CARWATCHING

EMERY DAY

I twisted open the lid of my bottle of hard kombucha, the result of my eleventh home-brew. The previous attempt, a botched try at pilsner, landed me in the hospital for a week and a referral to alcoholics anonymous (I didn’t go, obviously). The smell didn’t totally knock me over, which was a testament to either my increasing brewing competence or toxin-desensitized nose. I prayed it was the former.

I sat on a folding chair in my lawn, next to the Pacers-brand cornhole game I bought while I was drunk and regretted immediately after. I didn’t hate the Pacers. That would require knowing who they were. Around twelve o’clock, my wife woke up, and she was the first face I saw not behind a windshield.

She gave me a cursory look and sighed. It might have been because I wasn’t wearing any shoes, or because the stench of alcohol was heavy on my breath. My wife and I had a game some mornings where I would take a deep breath out and she would guess my newest brew. She didn’t seem to like that game.

“Hey,” I said. “Do you want some?”

She sighed in place of responding, climbed into her truck, and drove off to work. The mainstream news gives unemployment a bad rap, but there’s something mesmerizing about staring at the cars on the street. Sometimes you see them even more than your own friends, in between games of Angry Birds and YouTube videos of cars getting hit by trains. FSL-9203 was the bad boy in town; I don’t think I saw him within five miles per hour of the speed limit even once in my time carwatching. He was a hulking blue truck, the front of which looked to my drunk eyes like an especially amicable smiley face. What did he have to be so happy about? I saw the human driver once. He was pale, had short black hair, and generally looked like a college student studying engineering with a minor in African dance. He looked like the kind of guy who would reveal to you some random tidbit about his life that you’d never expect after years of knowing him. FSL truly was one of the best.

Around three, I saw a black compact car with a The Office bumper sticker; SXW-4957. She slipped under my radar for a while because of her sleek design, and how little of an effort she made to stand out from the crowd. She was exactly that, average. Not a bad average, though, the kind of average that shows up to work forty hours a week, nine-to-five, and pays for their son’s college tuition to study Robotics. She was the kind of average who let her son live with her until he was twenty-five, instead of kicking him out at seventeen because he was a ‘toxic influence’. I figured that her son saw past the average façade. He must have, at some point, talked to his mother and for the first time in his life said “Oh, you are a person, no different than me, and you have bills to pay, and you have to eat, sleep, and make money. What have I done?” I bet he asked that question years before he reached the point of no return.

 631-ZYG was smart. He was a cube, with windows too tinted to get a good look at the driver. It was totally illegal, but he was the kind of guy who was too cool to care. ZYG struck me as a bright kid with a big future, who fell in with the wrong guys at the wrong time. He was the kind of guy who never reached the “Fuck, what am I doing?” part of the descent into madness and fermented science experiments and instead skipped straight to the deepest pit of it. But, ZYG didn’t seem like the kind of guy to stay down, at least not for long, and I knew he would pick himself up eventually. It was obvious to me that he would succeed in whatever direction he pointed his sword. I just hoped, and prayed, that that didn’t lead him down the wrong path. It was around five that I realized I hadn’t seen ZYG in a week. Good for him. I bet he’s in New York, or LA, or another ‘somewhere’ where stuff happened.

I sighed, stumbled back inside, and turned on the TV. My wife got home around eight, and when she entered, she looked exhausted and disheartened. We made eye contact, and she nodded to me, before walking up the stairs and into our room. Once she was gone, I went back outside and got a good look at her truck. It was covered in mud, and its headlights made a screaming face, like usual, but a blotch of dirt formed an eyebrow that made the Jeep look furious.

I wondered how the car felt about this whole ordeal.  It’s being dragged through the mud, working forty-hours-a-week, and what does it get in exchange? Covered in mud and ignored throughout the night. That’s life for you. Those types of cars don’t last long, I’d heard, and the stress couldn’t have been good for the engine. That much milage without support can cause a total breakdown, if not handled correctly. She obviously wasn’t being handled correctly.

I sighed and got up from my lawn chair. I turned the flashlight on from my phone, and after a moment of searching in the closet, I found the bottle of ArmorAll car wash.