What a Ride

I remember in Max Barry's novel Company, a scene where our protagonist gets behind the wheel of an Audi (a convertible, I think), and reacts to it roughly like Ferris Bueller when he slides behind the wheel of Cameron's father's Ferrari.

The girl who owns the car groans something about, 'Are you a car person?' And Jones replies that he hadn't thought so.

I could really relate to that because most of the time I don't think about my car one way or the other. I love unusual cars, and mine is not unusual if you don't count Mo's crayon scrawls or my Libertarian bumper stickers. It's a white Honda Accord, about as vanilla as cars get.

It gets me there, gets me there dry, four wheels and a seat. And except that, once again, my driver's side window is permanently down, it's a great car. Closing in on 170,000 miles and it still doesn't use oil. Well, it's started leaking power steering fluid pretty steadily, but that's something I can cope with. I just have to top it up when I get gas.

Anyway, so I went to Nebraska Furniture Mart to get Mo's nightstand and there was a car on the floor. I don't know why, cars aren't furniture, but then again, a lot of the stuff they sell (cameras, computers, video games) stretch the definition of furniture.

And I'm not normally a car person except for finding most automobiles bland to the point I can't imagine why someone went into debt for a year's wages to own that grey turd of a vehicle.



This car, though, it made me do a double take. It's so sexy. And I didn't recognize it, not really knowing my car company logos when you get beyond Honda, Toyota, Benz and BMW.

It's a Maserati. It costs almost as much exactly as my house appraised at a couple years ago.

It gets worse: 12 mpg in town, 18 on the highway. A freakin' pickup truck does better than that. Of course, this car has half again the horsepower of a typical full size pickup.



Thing is, besides the $130,000 price tag, the crappy fuel economy, think about the taxes and insurance: you could maintain five F150s for what it would cost to keep this thing street legal. Do I want a monkey like that on my back?

Well, yeah. If I had the means. I wouldn't keep it in a garage and rub it with a diaper and only drive it in the driveway, either. If I had a car like this, I wouldn't want to be seen in anything else.

And I'd have to beat the shallow, materialistic girls who like me for the wrong reasons, off with a stick. It'd be great!