Humility, Demonic Oppression, and My First Car

"It wasn't supposed to be this way."

But I guess most things don't turn out the way you first expected. Still, this was way beyond anything I could have imagined.

It started five years earlier in 1994 as I was preparing to go away to college. I had saved $1,400 for a car and needed to find one quick. Those two components - very little money and very little time - gave me very little confidence that I was going to find a vehicle good for anything other than disposing of a body in the Ohio River.

So I prayed. I prayed that the Lord would bless me with a great deal on a vehicle that could get me from Nashville to Dayton and back - 700-miles round trip - every couple of weeks for the rest of my life. A tall order. But faith can move mountains, right?

In this case, faith moved a mountain of proverbial horse dung and buried me with it. But not all at once . . . it was one bowel movement at a time, slowly so that I didn't realize it was happening until finally the weight was cutting off my airway and the stench was a part of my essence.

In 1986, General Motors produced 138,000 units of the Buick Somerset. Many a night I have cursed the heads of that corporation for not stopping at 137,999. I had never heard of a Buick Somerset. That should have tipped me off, I guess, but I was young. A widow at my church was remarrying and her new husband - ironically, an engineer for GM - wanted to sell her Somerset and buy her a new vehicle. How much did they want for her old 1986 Buick Somerset?

$1,400.

The car was flawless. White paint without a hint of rust - no small feat after an eight year tenure in Ohio - new tires, and a removable stereo to prevent theft. And she drove like a dream. Remember the over-the-top power-steering on vehicles back in the eighties, where you could do figure 8's by only touching the steering wheel with the very tip of your pinkie? Yes. I loved it. The price was right and the car was in excellent shape - God had answered my prayer.

I actually do believe God answered my prayer. It's just that He wasn't interested in making me happy. He wanted to make me humble. Really, really humble.

So I bought the car, thanking the Lord all the way home. I slept like a baby that night. The next morning I got up and decided to take a joy ride in my very first car.

It wouldn't start. Hmm. That's strange. Oh, well. The car's eight years old. It's not gonna be perfect. It's probably the battery. A quick trip to Auto Zone confirmed that the battery was bad. No big deal. $40 dollars and I'm on my way.

One week later, on my first Sunday in college, I got up early to meet some family friends at their church. On the way, I noticed that the cassette tape I was listening to was slowing down. The voices of the singers went from tenor to bass in about 7 seconds and the car started to feel a bit sluggish. Another 7 seconds and I was straining to pull the car to the shoulder, every hint of that glorious power-steering seemingly gone forever, and praying desperately that inertia would carry me to the nearest gas station. The inertia came up about 1.5 miles short.

I was in a new city, had no life experience, knew nothing about cars, and had no earthly clue what to do. My parents were 330 miles away. Which didn't really matter since the only human in the universe with a cell phone was Captain Kirk. No pay phones in sight.

Then God's providential hand appeared and bailed me out. A car pulled over in front of me and a woman got out, walked back to my car, and asked if I needed a ride. I said yes and she asked where I was headed.

"To church."

"What church?"

"I don't know the name. I just know its on this road."

"Well, you can come to church with us."

Us? I couldn't see anyone else in her car. I got out and walked to the passenger side of her car and saw that there was a toddler in the back in a car seat. That's when I knew that God was looking out for me. What woman in her right mind gets out of her car and offers a ride to a total stranger when she has a baby in the back seat of her car?

We got to the church and I immediately ran into the friends I was supposed to meet. The Good Samaritan lady just happened to go to the same church as my friends.

Makes you feel warm inside, doesn't it? Happy ending, right? Not really. God really was at work here, but knowing what is coming, I can tell you that there is some grand irony in the mix. You see, God was just getting warmed up on the humility thing. He was still stretching. We're still on the front end of a five year lesson here. I'm convinced God's help that day was benevolent, but at the same time He was also keeping me in the game so that I could absorb a few more kidney punches to the ego.

As I write this, a large part of me wishes I had left that car on the side of the road and just taken the $1,400 haircut. I'm sure Greyhound offers service from Nashville to Dayton. The bus would have offered me reliable transportation and a little human interaction. Far less heartache, embarrassment, and physical injury. But I went back to the car. My friend Bobby determined it was the alternator, which I guess is somewhere under the hood. Another $80 and I'm on my way.

So far, just normal car trouble right? Well, buckle up. No pun. Things are about to get freaky.

Fast forward to that summer. I notice a foul stench coming from the back seat. I looked back there and found standing liquid in the rear driver side floorboard. I assumed one of my sisters had spilled a Coke and not had the decency to clean it up. The stifling summer heat and mildew had caused a seriously offensive aroma. All the cadaver dogs in the Midwest must have been freaking out. My dad, who himself has a bloodhound's sense of smell, felt a marked urgency to rectify the situation.

Of course, our first solution was simply to soak up the liquid, which turned out to not be Coke, but dirty water. The liquid returned. We soaked it up again. The liquid returned again. We absolutely could not detect where the water was coming from. After a few days of this, the wretched smell was preventing dad from sleeping at night and he suggested a more aggressive course of action: we tear out the rear driver side floorboard carpet and therefore remove the breeding ground for that hellish mildew. Even if water returned, at least there would be no mildew. I could just make it part of my routine to sop it up every day.

So that's what we did. I have to say, it was a tad embarrassing to have bare metal in the floorboard back there, but I accepted my lot, realizing that appearance isn't everything and that this situation was indeed preferable to the smell of death that precipitated it.

Here comes the freaky part. Water never again filled the rear driver side floorboard - it filled the rear passenger side floorboard. Are you following this? No moisture ever again on the driver side . . . a constant pool of water on the previously completely dry passenger side.

I have a flare for hyperbole. Mild embellishment can make a story far more enjoyable to the speaker as well as the listener. But I stand before God right here and now and tell you with a clear conscience that every word of this is true.

We went through the motions again - couldn't detect the source and couldn't keep it dry - and finally resorted to the same solution with the passenger's side: we tore out the carpet.

I then had no carpet in the back. It was noticeable. My attitude toward the vehicle was changing. At one time, I had been proud of this car. Not anymore. But I realized it was just a car and it got me where I needed to go. So I was humbled, but thankful.

The day after the second scalping, I went out to see if it had worked. I peered through the window into the back seat and felt a wave of relief as I found that there was no water in the floorboard. Hallelujah. I went around to get in and go to work, and as I sat down a shimmering light caught my eye - it was the sun's reflection dancing on the surface of a brand new pool of water in the front passenger side floorboard.

I audibly rebuked Satan. This was clearly supernatural. Again, no clue where it was coming from. Again, we were forced to tear out the carpet.

And again . . . the water found a new home.

Follow the pattern. Rear driver side floorboard. Rear passenger side floorboard. Front passenger side floorboard... Hmm. What's next? Where do we go from here? I'm afraid so. The circle was completed. I just went ahead and tore out the carpet underneath my feet since in the other three places the water had never come back once the carpet was gone. And that's where the demon juice broke with tradition.

From that day forward, there was standing water in the front driver side floorboard. I humbly accepted defeat and resigned myself to this character building element of my life. No big deal. I just had to learn to drive with my feet perched on the interior walls of the floorboard.

By the time I went back to school in the fall, all was routine. Then one day I went out to the car to go somewhere. I don't recall where I was headed - my destination is not what I remember about that day. What I do remember is the advent of the singularly most publicly humiliating quirk of this cursed machine. When I cranked the engine, it made a sound that initially had me completely convinced that someone was being stabbed to death with a railroad spike under the hood of my car. After the fight-or-flight response began to subside, I realized that the noise was far too loud to be a human in the throes of death. Far too loud.

Everyone within earshot - that is, every soul in the greater Nashville area - simultaneously turned their entire body in my direction in utter horror. At that point I had a full-blown episode. I needed world class mechanical and spiritual assistance ASAP. I didn't know whether to shut the car off and take the walk of shame back to my dorm, passing the glances of total rejection from all my peers, or floor it, get off campus, and pray that the car would warm up and taper off the ear-piercing screech.

To my relief, the noise did decrescendo after a few minutes. However, the next time I started the car, I learned that the screech, too, would become a hallmark right along with the perpetual swampland under the pedals. The mechanically-inclined could offer me no diagnosis or remedy.

That winter my illusions about a rust-free exterior were removed from me. Paint began chipping away like the skin of a leper in July, revealing a rust-ridden shell of a vehicle. After that, the careless entering and exiting of the automobile would require an immediate trip to UrgentCare for a tetanus shot.

For a while after that, it was just small things...small things that began to show a pattern. I noticed that of each of the features of the car that came in pairs, only one member of each pair was working. Two headlights - only one lighting up. Two windshield wipers - only one wiping. Two stereo speakers - only one hissing. Two rear shock absorbers - only one absorbing. It was as though the car had suffered a stroke and only the driver's side was still functioning. But at that point I had already decided, I'm not spending another dime on this beast, I'll drive it 'as is' until a government official declares it unfit for public travel.

I have a theory about what caused the next problem. I trace it back to the extended period of time with water in the floorboard. The constant moisture in the air caused the headliner to peel away from the roof so that it lay on my head like a terrycloth bedsheet, flattening my hair and rendering my rearview mirror completely irrelevant. A staple gun fixed the problem. For a time. But again the moisture had so weakened the fibers of the headliner that the staples eventually tore all the way through, returning my head-blanket and obscuring my rearview. Not to be beaten, I jabbed a coat hanger into the molding around the roof directly above my head, like a huge paper clip holding the blanket off of my head. I still couldn't see out the back window, but at least I wasn't dealing with constant static in my hair.

I was pretty calloused by that point. The screeching, the swamp, the giant do-rag, the stroke-induced paralysis - none of this affected me. I was numb to the pain. I had no memory of the blessed machine I had bought years before. There was only my master, the Hellcat.

We now come to the climax. One day during our last winter in Nashville, there was snow on the ground and ice on the streets, so I got ready a little early so I could defrost the Hellcat. I went out and cranked it up, once again breaking the noise ordinance via the ubiquitous cacophony that had become virtually inaudible to my desensitized ears. The ice was quite thick so I decided to assist the defrost by scraping the windows. My wife had our ice-scraper with her in our good car, so I went back into the apartment, retrieved a metal spatula, and started chipping away. Oddly, even when I was satisfied that there was no more ice on the windshield, I still could not see through the glass.

And then I knew. Condensation from the foot-bath in the floorboard had frozen on the inside of the windshield. Picture, if you will, this scene. I am sitting inside the loudest man-made object in Tennessee shrouded in a red canopy with my feet clinging to the sides of the floorboard as I scrape ice from the inside of the windshield.

When I could see through the glass, I buckled up and started off for work. Since I was running late by now, I had not taken the time to calculate the final implications of the internal ice scenario. Because the defrost was still on, melted ice was dripping down into the dashboard . . . the dashboard housing all my digital gauges. They didn't last long, but simply flickered three or four times and then expired for eternity. From then on, I had no idea how fast I was going, how much gas I had, or when to get my next oil change.

I then muttered quietly and to myself, "It wasn't supposed to be this way." It was the conclusion of a long, slow death of pride.

In the summer of '99, after disclosing all it's deficiencies, I sold the Hellcat to some desperate soul for $550 and laughed myself sore all the way to the bank.

Finally, I had gotten the great deal I prayed for.