. Of course, by the time I got it, the CD player didn't work, and the radio's volume knob is broken so it's stuck at the same volume, just loud enough to put you to sleep.
Of course, the AC on the Nissan used to work, but in the past 6 months, I've developed a problem where the engine bellows gas or exhaust fumes and that means I can't drive with the window rolled down or the AC going or I choke on potentially poisonous fumes. So, now that it's getting warm, I sweat.
A belt squeals. For some reason, all the lights on the dashboard light up at random times. Last week, the gear shifter started sticking. And these are the remaining problems after I just sank over $600 into repairs and replacing tires on the Nissan in the past few months.
I need a replacement, but I wasn't going to be able to replace it for a long while, as I'm the kind of guy who got insurance very cheap through Obamacare, if you get what I'm saying. It didn't help that the pneumonia wiped out my savings in 2014. I had to cash in a life insurance policy to pay for surgery in November.
But as most of you know, I've written a lot about the Tara Grinstead case lately, and in some of those articles, I wrote about the troubles I've been having with my car. After reading it, some amazing friends and fans of mine decided to make the overwhelming gesture of putting together some money for me to buy a car.
I don't know if those who donated will want their names known, so I'm keeping them anonymous, but they are truly incredible people. One was even a senior superlative in our graduating class, and it should have been Most Generous. And no, you conspiracy theorists out there, the donors were not in any way involved with the Tara Grinstead case. They donated because they wanted to encourage me to continue writing about their hometown, and they have.
Then, this morning, March 8, 2017, my sister told me there was talk about some very kind fans on the Up and Vanished Discussion site considering donating to my PayPal account to help me buy a car and a cell phone. I really appreciate them even contemplating donating for a car, as I need one, but I don't want a cell phone at all.
It will be a cold, sad day when I buy one of those time-consuming, courtesy-and-conversation-destroying devices. If you don't want to donate, but like my writings, a nice gift would be for you to destroy your own cell phone.
But it's nice for those who offered to buy me a phone to offer. I'm so thankful for all the compliments I've received lately, and for people to even consider giving to me is truly humbling. I've nearly cried in gratitude, honestly. It's for all those kind people, who have restored much of my waning faith in my humanity, that I am writing this.
And the money I received, it's enough to buy a better car, certainly, but I'm going to guarantee one thing: This vehicle that I buy will have a working CD player!
You see, since I quit smoking, I replaced that habit with composing songs, and I've wanted more than anything to be able to drive around listening to my own songs, but even when I ride with other people like my sister who has a CD player in her car, she for some reason doesn't want to listen to me singing. It's weird, right?
But more importantly, this new vehicle may help in a more serious way. Since I quit smoking, I got fatter, and I also quit being pumped full of nicotine, a stimulant. I haven't been diagnosed, but in the past few years, I think I've developed sleep apnea. I snore badly, which is a symptom, and have a thick neck, which is a risk factor, and I often come very, very close to dozing off when I drive. Sometimes I cross that line, if only for the scantest moment.
I know I should go to the doctor and get that checked out, but you know what that costs and you know I don't have it.
In my Nissan, with it's constant low volume, it's as dozy as NPR and probably contributes to the eye-fluttering, death-defying drives I have too often. I promise that whatever car I buy, I will blare the music at a very loud level to ensure I stay wildly awake.
You wonderful folks who donated have done more than helped buy me a car. You might have saved my life.
," and has since published another, "Deep Freeze." At night, leading up to Halloween in 2005, she gave guided ghost tours of the Agrirama.
