Home Healthcare Cars

My father went through a lot of vehicles when we were growing up.  Part of this was due to his profession at the time, home health care.  Another aspect was rooted deep down inside of him and can be traced back to his own childhood.  See, when my dad was growing up his parents were dirt poor.  Not migrant farming poor but pretty fucking close.  So my father’s dad, my grandfather, was always buying super cheap cars.  Pieces of shit in modern day vernacular.  And since said cars were indeed pieces of shit they would never last that long and he would be forced to again buy another unreliable, barely runnable, vehicle.  This process repeated over and over again when my father was growing up.

This apparently had a significant impact on my fathers psyche, shaping him to have the same tendencies, the same ways of thought.  Like father, like son and all that jazz.  All in all our dad bought a lot of shitty cars.

And the cars that he bought.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved when dad brought a new car home.  Even though it was shit, it was new shit.  But, for posterity, I want to remain as factual as possible.  Some cars looked like shit.  Beaters through and through.  Others looked ok, but ran like shit.  Most would be a combination of the two.

Some would have the sagging ceiling, it slowly falling off.  As a result, in such vehicles the exposed spray foam that once held the headliner in place, now hyper dry from old age, would fall sporadically into our little eyes.  Granted, this mostly occurred when we were picking at the ceiling while waiting in the car for dad, but other times it happened when the windows were down and we were cruising.  A crumbling polyurethane snow.  Jesus, so many times I can remember the sting from that foam as it hit me right in the eye.  Fond memories.

Other times the windows would stop working in the car and so drastic measures would have to be taken.  Because the car was hardly worth anything in the first place even minor repairs such as this just didn’t make any fiscal sense.  To even fix a window would cost around a third to a half as much as what the vehicle was worth.  So instead a garbage bag was carefully and masterfully installed and acted as a replacement.  Good as new.

The memories come flooding back; how fucking cold it was in the winter time as air snuck in around the hastily fixed bag to the sound. The roaring, deafening sound of plastic flapping in the wind.  The faster we went, the louder and more violently the bag flapped.  Trying to listen to the radio, if one was present in the car and or worked, was a waste of time.  Too many windows were replaced with black trash bags.

Air conditioning in such cars was never present.  This was rather viewed as a luxury and as such we could and did live without it.  The heat was another story.  Most of these cars did have adequate heaters.  Some of them did not.  And because we lived in Ohio, you really can’t fuck around with the heater.  It’s always a bet you’re going to lose.  With the air conditioning you could luck out; some days will be cooler than others.  In the wintertime, in Ohio, it just gets cold and then colder.  The heater is not something to be fucked with, because it will fuck you back.  Sure, you could bundle up before heading out in the car and we did that.  It wasn’t too bad.  But the windows.  That’s where the lack of heat gets you.

Vehicles that are not properly heated really make you appreciate all that you have.  You never know what you got until it’s gone and all that.  The lack of heat, for us passengers, wasn’t too big of a deal because we dealt with it.  The windows were another story.  We would be driving for some time and it would start to begin.  The fog.  Four people in a tiny car without heat, shuddering, breathing in an out, generate a lot of hot, moist air.  This usually isn’t a big deal unless there is no heat, and without said heat the fog begins to appear.  Slowly, so slowly at first, working its way from the base of the windows, crawling upwards until the whole window is enveloped.  Again a problem but a manageable one.  We would merely wipe away the fog.  But, like most quick fixes, it would only last for so long.

The cold air inside, combined with the super fucking cold air outside barreling past us anywhere from 30 to 60 miles an hour, takes its toll.  The fog, that thick fog, begins to transform yet again, this time into ice.  Ice is not so easily dealt with as fog.  If ice and fog were in high school, ice would be the big deal, the bully, the dude you don’t want to fuck with.  Because again he will fuck you right back.

But we persevered.  We managed.  Because that’s what Saucedas do.  A testament to the tenacity of life, the will to live; to flourish in places and situations where one should be beaten back. A phoenix rising from the ashes.  Finding money in clothes that you haven’t worn in years.  Shit like that.   

With such cars you would imagine needing to have a pretty extensive tool box to keep on top of everything.  A tool box for my father was a plastic bag with three or four cans of fix a flat in it.  For those of you unfamiliar with this testament to science fix a flat acts like a tire band aid.  It’s geared more towards a slow leak kind of a deal rather than a catastrophic failure.  Like when your tire is punctured by road debris or a vagabond bent on ruining days.  It comes in a can, similar in shape and size to conventional spray paint, and at the top a little hose runs out with an element that fits onto the tire’s air cap.  And through science it flows into the tire and expands into said leak giving you enough time to hopefully go to the tire store to get a new tire.  But never with our father.  Rather, he felt that fix a flat was as good a substitute as a new tire.  Again, it comes down to the monies. 

Tires can be expensive, and my father can be cheap.  And since the cars that we were in were so cheap to begin with putting money, any money, into them was just stupid.  Greenspan and Bernanke would somberly shake their heads in shame at such a notion. So, every time one of the tires got fucked he would merely unfuck it with fix a flat.  Problem solved, life goes on.

However, a drawback of fix a flat is that continued and prolonged use will slowly destroy the tire or something of that nature.  The good times, literally, cannot keep on rolling if you keep on pumping your bum tire up with fix a flat.  This product was never intended to repair, rather fix, so that you can unfuck your day.  The poor man’s run flat.

But our father used fix a flat on his shitty tires with reckless abandon.  Anytime a tire would get a leak, or a puncture, he would get a can out and pump that bitch up.  He was playing with fire and  always got burnt.  It catches up with you.  This can only delay the inevitable, that day when you’re going to have to buck up and get a new tire.  Or get stranded and have to get a tow, and then a new tire, which would be even more expensive.  Looking back, the amount of money that my dad spent on fix a flat probably came out to about, after being adjusted for inflation, around two to three tires.  This shit is not cheap.  But it is cheaper than a tire.

This fix a flat fast and loose life style always caught up with us.  And it always seemed to happen at the worst times.  Looking back it was fate, or karma, or something, because every time the tire said fuck it, no more, let me die, were always the times we needed to be somewhere important.  And the tire would always have had enough eventually; either too full of left over fixes or so degraded that it failed beyond repair.  Those poor tires. 

They probably made their peace quite a while ago, came to terms with their death and what it meant.  Said their good byes and got their shit in order.  And when death came, and they were ready, my dad would come and jolt them back to life.  Like an old person in the hospital that just wants to die, wants the pain to end, but their family just can’t accept the inevitable and as a result keeps them living in a perpetual hell that prolongs their torment mere days or weeks.  That is what my father did to those tires.

There were a myriad of other problems with the cars that my dad bought that we drove in.  Some smelled, some were dirty, some had electrical issues and some had major mechanical ones.  All of them left me with memories.  All of them were utter pieces of shit.