{"id":672,"date":"2004-04-29T10:37:59","date_gmt":"2004-04-29T14:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=672"},"modified":"2024-10-27T15:17:11","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T19:17:11","slug":"the-peace-of-westfalia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=672","title":{"rendered":"The Peace of Westfalia"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post, by Jess<\/a>, about cars in her past made me realize, (for the first time, weirdly), that I have never owned a car on my own<\/b>.<\/p>\n

What kind of person never owns a car? I never needed one in Chicago – and now in New York I am quite glad to not have one. It would be nice, though, to have the option to get out of Dodge, should the impulse come over me.<\/p>\n

My first boyfriend and I bought 2 vehicles together – but he was kind of bossy – so I didn’t feel like the vehicles were mine, in any way\/shape\/form. Even though I paid for half of them.<\/p>\n


\nThe first car we bought together was a used Nissan 300 ZX. It was GOLD, as well. A ridiculous car. It was so low to the ground you basically had to lie down on the pavement to slide your way through the door. We would zip up and down the highways of the Northeast Corridor in our small gold bullet, blasting our GEEKY music, going from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds flat. A dumb car.<\/p>\n

Then we started planning for this massive 2-month jaunt across the country. From Philadelphia to San Fran.<\/p>\n

We bought a used Westfalia, had our furniture shipped across the country to meet us in San Fran, and took off. We lived in that van. We cooked in it. We drove it across mountain ranges, through deserts, over bridges, across the plains. It is an amazingly hardy vehicle. We would have these “Easy Rider” moments, at some campsite, with a flickering camp fire, and coffee brewing in a pot inside the Westphalia, the blue flame of the stove trembling through the dark.<\/p>\n

And then we got to Death Valley and one of our tires exploded. Literally. Exploded into shreds on the hot pavement. We careened off to the side of the road. It was the kind of landscape which glimmers, as though it is water, and I kept thinking I saw liquidy lush green fields up in the distance. My first experience with desert mirages. Boyfriend changed the tire, then we had to buy a new tire which caused us to run out of money a month ahead of time.<\/p>\n

So we cut off the rest of the trip, and careened up the coast of California to San Fran.<\/p>\n

We lived in San Fran for a bit, and I remember that perhaps one of the proudest moments of my ENTIRE LIFE was when I successfully parallel parked that clunky stick-shift van, on one of those precarious hills. It took me 25 minutes, I was in a panic, a sweat, I thought I would lose control and plummet down the hill to my death, that something would snap, that the clutch would go, that complete and utter disaster would ensue. When I finally got that van into its spot, I had a small private moment of pride. I DID it.<\/p>\n

A month later, I moved to Los Angeles, I took the van with me (all of my stuff was in the van – I had furniture, and filing cabinets, and boxes and boxes of books – He and I had not just taken the trip across the country for fun, we were in the process of actually moving out to California – so all of our stuff had been shipped to the new digs in San Fran.)<\/p>\n

Anyway. It was a confusing chaotic time. I moved to LA, one of my college friends hooked me up with a friend of his aunt who let me stay at her place for free, while I got my act together (which looked like it was going to be a pretty big job). She lived in Woodland Hills – a woman I didn’t even know – but she let me stay in her house. Woodland Hills was like the 8th circle of hell. I knew nobody in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

I got temp jobs in random offices, and I would show up for work driving the battered Westfalia, filled with my furniture from Philadelphia. Quite a spectacle I was.<\/p>\n

I got my first flat-tire on some shriek-y terrifying freeway. I was headed “home” from my temp job, so I had on my little temp outfit. Heels, etc. Boyfriend had always been the “I’ll change the tire” type. Without him, I had to figure it out on my own. I did so – beautifully. I jacked up the damn VAN, on the side of the freeway (I felt so conspicuous – everyone has these little zippy cars, and I was like some reject from a commune, wandering down the 405) – and changed the tire. I felt like the most successful and triumphant woman on the planet.<\/p>\n

The next day, I got my second flat-tire. I changed the tire as deftly as an old pro.<\/p>\n

Two weeks later, I was driving in Woodland Hills, having kind of a nervous breakdown, truth be told, and I put my foot down on the clutch and I felt something pop. I felt this very small deep-down snap, within the belly of the van – and immediately I got this cold feeling all over: Oh God. That sounded BAD. This is BAD.<\/p>\n

(I was broke. I was living with a strange old woman. I had broken up with my boyfriend. I had no friends. And now the car…)<\/p>\n

Various and sundry insane moments followed:<\/p>\n

— I abandoned the van at a stoplight, in the middle of the road, somewhere in Woodland Hills, and as I walked away, I kept turning to scream back at the van: “OH, SCREW YOU, SCREW YOU” like an escaped lunatic. I knew I would not have the money to fix whatever BAD thing had just happened. Being without a car in Los Angeles is, of course, unthinkable.<\/p>\n

— Two cops saw me standing in the middle of the street, screaming at my own vehicle. They basically made me get into their squad car with them<\/p>\n

— They told me they would call a tow truck. I leaned over the back seat into the front<\/i> and said, right into their faces, defiantly, “I have NO MONEY. None. NONE.” I was yelling at two members of the LAPD.<\/p>\n

— They tried to calm me down. “We’ll work something out for you. It’ll be fine, ma’am. Do you want some water?”<\/p>\n

— The tow truck arrived. Meanwhile, my abandoned van was causing a near ruckus in the traffic. I stalked over to the tow truck guy, said not a word, and just showed him the inside of my empty wallet. Look here, guy, ya ever see anything as empty as this WALLET? I had this crazy grin on my face, daring him to turn me down. (I don’t think I’ve ever been so publicly out of control as I was during these 20 minutes.)<\/p>\n

Recently, I did an imitation of this entire thing for my cousin Emma and my aunt Regina, and they were laughing so hard they were crying. Especially with crazy Sheila leaning over into the front seat, snapping some crazy remark at the cops, and also the showing of the empty wallet. It’s funny NOW, but then … no no no, it was not funny!<\/p>\n

— So Tow-Truck man, like the cops, probably realized that I was having a sort of meltdown, and gave me a tow for free.<\/p>\n

— Dropped the STUPID van off and then had no way to get “home”, no way to get back to the strange house with the strange old woman. So I walked home. It was a 45 minute walk.<\/p>\n

— On the way home, suddenly it was as though my brain started working again, and I thought: “What. The Hell. Am I DOING???” Sense returned. I could see my life, I could see how unhappy I was, and I could see that I actually could do <\/b>something about it.<\/p>\n

— I stopped at a pay phone, during this interminable walk home, and called my friend Jackie, collect. She was living in Chicago, and having a great time, acting in shows, doing great – and I spontaneously called her and said that I was going to move to Chicago as soon as I could, and could she put me up until I found a place of my own? She said Of course.<\/p>\n

— I became a whirlwind of desperate activity. GET ME OUT OF HERE. I sold off most of my stuff – This kindly strange woman let me keep a bunch of furniture and boxes in her garage until I was ready to send for it (who WAS this person?? Her random kindness to me still sort of blows me away.)<\/p>\n

— I had had to reluctantly call the now-EX-boyfriend in San Francisco (who was already dating someone else – hence, the meltdown…) and ask him to pay for the repairs on the van. Which were going to be 600 bucks. Oh, it killed me to ask him – but he agreed to pay for it. He could afford it, he was making massive amounts of money and I was sitting in a room in Woodland Hills, nibbling on Pretzels for dinner.<\/p>\n

— Once the van was fixed, I put an ad in the paper for it – sold it almost immediately – and used that money to buy my plane ticket to Chicago.<\/p>\n

— Literally only a month later, I had found my own apartment on the shore of Lake Michigan, a tiny one-room apartment, but my own, my own place. I still had had leftovers from the sale of the Westfalia, and used it for the security deposit.<\/p>\n

— It took me about 4 months for my head to stop spinning, and for me to calm down.<\/p>\n

The Westfalia was the last car I ever owned, and it was pretty crucial – for all of the reasons I just described. In the end, even though it was a huge pain in the ass, it allowed me to get out of LA as quickly as possible, and enabled me to get an apartment almost immediately.<\/p>\n

However, I also should say – that the boyfriend was crucial as well. He didn’t want to pay the repairs, but I basically told him he had to. And he did it for me. Without the van being repaired, I never could have sold it, and it would have been much more difficult to move to Chicago.<\/p>\n

So I have him to thank as well. Moving to Chicago pretty much changed and saved my life.<\/p>\n

Whenever I see pictures of the Westfalia, and my boyfriend and I, cooking over the fire, me with a bandana around my head, he pouring coffee, drying our clothes on a line we had strung up – whatever – I always end up thinking of Chicago. I think of me flipping out on that random busy intersection in Woodland Hills, I think of the kindly people who tried to calm me down, I think of how odd it was that during our whole trip we had no idea that we actually were breaking UP as we drove across the country, as opposed to starting a new life together in San Fran, and I think of my eventual escape to the Windy City.<\/p>\n

It was a good van. It really was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post, by Jess, about cars in her past made me realize, (for the first time, weirdly), that I have never owned a car on my own. What kind of person never owns a car? I never needed one in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16617,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/16617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}