Car Trouble

Tonight we stole cars.

It wasn’t my idea.

And I didn’t actually do it.

Chuckie did.

He had done it before.

I don’t even know why we did it.

For fun or the fact that we were all guaged out,

But here we were cruising through the city

In two cars that were not ours.

I was in the back seat of the car that Chuckie was driving.

There were four of us including him.

There were three in the other car in front of us.

Now you’d think that if you had just stolen a car

That you wouldn’t want to attract any attention,

Especially if your gilled on drugs and alcohol.

But Chuckie decided to ram the back of the other car.

We were driving down one of the avenues.

It was late at night, but it wasn’t exactly deserted.

Chuckie hit the back of the other car again, hard.

We were like “Oh shit!”, “What the fuck?!!”.

Now Chuckie was laughing.

He sped up to the left side of the other car.

The other driver was Tee and he had a big fuckin’ grin on his face

As he swerved his car to the left

And smashed into the right side of our car.

There was a collapsing crunch of metal

That came in through the windows on the passenger side.

The boys in the other car were laughing and screaming at us.

And so we roared down the avenue

Inflicting damage to each other’s cars

That weren’t ours.

Laughing hard.

Screaming insults at each other.

Encouraging Chuckie to “Hit ‘Em again!”, “Do some Damage to those MotherFuckers!”

Slapping him on the back after he made contact.

The bastards in the other car were doing the same thing.

The more the cars were damaged

The harder we laughed.

It was hysteria.

I remember at one point

Looking at the other junker and just thinking to myself

How ridiculous it looked.

Crumpled like a car in a demolition derby.

I have no idea how we made it as far as the piers

But we did.

Clean.

No cops.

It was a miracle.

We stood outside

Of the two trashed vehicles

Smoking cigarettes

Laughing and ribbing each others skills.

The adrenelin had made us even higher.

I broke the rear view mirror

Out of our car as a souvenir

Before we started pushing those cars

Down the pier.

We pushed hard

Racing each other to the water.

At the piers edge

We took turns dumping the cars into the black water.

First our car.

It took all of us

Because once the front wheels went off

The car’s frame got stuck on the wooden lip of the pier.

It dragged, scraping.

We pushed.

The car fell over the side and hit the water’s surface.

And then,

It was rather crazy.

We all thought that the car would just sink

But it just floated there.

We pushed in the second car on top of the first

With a loud crunch.

The first car went down

engine first

Slowly.

The second car

As the first

Bobbed on the glassy liquid surface

Until it too started to go down nose first.

I remember as I watched that trunk disappear

Into the harbor’s depths,

A sense of eeriness

In the absolute quiet around us.

No one spoke

So I sense that I wasn’t alone.

We watched foamy bubbles rise to the surface.

Quiet.

Absolute quiet.

Moments passed.

The group turned to walk home.

And we were silent.

It was a while before anyone spoke.

Epilogue:

I held onto that rearview mirror

For many years

As some sort of accomplishment.

It was the source of a good story.

But at some point

It became meaningless

And I threw it away.

My life had changed

And it became one of my dark secrets

Less and less revealed.

The silent image of the trunk of a car

Sliding down in the dark, dark water

Still haunts me to this day...