I pull up to the mental health counseling office in my Lamborghini Aventador LP 770-4 Superveloce Jota. The V12 spins down, and the winter quiet is palpable again. As the doors scissor shut behind me, I wonder if today is the day. It’s about time I got something good. Something concrete. What the hell else am I paying him for? Lord knows I don’t have that kind of money to just throw around.
I shouldn’t get my hopes up. The talk is circular. I run my mouth in monologue laps around roundabout questions. Then time runs out before my hands even get a chance to thaw. But I can’t just push a quarter down the man’s throat to make him keep talking. He isn’t a jukebox. As I make ready to leave, scarf, gloves, and heavy coat in hand, he says,
“You know what you really need…”
Then he takes a fat puff from his pipe. Whether his sentence is finished? Unclear.
So I continue putting on my coat. As the stagnant room fills with swirls of smoke, he stifles his coughing for just long enough to leer at me through his bloodshot eyes and say,
“You gotta write this shit down, pendejo.”
I need to find a better therapist.
The icy January wind bites into my neck. I flip up the collar and crunch away through the fallen snow. It’s not good advice, and it isn’t bad. But it’s all I have to go on. It’s up to me what to do with it. Blue lights flash from behind, and a siren blips a warning. I pick up the pace.
Ok, so maybe it’s not exactly a mental health counseling office. Maybe it’s a bridge.
More specifically, under a bridge. Maybe sometimes I go hand out cigarettes to the homeless. See what they have to say. I would hand out joints instead, but that probably just exacerbates their schizophrenia or whatever other psychoses, like it does mine. Maybe they’d like that. But I doubt it.
And as for my ride, well, for one, the doors have to be unlocked manually. My only key is bent so I have to be careful when the lock freezes so the damned thing doesn’t snap off the rest of the way.
No, it’s not a Lambo. I’m a compulsive daydreamer. But if you were taking on a task like the one I’ve gotten myself into, you would be too.
I’m looking for a way out. Not the kind of way at the business end of a shotgun. I tried something like that with a knife once. Didn’t really pan out.
The kind of way out I’m looking for isn’t as easy to describe. Most folks don’t even realize they’re somewhere they ought to get out of. But that’s not the way I see it. Too many of us are complacent. So many just give up. We pretend to be happy. We learn to lie to our parents, then to our friends, our bosses, our spouses, our children. The benefits and attractions are just comfy enough so we don’t raise hell. I think we’re keeping our heads down to be servants of forces not acting in our best interest. And I want out.
Thing is, last time I tried, everything went to shit and I almost died. So, this time around behooves a more patient and tactical approach. But this time around, I’m also deeper in than I was before. The way out gets further away as we age. The impulse to fight gets weaker as the path of least resistance broadens.
Anyway, back to my ride. There’s no shortage of things to investigate, marks to question, leads to follow. B needs getting to from A. I drive a salvage title 2002 Toyota Celica GT-S. It’s a fast, lightweight, high-revving coupe. Cheap and reliable. Engine co-developed with Yamaha, also used by Lotus supercars. Decent handling from the low center of gravity and double-wishbones in the back. Front-wheel drive helps when the snow and rain get dicy. Dirty and banged up, it flies under the radar. Economical mileage, but there’s a hidden, more aggressive profile on the cams, a valve lift only activated after six thousand RPM, like having a second, more powerful engine under the hood, or up my sleeve. Just in case I need to get into some trouble.
As much as my dwindling Italian genetics still love the ostentatious flair of the Lamborghini, it just wouldn’t work out here in Chicago. Even if I got one of them shits for free, the repair bill from a month of scrapes, dents, rust, and potholes would send me into bankruptcy. And that’s fingers crossed nothing goes wrong with the rest of the car, which, if you know anything about luxury Italian cars, well, they tend to have what some might call temperamental personalities.
That’s also assuming I wouldn’t get carjacked before any of that, or shot for driving by the wrong club at the wrong time. So for now, the wheels stay Japanese.
I brought the car back from the brink of death a few months ago. I almost gave up on it. Whoever the last owner was, he wasn’t kind to it. The third gear synchro is blown, and needs to be double-clutched. The engine was dying at idle, and also dying spontaneously. If you’re looking for the advanced class of how to be zen, then holy shit, get yourself a car that dies spontaneously, and try to stay calm. It might just drive you crazy. How do you think I got like this?
But I saved her. And now a whole slew of other problems are creeping up from the metalwork. The suspension’s never been touched, anywhere, and it’s all breaking down, bit by bit. I think of it as an exercise in awareness. The rattling, the bouncing, some weird cowbell noise, the curious gunshot sound when a deep pothole sneaks up on me, the shaking in the steering wheel – it’s all part of a dynamic puzzle. Tie rods, control arms, drive axle, springs, wheel weights, shocks, ball joints – which parts are wearing, breaking, and in conjunction with which others?
Most likely everything. Everything’s broken.
I’m trying to hold out as long as I can. I could probably just barely afford to fix all the suspension bits, even refresh the engine, get a spare key, maybe even swap the synchros. But there’s value in holding on to the last possible moment. Somewhere in this combination of double-clutching, feeling every texture of the road, and hearing every protest of the chassis, something hidden is written, waiting to be unlocked.
There’s a bond between the machine and me. There’s a phantom pain in my bones with every struggling creak of the metal. But somewhere along that razor’s edge crest between functionality and catastrophic failure is a vein of rare gems. Something with the potential for the healing of a greater, overarching condition. Like the clarity of an epiphany following a new depth of fatigue. Something like a modern-day form of bloodletting, hoping that it cures this mood I can’t shake.
For the record, I’ve tried actual bloodletting, and that didn’t work for shit.
But it’s just one of many leads to follow. It’s easy to get lost. Of all the caves I could’ve chosen to dive into, I’ve taken a plunge into the automotive world. All I want to know is if there’s a path for me here. But all I find is more questions that have nothing to do with what I’m looking for. Should cars be connected to the cloud? Isolated from the outside world? Or connected to the outside world, and isolated from the cloud? Should they drive themselves, or not at all? Should they fart, or hum? Is it better to utterly demolish a few third-world countries for some lithium, or turn back and keep feeding the oil gluttons?
Who the hell knows?
When I was a kid, cars were spaceships. Fast or slow, sleek or chunky, it didn’t matter. They could take you anywhere in the world. I spent hours in my mom’s minivan, without the key, just my hands on the wheel, imagining universes, a rogue with a mission, always just barely escaping, slipping through the cracks between good and evil.
Whether one day I end up driving a Rimac Nevera or a busted up Chevy Astro van, it won’t matter. A car is not just a machine that travels distance. It can change the dimensions of your mind, and transport you to other realities, if you let it.
Try sometime. Instead of cussing out some jamoke for not using his turning signal, pretend he’s a goddamn asteroid. Swerve around his ass and fly away.
My powers of daydreaming today are a far cry from what they were when I was younger. But when I lean back into the low-slung bucket seat and run my hands over the controls, it still reminds me of what I came from. And where I’ve always dreamed of going. But time ticks faster than it did back then, too. And there are stakes now. I have job offers rolling in giving promises of mediocre but comfortable positions I could have for the rest of my life, if only I agree to bow my head and keep doing the things I’ve never enjoyed. And the temptation to throw everything to the wind and simply love the woman I’m with, no matter what the job, grows stronger every day.
I know I’m not alone. And I know there are people who have been where I am now and found a way through. One day I want to tell that story, from the first person point of view. That could be what all this writing is for. A staircase of words. But it’s too soon to tell.
Keeping one’s mind on the task at hand is not easy. I try not to divert my attention into an investigation of who is to blame. It’s easy to go looking for culprits, for perpetrators of crimes, just for the satisfaction of removing culpability from oneself. But when I slide away from finding the escape route into seeking targets to blame, I end up running in circles again. Because more often than not, I’m like that guy in the movie Memento.
You ever seen Memento? This guy who keeps forgetting shit is trying to solve a crime and it turns out he’s to blame for a lot of the shit he’s investigating. I think the moral of that story is something like: don’t try to be a detective if you have a severe mental disorder.
My car comes to life with a few too many cranks, but then – a satisfying roar. It could use a compression test. The snow melts off the hood, as its warm heart beats underneath. Outside, it’s turning into a blizzard. The roads are getting slippery, and the plows haven’t attacked the parking lots yet.
I wonder how many power slides I can do before my front suspension craps out.
