I got my car in November of 2004 from a private seller after being told by Geoff Hoffman that it's always possible to get a car (or a place to live), within a week if you have to, as long as you don't care about price or quality. It wasn't so long ago, but when I look back I see myself as younger in some more crucial way than age. I needed advice like that. I'd never made any purchases more significant than getting dozens of CDs at Soundgarden in a single visit. I felt like I didn't have authorization to buy a car, that only more qualified people with more authority than me could buy cars. I didn't see this simply as an issue of age, because I knew younger people who bought cars (and did other authoritative or autonomous actions, like live on their own without going to college or get non-retail jobs). I have always self-consciously identified symbols of authority or autonomy, everything from a person's bearing to the ease with which someone considers performing acts I associated with maturity (and since at times that included performing in a rock band or organizing parties, I might have had an idiosyncratic understanding of maturity).

I was awed at the prospect of buying a car. I didn't know where to begin, and even once I started looking at listings in the newspaper I couldn't take it seriously. It didn't feel like I could actually make an offer on a car, negotiate a deal, pay, take the car away with me, and own it, so looking at listings seemed like play-acting. Geoff's advice was pretty important to me, then, because I had identified him as someone with the autonomy I lacked. I perhaps took other suggestions of his more seriously than he intended, because I also looked for a car with manual transmission and no automatic features after he said that's what he looked for. He's one of those people who have had experience with worst-case scenarios, so it didn't seem so ridiculous to him to think of what would happen if power windows broke during a rain storm, when the windows were all the way down.

I started out looking for Hondas, because at the time I had more experience with Hondas than with any other type of car, but Geoff steered me toward a Toyota. He said that if I was going to get a Japanese car, guys drove Toyotas and girls drove Hondas. I knew at the time how absurd such a statement was, but I was a little more willing to go along with it than I might otherwise have been because my ex-girlfriend had two Hondas and made a rather big deal about her affection for them. Nevertheless, the first car I test-drove ended up being a Subaru Outback. It belonged to a professor of music at the College of Santa Fe, where it was parked until he could get rid of it. I hadn't ever gone onto their campus, and I still felt very insecure about following directions to unfamiliar locations. I also had no idea how to assess the value of the car, and it had been several years since I'd driven a stick-shift, so I asked Geoff to go with me. I think he found it amusing that I thought of him sometimes like an older brother, and so he came along. He even drove when we took the car onto the street to see how it ran, and afterwards he said in a jokingly firm voice that I should buy the car. I thought it would be odd for me to drive a Subaru Outback, but thought I'd probably get it. I asked the owner if I could have some time to decide.

I eventually lost that car to bad cell phone reception on campus; the next time I was able to receive one of the owner's calls, he had sold the car to someone else because he hadn't heard from me in several days. The next one I found that was within my price range was a 1997 Corolla; the owner said I could come by and look at it at his house west of the Paseo, an area I had also never been. I'm pretty sure Geoff drove me to see it again; if so, he may have proven himself to be less assertive than I would have thought, because I never did find out why the Corolla had a hood that was a different color from the rest of the car. It was also probably worth less than the $2500 it was being offered for (and which I eventually paid, with money generously provided by my parents). When I went to pick up and buy the car later I got a ride with Febbie Steve, who came in with me to the guy's kitchen and started leafing through his New Mexican, asked for a glass of water, and asked a few questions about the guy's daughter, who had been the driver of the car.

I reacquainted myself with a manual transmission when driving home from the house, stalling frequently at stop signs and red lights; Febbie Steve was long gone by the time I even got out of the community. For weeks afterward, I stalled epicly. When Geoff and I were headed downtown one night, I stalled in front of a police car and Geoff joked, "well, that's not suspicious." I only really picked up the skill of getting into first gear after the first snowfall that year, because it just so happened that the mixture of caution and skittishness I felt moving around on the snowy streets produced just the right ratio of pushing down on the gas and letting up on the clutch. After that, I just imagined that I was driving on snow and I started getting better at getting into gear.

It would be difficult to number the memories I have associated with that car. I sat in the driver's seat the morning after Senior Prank, having slept on a bed vacated by a friend who was chasing a girl, because I was drunk and sleepy; I sat quietly in the nurse's lot, my hands on my eyes, waiting for an unaccountable burning to stop (for whatever reason it was the first time I got allergies in New Mexico). I was again in the driver's seat when I made a prank call to the radio show of Cobalt Blue, the St. John's College Events Director. I pretended to be Jorge, a huge fan who just wanted to tell him to keep on doing what he was doing, while Geoff held back laughter next to me. A few weeks later, as I was getting ready to leave Santa Fe, I took the car in for a diagnostic and found out that I needed to replace some critical elements before I could drive it across the country, and so my brother Jeff (who had flown out to drive with me) and I got a hotel room and waited for the car to be fixed. When it was ready, I loaded it with everything I had brought to Santa Fe, and we drove it across desert and nothingness to Dallas and then up through the muddy plains to the now unfamiliar green of Maryland, back pretty much only because I'd fallen in love with Anne.

I had to convince my father that returning with the car, rather than selling it and taking a plane, made more sense. I had wanted to make the drive, and also knew that having a car in Maryland would be necessary to see Anne as frequently as I wanted to. Having my own car certainly made it quite a bit easier to drive the 35 miles from Ellicott City to Severna Park. Once I got there, we frequently had no place else to go after Barnes and Noble closed and we'd already sat in the Double T for as long as we could tolerate, so we just stayed in the car into the night, which had the added bonus of getting to know several officers from the Severna Park Police Department, wondering if we were both consenting adults.

The year after I'd gone back to Maryland, Anne moved in with me in my parents house and we saved up enough money to move . . . somewhere. We were commuting every day to Lanham just north of D.C., 45 minutes both ways, and on Saturday mornings we opened the synagogue that my mother worked at and served as Shabbas Goyim. At first I thought we were going to Berlin, where my brother Eric could help me find work teaching English. Then one night, sitting on a wooden bench on the fake dock at the fake harbor of the Annapolis Harbor Center Mall, I got a call from Kay, a friend and my old supervisor at the library, asking me if I'd be interested in taking her position when she left at the end of the summer.

Anne hadn't driven in several years, but she decided to relearn how in order to help me with the driving. She had stopped driving back then out of what sounded like terror. It took about half an hour to persuade her to drive past the stop sign at the end of my parent's street, and even after that she attributed a lot more importance to stalling out than was reasonable, but amazingly, after a week of lessons, she had gotten a couple hours of experience on the harried highways of Baltimore, and she felt ready to do some of the driving on the trip.

And so we loaded up the car again, which had by this point been christened Bukowski because the engine sounded so angry and bitter about everything. We drove through northern Maryland forests into the overgrown highways of Virginia, through Tennessee and over the pot holes of Arkansas, then down into dusty Oklahoma, where we hung out with Wes of St. John's Annapolis fame and St. John's Santa Fe obscurity. Then we spent a day and a night and another day and another night and then a week and then some more nights getting through Texas, and finally arrived here in Santa Fe. Somewhere in all of this, Buchowski lost half of his hubcaps, which had huge, warlike spirally grooves; the other two fell off in Santa Fe.

I write all this because now, after three and a half years, I've traded Bukowski in for a newer Corolla. I spent the last several days cleaning him out, thinking about the things I wrote about here, and focusing on the view while driving. I'm surprised by how difficult it is to let go of a car, how attached I feel to it/him (and I really have thought of it as having a personality, as is probably not surprising to anyone who's named a car). He's gone now, sold to Carmax and soon to be replaced by a 2003 Corolla that just happened to lack power locks, mirrors and windows. Its name will be Hoffman, in honor of Geoff.