I remember when my dad first pulled up with a Scion XB. It was 2008, right after his accident where he totaled his teal blue minivan. I loved that minivan, it had a VHS player so my sister, Sarah, and I could watch movies while on the road. I was devastated when I found out. What’s worse is that my dad replaced it with the most hideous, white box car I’d ever seen a week or two later. I actually cried when I first saw it. There wasn’t a TV in there. What I didn’t know then, but I do now, is that this car isn’t just hideous, it’s cheaply designed; it was purposefully done that way to appeal to teenagers learning to drive. My dad selected the car because he could pay it in full with the insurance money from the wrecked van. The Scion has a cloth interior, perfect for absorbing sweat and other various smells, so I’d never forget the time I drove it unshowered or got take-out. The dashboard sits low and hits everyone’s knees when they drive it, so if they get into an accident their knees would be crushed. The worst feature of the car is the manual transmission. The other version of the 2008 Scion XB has an automatic transmission, but that version wasn’t in house, and my dad didn’t want to go an extra week without a car.
“It’ll be your car one day,” my dad constantly joked. I would insist that the car won’t last that long. Everytime I heard the joke it made me mad – probably because I worried they were right. My parents were the type of people who would buy something and use it to exhaustion. “If it gets you from point A to point B, it’s perfectly fine,” my mom would always say.
Refrigerator, toaster, XBox. Those were all names we called the car, poking at its boxy figure. My eight year old self was ashamed of it; I inwardly and outwardly wished my dad hadn’t purchased such a humiliating car. My dad was a stay-at-home dad, so Sarah and I were hauled around in his refrigerator on wheels. I recall a time when Sarah and I missed the bus, and he had to drive us to school. My dad parked out front of our elementary school and walked us inside dressed in his pajama pants and no shoes, if only to add to my shame.
My parents intended for me to drive the Toaster once I got older, I was the target teen audience after all. My lessons began once my 15th birthday rolled around. The problem was, my mom wasn’t the best teacher and had a short temper – something I unfortunately inherited. My lessons never lasted more than 30 minutes, and both of us gave up quickly. The stick shift was the hill my 15 year old self and my 45 year old mother were willing to die on. By that time my dad bought a Honda Pilot SUV for hauling his music equipment anyway- speakers and microphones and cords didn’t fit quite as well into the compact Scion. Instead, I learned to drive the SUV, to my relief.
There was a time when I thought I knew the XBox’s manual transmission well enough to drive by myself to Westchester – a shopping center in Midlothian where everyone and their mother would hang out with their friends. I somehow managed to make it there, and went to the noodle restaurant for Saturday lunch. On the way back home, I got stuck on the middle of a hill on Woolridge road. Hills are infamously hard for beginners driving stick because if you don’t get moving in first gear quickly, the car rolls backwards. Tears leaked from my eyes as I tried again and again to get the car into first gear to no avail. As I became more frustrated, the harder it became to focus on driving and the more I failed. I sobbed when cars honked and gave me dirty looks as they drove around us. At that moment, I hated driving, and I blamed my knees crushed against the dashboard and my dad’s unwillingness to wait one week for the same car with automatic transmission. I turned on the hazards, put the car in park, and called my dad in tears to come pick me up. I decided learning to drive that car wasn’t for me.
It wasn’t until my sister started learning how to drive two years later that I restarted my stick shift lessons. I saw the writing on the wall, sharing a car with both my sister and my dad would be a nightmare. At least if I knew how to drive the Scion, I would have one less person to share it with. One day, my much more patient dad and I drove up to Krim Point, the retirement part of our neighborhood. My dad chose this area because he knew that there were significantly less people driving around there and plenty of hills for me to practice first gear.
We stopped in front of a small, white gazebo facing the trees. My dad and I switched places, and I fell into the driver’s seat. I could feel the sweat building at the back of my neck and my eyes aching. I remember complaining about how close the chair sat to the steering wheel, my knees grazing the dashboard. My dad admitted that it was “a piece of shit” – his words – and the makers cut corners to produce a cheaper car. I pushed my foot onto the clutch to start the car, complaining of the strain in my leg from the reach to press it all the way down. My base knowledge of manuals at this point was limited – I could drive once the car was moving, but I didn’t know how to successfully get it moving in first gear. What I knew about getting the car into first gear was 1.) that it was the hardest gear to learn and 2.) the motion my mom’s hands made when she attempted to explain the delicate transition from pressure on the clutch to the gas. I used what little knowledge I had to get the Scion moving only for it to stall out seconds later.
I wanted to give up there. My dad insisted we try again and offered alternative advice: instead of the delicate balancing act in the switch from the clutch to the gas pedal, rather to slowly let up on the clutch and to press down on the gas with a violent stomp. I tried his method and it worked! My dad had me practice for the next hour, asking me to stop at the base and middle of every hill. My mom’s balancing act may have worked occasionally, but my dad’s worked 100% of the time, tried and true. I felt victorious, I conquered the Scion.
That day the car became mine, in theory, not in reality – my parents still owned the title. It was the car my dad would rather not drive, preferring the SUV. It was a car my sister couldn’t drive, safe from her reckless hands. Instead it passed to mine. I would scare my friends every time I stalled out or jolted in the transition from one gear to the next. I would laugh at their wide-eyed looks and attempt to explain that’s just how the car ran – it wasn’t a smooth ride. I didn’t have the same electric Scion that Tom Hanks owned, and it was better that way.
Maybe because I’ve always associated my Scion with my dad, I always viewed the car as masculine. It didn’t help that it has harsh lines and a clunky shape. While working at Publix grocery store – a job I snatched a few months into quarantine – I met Anthony, a fellow cashier who couldn’t drive. If I were to picture the target audience for my Scion, it would be him. Both the car and him have the same square shape, but it was also built with an aux cord, a plugin to listen to music on your iPod, another appeal to teenagers. After climbing into the car, Anthony would always reach for the aux cord. He was reminded every time he did, that the aux cord doesn’t work – it hadn’t in years. What I had instead was a cigar charger with two adapters on it so music could reach our ears rather than sighing and resolving to turn up the volume on the phone. Anthony and I would drive to Westchester and pass the time going to drive-thrus and chatting late into the night. We met at Publix but became friends in my Scion.
A few weeks ago, my friend, Krista, and I made the trek to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to see Harry Styles in concert. It was a two hour drive to our halfway point, Krista’s dad’s house, and another three and a half hours to the venue, and then back home. The whole ride, I stressed over my car making it there. A Ruotolo has been grinding its gears for 13 years; it has over 200,000 miles on it. It wasn’t exactly in peak condition. We pulled over at least three times, cars whipping past mercilessly on the highway. On the way there, I pulled over on the side of I-95 at the flapping noise coming from the front, right tire. One side of the plastic protection had come loose and was rubbing against the tire. The friction had the plastic hanging in ragged pieces. I repaired it best I could, and we continued on.
Krista and I were both excruciatingly aware of how uncomfortable my car is to drive in for long periods of time. Road trips are exciting, but at its core is sitting and waiting. The only thing distracting me from my discomfort was my excitement for the singer I’d been dying to see for over a year, and Krista and I chatting about anything and everything. We bonded over the low hanging dashboard, complained about the minimal leg room, and shared the same back pain on the stiff seats. With a few more hours until we got back, Krista managed to fall asleep, leaving me alone with my car. On the highway, I could forget about the manual transmission, staying in one gear nearly the entire time. I could focus on the road before me and see the stars, clear as day on the mountain’s road.
