Sit back and enjoy the tale of how I stopped thinking it was cool to slide around blind corners in other people’s cars.   

After my senior year of high school I spent the summer working for my dad’s architecture firm with a friend who for the sake of this story I will call Gerald.  There, we did simple stuff like draft plans using CAD and deliver widgets to building sites.  Halfway though the summer, however, we took on a much more exciting responsibility.  One of my dad’s clients visited seasonally and he asked my father to take care of his summer car while that car’s accompanying house was renovated.  The car in question was a 1992 Lexus SC300 in 90’s green and with a 5-speed manual and only 50,000 miles.

When we learned of this, Gerald and I concocted an excuse to drive it.  Well, leaving a car in one place for a few months is, uh, bad for the engine and tires. The car needs to run every now and then to, you know, to breath.  My dad initially refused, but he eventually asked the owner if he would mind the driven to stay fresh.  Happily, the man from New Jersey had no problem with the idea.  So we would take the Lexus out for about ten or fifteen minutes at a time and then bring it back, put the cover on, and make an entry into our very serious looking maintenance spreadsheet.    

The car itself was wonderful.  Its whole construction reeked of the world dominating ambition that Toyota, and perhaps Japan as a whole, seemed to have in the 1980’s.  Two huge hinges, probably pilfered from the Black Gate of Mordor, held each door in place.  The roof didn’t even have a cut line; instead it was one flush piece of steel.  In short, it seemed invincible.  The straight six sounded like what I imagined auto journalists meant when they reminisced about old naturally aspirated BMWs, aggressive without being juvenile.  The steering was light, crisp and generally free of slop.  Being from the 90’s meant that the steering wheel was thin and shaped as a steering wheel, not the two inch thick rubber donut you see on that arcade game with speedboats.  The driver sat in an unusually reclined position and while headroom was tight, the controls met the hand naturally.  The leather wasn’t very convincing.  The shifter vibrated at idle and had a very light action, but the clutch take-up felt pretty accurate.

After a while, driving the SC300 felt perfectly natural.  l figured this was because the car used a straight six and had rear wheel drive-you know the correct layout.  This all changed late one Tuesday afternoon.  The night before I had psyched myself for the drive by watch YouTube videos related to that particular Lexus model.  One exciting feature had some totally sweet bros put a Corvette engine in theirs and fling it sideways around a track.  So with those guys in mind, I went to work and counted down the minutes until I would drive the SC300.  Thunderstorms precluded driving for most of the afternoon, but by the early evening the skies had cleared somewhat and we were off. 

Near the office is a twisty little road with a speed limit of about 25 or 30 mph.  One needn’t drive very fast to have fun there but many do anyway.  Gerald and I brought the car here and gradually built courage through the still damp corners.  After a few minutes I was getting the tail out just a teeny bit on the larger bends.  In retrospect, this alone was quite dumb.  The car was exactly as old as I am and it’s 15 inch tires probably weren’t much younger, but such reasonable thoughts never crossed my mind.  After ten or so minutes, we decided to head back and I drove.  Midway through the last bend, I suddenly remembered that drifting video.  For just a moment I thought about how I probably wouldn’t drive such car again, and that I might as well make my very last go round interesting.  I decided to give the throttle a little extra shove.

In all honesty, what happened next probably lasted about three seconds, but in my mind it took quite a bit longer.  Gandalf the White described a similar feeling in The Lord of the Rings “Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time… The stars wheeled overhead, and every [second] was as long as a life age of the earth.”  Aside from the darkness and stars bit, that sounds about right and the I’ll retell my version as best I can.  I pressed on the gas and nothing happened, then the steering became weightless and the tail swung way way too far out.  By the time that registered, the car and I were facing what the media likes to call a “wooded area”, but the vehicle as a unit was still traveling forward down the road. This can’t be happening because this isn’t my car so it if it was happening, it would be very bad.  So I am obviously a videogame right now. Then I heard a bang and felt myself spinning. Did I just crash? Nooo of course not.  I don’t crash. That would be irresponsible.  The whole affair felt like a dream but at the very end I felt a thud.  The SC had slid sideways, hit a rock with its bumper, was lifted by that rock, and spun 270 degrees from its starting point.  No way this is an accident it still seems like a dream, oh whats that I feel? I guess we just landed.  I guess this really happened.  Uh oh.

Gerald and I sat in silence for a couple of seconds.  I opened the door door and surveyed the wreckage. I expected the entire front end to have caved in, like one of those NHTSA medium speed crash tests, not the full 45 mph ones but not the 5 mph ones either.  The fascia looked pretty bad but had nowhere near the damage I was expecting.  There was an angry looking gash along the bumper and a lot of grass and dirt stuffed in the grill.  The whole front cover looked a bit loose as well, but aside from that nothing was terribly amiss.  I began to wonder where all the energy went and where that bang had come from.  Maybe I was just imagining things.  Before I could answer, another car appeared.  Gerald and I exchanged glances and jumped back in, avoiding eye contact with the driver and praying the engine would start again.  Luckily it did and we sidled a few hundred yards to the nearest pull off.

I got a much better picture of the damage here.  Unfortunately that loud bang turned out to be real; under the hood was a huge dent where the AC compressor should have been.  That jolt had come when the car’s compressor smacked a rock which was embedded on the side of the road and seemed to be about the size R2-D2’s “head”, though a good bit more jagged.  This was going to be expensive.  I felt awful, like I had hit a person or something.  After all, this wasn’t a Nissan Rogue from Alamo but my dad’s client’s SC300.  It was based on the LS300 sedan, which was one of those rare cars designed simply to be “the best” period.  Since this was the coupe version of “the best”, it was supposed to be rare as well-you know a “halo” car or whatever.  

To be continued…