How We Met

"Seat Safety Switch" (seat-safety-switch)
05/15/2015 at 13:09 • Filed to: trans am turbo, pontiac, subaru, mg, jeep

It was weird how we came to meet one another.

I would pass this abandoned gravel lot every day. I thought about parking in it to save a few bucks on my daily commute, but wondered if the landowner would have me towed or worse. Still, the lot stuck in my mind, and one day I screwed up the courage to visit it, to see if I could see any markings as to the ownership.

As my exocaged Forester rolled its heinously oversized Super Swampers over the curb to enter the lot, the gauge cluster went nuts. Obscene temperatures, a pinned tachometer, a speedometer that flailed like a morse code telegram. The clock showed an impossible hour. Spooked, I reversed out of the lot.

The next day I drove by and saw this brown Firebird. Not a Firebird, I realized, a Trans Am. In chocolate brown. I ran my eyes along its flanks and spotted the telltale power bulge of a Turbo.

I visited the car, walking into the lot on foot, and idly noticed my iPhone was also going nuts. The lock-screen clock had set itself to the same impossible hour, but one minute advanced from what the Forester had seen. The air around the lot seemed still even as there was a haunting dust devil pursuing me within it. It pelted me with gravel, grass and dirt, but I disregarded it. I reached out for the Trans Am and the mini-tornado dissipated into thin air. Its massive gold basketweaves glinted in the morning sunlight, seeming wider than stock to my pre-coffee mind. I was drawn to know more about this car, to feel its presence in my life, but every sense told me to retract my hand, to make no human contact - or contract - with this machine.

On the windshield dash plate, the VIN markings were obliterated, as if by an angle grinder. As I scrutinized the plate further, the grinder markings began to swim and shift before my eyes. I blinked in confusion, and the markings became still once more. I could not stop myself from reaching into my pocket, extracting a business card, and placing it beneath the wipers, sealing what I later realized was the Contract for life and beyond.

The next day, I began backing out of my suburban two-car garage only to see a car parked at the bottom of my driveway, preventing egress. I was enraged, of course, how dare this redneck trash park his brown Pontiac in my path? This wasn’t a cinder block showroom, after all.

Stepping out of my idling slammed V8 Cherokee, I stomped over to the Trans Am in a rage, only to find the door unlocked and the title stuck under the wiper with a crude note, written in the crude block-letter scrawl of madness: “YOU’RE WELCOME.”

Over the next few years, I would make multiple attempts to call General Motors for more information about the car. Perhaps they could send me the option package, or the build sheet, or anything. There were never any records of the car’s existence or manufacture; the assembly line had been shut down by the putative build date expressed by the door jam info plate.

Parts ordered from RockAuto would not always fit the Trans Am, as if it rejected the concept of the pedestrian commuter part and demanded something new, vibrant. At the time I didn’t realize that while I modified it, it also modified me. I could feel its hand at work when I made immense JEGS and Olsbergs purchases, happily accepted within the two-door Pontiac with a surprising lack of fabrication required. It was pulling me along a path to build something - but what?

I continued to pursue the General Motors phone tree, needing to know where this Turbo had come from. Once I got as far as the oldest surviving engineer in the Pontiac division at the time. He called me late at night, from home, in a drunken tizzy. He assured me that he was half a bottle of sherry down and was ready to pass into the next world. The engineer was hysterical, screaming unintelligible stories about prophecies and dark spirits that were unearthed when the Van Nuys plant expanded to a nearby Indian burial ground. I was scared, and didn’t ask the relevant questions, but got the gist of it.

When I next got into the Pontiac, it refused to idle. It was angry at me for trying to take some of its mystery out of the world. A beast possessed, it sprayed a Herbie-esque stream of 5W40 Brad Penn onto the floor of my unassuming domestic garage. The radio flipped on and rapidly oscillated through stations, at first an undecipherable crescendo of syllables but gradually forming into recognizable English words telling me in no uncertain terms that it had “cash for clunkersed” the GM engineer I had just spoken to. After that, it stalled, and would not restart for weeks.

I could not tell the police. They would never believe me, and in the worst case I would end up on Death Row in Michigan - two thousand miles and one border away - for murdering the engineer, who had been pinned beneath his exploding Chevy Volt by an unknown assailant last night. I had no real alibi, having been at home attempting to string-align my bored and stroked MG Midget.

I threatened the car with resale, and went so far as to attempt to tow it to Carmax in order to get rid of it to some spiteful hee-haw commuter whore who desperately wanted to emulate Burt Reynolds, perhaps spraypaint a firechicken on the hood in his spare time between slinging artisanal microbrews and urinating on fine art. The tow truck driver assured me that the sheared off bolts on his tow arm and the complete destruction of his PTO shaft and the transmission behind it was unusual, he had never seen it before, and he wished me great luck in being able to move this car, before involuntarily saying prayers in Spanish - a language he didn’t even speak - and fleeing on foot into the night, leaving the shattered bulk of his tow truck behind for another man less lucky than he.

Haunted, I would awaken at night to sit in front of the Pontiac, its bulk seeming to fill the garage, being bigger than it had any right to be. It scratched at the corners of my mind, threatening to burst free and drive me to madness.

I don’t know which sleepless night made it happen, but it did. I found myself in the garage, unable to free the throbbing twinge of pain from my mind.

Overwhelmed, I tentatively reached out, hands shaking with fear, and patted the urethane bumper cover gently while reassuring the Pontiac that it was a “good car” and we were going to have some adventures together. It immediately fired up, deafening me and filling the room with a staccato burst of what seemed like laughter before settling into a kittenesque purr of a perfect, happy idle.

Was that really how we met? Everything is a little blurry when it comes to this car.

DISCUSSION (5)

deprecated account > Seat Safety Switch
05/15/2015 at 13:19

May I refer you to /r/nosleep ?

SnapUndersteer, Italian Spiderman > deprecated account
05/15/2015 at 13:57

til Brooklyn?

S.A.Yeager > SnapUndersteer, Italian Spiderman
05/15/2015 at 14:07

til Hammersmith?

Fiveohfour > Seat Safety Switch
05/15/2015 at 14:13

What In God’s name did I just read?

Wolc *grammar nazis go f*** yourselves* > Seat Safety Switch
12/23/2015 at 20:10

This.. is eerily familiar. Only in my case it’s bmw e36 320i..

Do you still have the car?