In memory of Gorbachev
Remembering my best friend's high school car with an unusual name
Hello friends,
A week and a half ago, Mikhail Gorbachev died. The obituaries are still trickling in, and I wanted to contribute. My obituary, however, is not for Mikhail Gorbachev, the man, but for Mikhail Gorbachev, the car.
Around 2007, my high school (and current) best friend, Sam, got her license. I took an extra year to get mine. I learned to drive with the same amount of anxiety as when I learned to ride a bike. Skinned knees would be the least of my problems in a car accident, though, so I took my time. I also failed my driving test the first time around. I didn't come to a complete stop at a stop sign. My anxiety told me the proctor was impatient with me, so I partially stopped and lazily rolled through the small intersection. I was mortified, but I felt better after sharing stories with my friends who had also initially failed. We were living up to the Florida stereotype.
Sam, meanwhile, passed her test on the first try. Her older sister, Virginia (whom we call Gin), was at Columbia in New York, so Sam inherited her car. It was a tan 1990 Mercury Grand Marquis. When Gin was 17, she bought it from an older man who lived around the corner. He sold it after his wife died. His wife drove the car to the grocery store, church, and nowhere else, so he was pretty protective of it. Even after he sold it to Gin, he stopped by her house occasionally to check on his wife's old vehicle. At the time, Gin was learning about Mikhail Gorbachev in history class. She decided to name the car Gorbachev (Gorb for short) because driving it—him—felt imperial but quiet. I didn't know Gin then, but I learned all this after Sam got her license. She introduced me to Gorb like you'd introduce a new friend.
I was still trying to muster the courage to retake my driver's test, so Sam drove us everywhere—home from school, to the beach, to the mall, to Denny's at two in the morning. We spent more time riding around in Gorb than in our homes. Being a 1990 model, Gorb no longer had working air conditioning, so we always rolled the windows down. And when I say "rolled the windows down," I mean that literally. We turned the hand cranks on the doors until the windows rolled up or down. The passenger-side window required more muscle than any of the others. It felt like pedaling a bike in the wrong gear. I could go faster if only the damn wheels would turn. When I finally got the window open, I was met with the heavy breath of Florida's perpetual summer. Some days, when the heat was particularly oppressive, we drove in silence. Any unnecessary energy expenditure resulted in more heat than we could bear.
The windows weren't the only old-school features of Gorb. He was all analog. Sam would unlock her door with the key, and I would wait for her to lean over and flick the unlock button on the passenger door. The dash only had a tapedeck, so we needed an adaptor to plug in our iPods. This was also back when iPods were separate entities. On one end of the adaptor was a 35 mm jack that plugged into the iPod. On the other end was a cassette tape with no tape on it. It worked most of the time.
Gorb also had a unique quirk. Although you needed a physical key to open the door, you didn't need that key to start the engine. For some reason, you merely had to turn the ignition lock cylinder for the ignition to fire; no key necessary. If we didn't lock the doors, someone could steal Gorb without any trouble. Even so, we didn't always lock them. We figured no one would actually want to steal Gorb.
For a few years, Gorb felt like another friend. We talked about him like he was a person. We spoke to him when driving to encourage him not to break down. And then, in 2010, sometime after we'd graduated high school, Gorb died. Sam called to tell me she'd been in a fender bender, and Gorb was totaled. The car ahead of her barely had a dent, but Gorb was old and frail. The impact crumped the fragile bones of his front end, and there was no bringing him back.
Gorb's death felt like the death of something bigger. He was a consistent presence throughout the turbulence of high school. Sam and I (and many of our other high school friends) spent hours talking in the comfort of Gorb's velvety grey seats. We covered romance and family and how thankful we were for each other. We sat in parking lots and driveways and poured our hearts out. Gorb heard all our secrets. He listened every time we sang along to a song without knowing all the words. He stayed out with us until the wee hours of the morning. He saw us grow up.
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Praise Gorb!
My sister was always big on naming her cars, especially in high school. Our dad was not amused. "Cars are things to get you to work, not things you work to get." He felt giving cars an emotional valence was asking for more grief than they were worth.
I never felt like naming my cars, but I should have named the Toyota Corolla I had with carpeted interior and a mix-CD of goth music stuck in the player something, because that car was something special.
RIP Gorb