The Vehicle of Damnation

by Jeffery Vernon Matucha

    “I have that stupid White Zombie song stuck in my head”.
    “Which song?”
    “Y’know, that MTV song of theirs.”
    Skye had not seen Spinny in more than a year. Skye had been bent over her old Plymouth, trying to determine why it had died on her, when Spinny walked up to her out of the blue.
    Spinny nodded towards the car. “Won’t start?”
    “Yeah, and I don’t know why.”
    It was just before six in the morning. Skye had dropped off her last passenger about an hour earlier before going to Ocean Beach to finish off her last beer and another all-night bender. Now the sun was coming up, creating long, sharp shadows. The morning ocean wind and the continuous crashing sounds of the waves made everything extra cool. Only a few widely separated homeless people and early morning joggers were wandering around the Sunday morning beach.
    Spinny’s long, stringy hair wavered around her face as the breeze wafted by. Skye always wondered why Spinny never tied her hair back. Skye had tied back her unruly dreadlocks so that no stray hair would get into any of her engine parts.
    “Battery?” asked Spinny.
    “Nope. It still has juice.”
    Skye wasn’t sure why she was looking around the engine. She had, for the most part, exhausted her modest knowledge of auto mechanics in trying to determine why her car wouldn’t start. But she still had a residual feeling that if she looked around long enough and stared hard enough she might find out what was wrong with it.
    Skye could tell that Spinny had also pulled an all-nighter. No doubt she was on something else besides alcohol that was keeping her going. Skye stood up straight to observe some of the distant wanderers on the beach.
    “I guess I can’t get a ride then,” said Spinny.
    “Not unless you can get it started. You know anything about cars?”
    “Hell no.”
    Spinny walked around to the other side of Skye’s car and sat down on the ground, using the driver’s side door as a backrest. Skye never knew what tribe Spinny belonged to, whether she was a punk, a throcker, or a hippy. She was wearing a handmade skirt of various fabrics and colors, a faded Operation Ivy t-shirt, and a black Derby jacket. She shouldered a large army surplus backpack as well. Her eyes were surrounded by thick, cracking eyeliner and her ears glinted in the sun from multiple studs and dangling earrings.
    As she came around the car, she saw that Spinny had opened a can of beer. Spinny took another beer out of her backpack and held it out for Skye. Skye didn’t feel like drinking, but she took it and opened it anyway to be polite.
    Skye put her beer on the roof of the car and looked into the back seat. “This car is a fuckin’ mess.”
    “I’ve seen worse,” tossed Spinny.
    The car was a rolling disaster area, thought Skye. All kinds of papers and trash were all over the floor. The front part was bad enough, but the back seat was a trove of refuse. Papers, wrappers, various items of clothing, and even a few old beer cans were strewn everywhere in the back. You couldn’t even see the floor in the back for all of the debris. Basically Skye’s passengers had treated her car as their own teenage bedroom.
    “Where’d you get this thing from anyways?” asked Spinny.
    “From my grandparents.”
    “They gave you this to you?”
    “They couldn’t drive no more, so they let me have it. I’ve had it since high school.”
    Standing back, Skye ran her eyes along the edge of her faded and dented Plymouth. Her car was so still. It’s fading paint and small random rust spots gave it a pallor that was telling her the car was done.
    She didn’t know as much about auto mechanics as some of her friends, but she was convinced her car had given up the ghost. It was probably something that could be fixed, but surely the repair was something she couldn’t afford. The car had made a quite loud and hard-to-define noise when it had failed to start. Skye knew that meant something really expensive was going on under the hood.
    Spinny let out a belch. “Callin’ Kasi?”
    Skye was impressed with Spinny’s memory. Despite not having seen her for some time and having maintained only a part-time friendship, Spinny remembered that Kasi was Skye’s go-to-gal for auto mechanics.
    “Nah,” tossed Skye.
    “What y’gonna do? Just leave it here?”
    “Yeah. It’s dead.”
    Spinny turned to look back at the sharp light of the beach as Skye wedged herself into the back seat. If she was going to ditch the car, she was at least going to look through the chaos in the back, just in case there was anything she wanted to keep.
    She didn’t have any particular goals in mind for her search. She just knew that through years of use and abuse the backseat and the trunk could possibly contain lost items that she would want to keep. Perhaps it was all just junk and trash, but it was a chore she needed to do if she was really going to abandon it.
    She started tossing papers from the back into the front passenger seat. The floor and seats were infested with free periodicals, mostly Bay Guardians and East Bay Expresses, plus a few old UC Theatre calendars.
    She also tossed aside a few beer cans. Some had been smashed semi-flat from being trampled on by numerous passengers. Many of Skye’s friends didn’t have cars. Some of them had never even bothered to get driver’s licenses, despite being in their twenties and thirties, because they never had the opportunity or resources to actually own a car. Therefore she always had a steady stream of willing passengers to all of the clubs, parties and bars she had driven to in this vehicle.
    “Whattaya doin’ in there?” shouted Spinny.
    “Cleanin’ out the car.”
    “What the fuck for? It’s dead, ain’t it?”
    “Hey! My Christ on Parade tape!”
    “What?”
    “I thought someone had stolen it,” said Skye as she waved the tape out of the passenger window.
    Skye carefully placed the tape on the dashboard and dived back into her search.
    “Now that your car’s dead you’re gonna clean it out.”
    Skye reemerged. “Check this out.” She held out a clump of keys on a metal bat key chain.
    “Hey, cool bat!” said Spinny, sitting up.
    “Who the hell left these in here?”
    “Nobody bitched about missing keys?”
    “There’s a Volvo key on it.”
    Skye placed the keys on the dashboard as she wondered who she knew who owned a Volvo.
    Then she remembered: Her ex-boyfriend Jesse had owned an old Volvo. He was one of a line of ‘What-was-I-thinking?’ ex-boyfriends, one of those relationships that she marveled at from a distance, wondering how she could have ever gotten mixed up with someone like that in the first place.
    Jesse was a special case, however. He was, no doubt, one of the most insane people she had ever gotten romantically involved with. She was no psychiatrist, but she felt he might have been a pathological liar. He had always been fibbing and lying about the things he had been doing, but without any motivation for most of his lies. Why would one have to lie about having seen The Ruling Class with his friends when they had actually gone to see Harold and Maude? Or lie about what he had eaten, or what kind of music he had been listening to? It made no sense. It was as if he always had to lie about everything as a sort of kick.
    She had broken up with him by throwing him out of her house. He had lived with her in her rooming house for six months after having failed, and possibly not even having tried, to get a job or to go back to school. His revenge for his eviction was to saddle her with almost all of his worldly possessions, possessions that he never did retrieve, forcing her to deal with a great deal of clothes, books, records, comic books, and a large variety of various other items that made her shoulders tighten up when she thought about them.
    She could feel the sun on her back, warming her up. She climbed further into the back seat, moving in to the cool breeze coming through the open windows. She didn’t feel like getting warmed up by the sun just yet.
    She had removed most of the larger pieces of refuse from the floor. Now she started reaching under the front seats.
    She felt a cold, metal cylinder. She rolled it out.
    “Holy shit!” exclaimed Skye.
    “What?”
    “I found a whole can of King Cobra!”
    “Unopened?”
    “Yeah. It’s got to be at least three years old.”
    “Fuck. What kind of trashy slut are you that you don’t clean out yer’ car at least once in three years?”
    That meant Jake Trash had been in her car. He was the only one she knew who drank that beverage. She couldn’t remember ever having given him a ride, however.
    She carefully placed the can on top of her car, as if she were a paleontologist setting aside a delicate bone.
    Reaching under the seat again, she found another cassette tape. The cassette tape’s label was too faded to read. She decided it was worth draining the battery by using her surprisingly still-functioning tape deck to hear what it was.
    “Skiiiinheeeads smoke dope! Thaaaat ain’t no fuckin’ joke!’
    “Damn girl,” exclaimed Spinny, “That’s the best fuckin’ punk song ever!’
    “Hell yeah it is.”
    “Yooooou are a stupid bloke!”
    The rest of her under-the-seats search yielded only more papers and food wrappers. Now she moved on to the underside of the back seat. The back seat was one piece that moved out quite easily. She was quite curious as to what was trapped under there.
    Moving the seat out of the car, even she was surprised by the vast amount of material that had found its way under the back seat.
    One of the first things she spotted was a waded up bill. It had to be a one, she thought. Unwrapping it, she saw that it was a twenty.
    She quickly stuffed the twenty into her jeans. She didn’t want Spinny to see it. It was the rewards of chauffeuring around drunks and drug addicts: Sometimes they were quite careless with things they never wanted to be careless about.
    In between all of the wrappers, dirt, and a few pens, she found plenty of coins. The more she moved things around, the more coins she found. Most were pennies and nickels, but she also found dimes and quarters. She even happened upon a silver dollar. Continuously stuffing coins into her ever bulging pockets, she kept trying to add up how much money she was making from her chore
    Her eyes lit up when she saw the bright blue edge. It was one of her old colored cloth hair ribbons. It was from her Gilman Club days, back when she was doing all kinds of crazy things with her hair, before she ended up just dying it black year after year.
    It reminded her how long she ago she had gotten the car.
    She could feel her heart sinking, just a bit.
    “Whattaya call this thing anyways?” called out Spinny.
    “What?” shouted Skye through the passenger window as she pocketed the ribbon.
    “What’s yer’ car called again? Something like the car from hell or somethin’ stupid like that?”
    “Vehicle of Damnation.”
    “Yeah. Why’d you call it that?”
    “I didn’t. My friends named it.” Skye leaned out of the window as she pocketed some more change. “I was the only one a’ my friends who owned their own car back in high school. Most a’ my friends could drive, but they always had to beg their parents for a car, which they almost never got. That’s one a’ the reasons I was so popular back then.”
    “No doubt.”
    “My friends nicknamed it the Vehicle of Damnation, because we always ended up driving around in it on the weekends.”
    “Cool.”
    Diving back into the mess, she threw out a few more food wrappers, and that’s when she saw it.
    Wedged way down, she spotted its silver chain, crammed in between a couple of fast food wrappers.
    She knew what it was before she unearthed it. Jena’s skull pendant.
    Several years ago she had looked everywhere for it. She wondered how it ever got into the back seat of her car. It was the memento that Jena’s roommate had given her, shortly after Skye had told her that Jena had been killed in an accident.
    Jena had gone back to Oklahoma to visit her family. She had been a passenger on a motorcycle when it had been struck by a drunk driver. Jena’s mother didn’t know any of her Bay Area friends, so she took her phone book and just started dialing all of the Bay Area numbers, trying to reach someone so she could tell them what had happened.
    Skye was the first one she reached.
    A lot of people were reminded of Jena when they saw Skye, usually because she was the one who had told them that Jena was gone.
    Jena’s life had been just like hers, and like most of her friends: Continuously wrangling with self-imposed and forced-upon chaos, moving from one place to another, from one wage-slave job to another, from one fucked up boyfriend to another, from one ridiculous housemate situation to another, from one drunken and drug-soaked night out to another…
    She had spent a decent amount of time digging through the trash and treasures of her car. The car was just like her life, she thought. Chaos.
    She started to ask herself why she hadn’t taken better care of her car, why she hadn’t maintained it better, and maybe at least kept it in a better state. She could have taken extra time now and then to clean it out, to fuss over its maintenance, and to ban friends who didn’t treat it right, which she probably hadn’t done because it would have meant disowning practically everyone she knew. The people she had driven around had literally used her car as a waste basket, throwing things on the floor and stuffing things behind the back seat.
    More freeloaders than friends, she thought.
    Skye carefully folded up the chain and put the pendant in her pocket.
    Her heart skipped a beat.
    Bringing herself out of the car once more and standing up, Skye saw that Spinny was still sitting against the car, nursing a new beer. She looked at Spinny’s outline, thinking she still didn’t look too beat up yet. Her face was still quite youthful. She could still almost pass for a teenager. But if you looked at her up close, you could start to see the deepening lines in her face, on their way to becoming the dark lines of the fast-lane lifestyle. They would be the telltale surface markings of what was going on underneath, all of the physical and mental damage. Skye didn’t pretend to know where Spinny was going in life, but she was sure it wasn’t anywhere good. One day running into the next and then blurring into another one, with barely a thought about where her time was going or had gone.
    Skye dug out a handful of coins from her bulging jeans pocket and sorted through the loose change. “Can you hang out for a minute and watch the car?”
    “Sure,” said Spinny as she started standing up. “You goin’ by the store?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Can ya’ pick me up a quart?”
    “Sure thing. Right after I call Kasi.”