My car thinks it's funny. It's not.

My car hates me.

No, really. Inexplicably, the car has a vendetta against me. It is a VenJetta, if you will. I am at a loss as to exactly what the car has against me, since I have always gone out of my way to see that it had a loving and nurturing home life. Ever since I bought the car four years ago from my sister (when it was only 3 years old), I have gone out of my way to treat it with respect: I shift gears kindly, I keep the vinyl treated and shiny, I drive around mud puddles, and I try not to park under birds’ nests. If I can’t avoid hitting a pothole on the highway, I always apologize. You’ll recall that I’ve even mentioned how I thought the car had a nice ass. But despite my slavish devotion, the car sees fit to embarrass and inconvenience me at every opportunity, and I can only chalk it up to misanthropy. Or garage envy.

The first day I got the car, the passenger side door lock broke off, unprovoked. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a sign. It was the car’s way of verbalizing: “Hello. I don’t like you. I’m not likely to start liking you anytime soon. Here, sit on this.”

In the coming months, I tried not to let the car bully me into disliking it. I showed appropriate concern when the Check Engine light would come on. I would take the car to its doctors, they would charge me $200 to tighten a screw, and I would hit the road again. About a week and half later, the Check Engine light would invariably come back on. Back to the car doctors, more screws tightened and hoses nudged, and back home again. It became a game to see how long the dashboard would be lightless. Eventually, when it got to the point where the light would be back on before I even returned home from the mechanic, I knew that the car was playing psychological games with me. The Check Engine light always came back, like the cat in that song, more regularly than my period.

After the fifth or sixth appearance of the Light in two months, I started to ignore it. This may be where my car started to hate me.

The VenJetta’s new quest became finding fresh new ways to distress me. The brake pads disappeared one day. Various fluids started to flee their confines. Every instrument on the dashboard completely died one day while I was driving, leaving me with no speedometer, odometer, tachometer, or gas gauge. I had to have the entire instrument panel replaced, which cost roughly what would be required to start a small country run by little people in 24 carat gold costumes who dine on nothing but diamonds and caviar. The belts and motors in my power windows would randomly break, resulting in a sudden SHWOOMP! and a frightening change in air pressure as the window would simply fall down into the door, never to be seen again. There were a few traumas inside the engine involving parts I can neither pronounce nor remember, but I have the receipts to prove it. The light that illuminates the AC control panel hasn’t worked since 2001. The glove compartment no longer opens or shuts; it is stuck ajar, one side of the door hanging 45 degrees lower than the other side. I can squeeze my hand into the compartment just enough to retrieve my registration for when a cop pulls me over to scold me about a headlight that went out THAT DAY (probably just as I was driving past the cop, because my car thinks it has a sense of humor). I lowered the driver’s side sun visor one day and the hinged plastic cover that protects the mirror on the backside of the visor fell onto my head, broken, and narrowly missed my eye. Not long after that, the exact same thing happened to me when I was in the passenger seat. It’s getting harder and harder not to take these things personally.

The car outdid itself a year or so ago with an especially creative attack on my sanity. I began to notice that people would randomly honk at me while I was driving, and I couldn’t figure out why. I would turn a corner and hear a sudden honking, and I would immediately turn around to make sure I didn’t have an axe murderer in my backseat, because I’ve read Urban Legends 3, and you can never be too sure. As the curious honking followed me around town, I suddenly realized with utter horror that the noise was coming from my own car! It was honking by itself!

God help me, my car was Christine.

I had no idea when or where the car would choose to voice its road rage, but I was certain that I never touched the horn. I avoided eye contact with other drivers who would shoot me resentful looks as the VenJetta would let loose a maddening bellow in a quiet residential neighborhood. My devil-incarnate-Volkswagen-dealership (a story for another blog altogether) would not take an appointment until the next month, so I drove around in this humiliating manner for almost two weeks. Finally at my wit’s end, and with an inspired suggestion from my father, I went into the fuse box and removed the fuse for my horn. The next day I nearly got into an accident in which having a horn would have been a useful warning to an idiot driver.

For the past few months, the VenJetta has been fairly quiet. A comprehensive (and expensive) tune-up seemed to have bought me a short reprieve from the car’s fury, but I should have known it would not forgive me so easily. A couple of days ago, the car began to make a funny noise when I started it up, but it would drive perfectly. I made a mental note to schedule an appointment with the mechanic the next day. That night, the car introduced me to the aforementioned cop with nothing better to do than ticket people for burnt-out headlights.

The next day (yesterday) it broke down in the parking lot of a Border’s bookstore. The starter simply blew, and any attempt to turn the engine over was met with a profoundly dismal whine and a mocking flash of the dashboard lights, including the Check Engine light: FLASH! Hey there, Mel. FLASH! We haven’t done this little dance in awhile. FLASH! I know you are going to be late to work, FLASH! but let me introduce you to my little friend named AAA. FLASH! They won’t be here for awhile, so make yourself comfortable. FLASH! Watch the seatbelt, there. Wouldn’t want you to choke. FLASH!

Anybody want to buy a car?