#chrysler intrepid

[seat-safety-switch]

“I don’t believe in this kind of bullshit,” explains the driver as a tricycle goes sailing onto the hood and bounces off the expanded-metal mesh over the windshield. “It’s just exploitative, and trains you to get used to it rather than look for what’s really important, the child.” For my part, I’m not entirely sure that my travelling companion actually did check for the presence of a child before swerving onto the sidewalk to clip what he assumes was a deliberately abandoned false-flag prop tricycle.

For a couple years now, I’d been noticing the rise in the neighbouring suburbs of various street indicators that children were at play. My favourite was a life-size injection-moulded plastic child with “SLOW” stamped on his buttocks. The idea, in case you hadn’t cottoned on yet, was that you would be reminded of the existence of children, feel some kind of deep-seated communal guilt, and plow through the intersection without taking your eyes off your smartphone at 37.5 km/h instead of the legally-tolerable full fifty.

A couple weeks before the interview, I noticed that the amount of roadside props had only grown. Some houses would make a whole diorama, scattering toys and conveyances as to give the impression that a child had just abandoned them and was getting ready to run into the road. While looking for this phantom child, the idea goes, you’d naturally slow, as everyone who operates a car in my city slows to a snail’s pace whenever they have to think about anything at all. Stuck behind one of these individuals is where I found my new interview subject, a guy driving a blacked-out third-generation Firebird who I will only refer to as “The Asshole.”

The Asshole did not believe in this propagandist approach to road safety, and in fact was outraged by it. He made it his mission to drive recklessly through the neighbourhood but not to hit any children, because no parents ever let their kids play in the middle of the fucking road. He stressed to me later when I was interviewing him for The Journal of Bad Cars (our new higher-class, literary publishing arm which attempts to target a more wealthy reader, such as those capable of buying a used Intrepid in cash) that ice cream trucks, lawncare technicians, letter carriers, and coyotes didn’t count as “children” for the purposes of his great social experiment.

Personally, I had a bit of a thrill at the excitement of racing through an unfamiliar suburb at six-tenths, mandated-identical homes flickering through the thin slit of an acrylic racing windshield like the end of 2001. When I bid farewell to The Asshole, I made sure that I was fully outside of the vehicle and its NASCAR-grade door bars before I asked him what he felt about playground zones.

“They’re great,” he yelled, before engaging the line lock to lay a smoke screen a mile thick. “Gives me a chance to warm up my tires!”

As he sped off into the distance, I could just barely make out his bumper sticker: I BRAKE FOR CORNERS.

[seat-safety-switch]

When they make Kit Kat chocolate bars, the ones that fail quality assurance are melted back down and used to make newer, better bars. That's why they're so delicious: they learned their lessons from previous generations of failed chocolate and are afraid of an ignoble death in the recycling vats. Cars are the same way, if you think about it even medium-hard.

Most of the cars you see on the road today are probably made at least partially of recycled old cars. When you send your trusty Intrepid to a junkyard and it gets flattened, it's entirely possible that some of that metal is going to be recycled into new steel that gets turned into the unibody of a Bentley. It kind of warms my heart a bit, thinking of all the rusty turds I've gone through that are now all that keeps a Hong Kong speculator alive when he pirouettes his Ferrari into a bridge abutment.

In order to test my theory, I had to spend a few bucks. I tried to contract a psychic to see if I could communicate with the long-dead bodies of millions of Mopars mixed into the chassis of a new Fiat, but all she said was that she "doesn't do CAN bus." Too spooky for her, apparently.

Sure, I assume that when they make a new unibody, they filter out the rust somehow at the big metal-recycling plant, but nobody has ever made a machine that separates the soul from the car. Although, if they did, it would probably involve road salt and a focus group somehow. Which would honestly explain a lot of newer cars.

[seat-safety-switch]

There are three big heroes in the American pantheon of modern-day gods: the crusading attorney on the side of the people, the trailer-park grifter, and the guy who drives a W-body Chevrolet. Yes indeed: whether it be a hogged-out Lumina or a gently-miled, baby-diaper-wiped Grand Prix, all the world loves a W-body driver. It wasn’t always this way, though.

When the W-body was first introduced, way back in 1988, the world simply wasn’t ready. These were futuristic, sleek Space Shuttles for the road. American drivers wanted a more robust, rear-wheel-drive chassis that can do common everyday tasks like jumping across a damaged bridge in Hazzard County, destroying a logging camp, or getting revenge on the Devil Himself for casting your daughter into Hell. Chevy wasn’t daunted by this initial lack of success: they came back with more front-wheel-drive personal luxury cars than Toyota could shake a Caldina at. They would simply force everyone to love the W-body, as they had loved it.

Soon, nearly every storied General Motors model name had been subsumed into the “slightly large coupe” chassis. Cutlass, Lumina, even Monte Carlo: if your uncle’s probation officer drove one in the 70s, then it was now a name on the perfect family vehicle with which to take the fight to the Chrysler Intrepid, the cloud-car nemesis to all things GM. A cynic would say they did this on purpose, to prop up flagging midsize sedan sales by slapping any name with positive focus-group opinions onto this chassis.

Now, perhaps there is some truth to this: 80s and early-90s GM largely had no idea what they were doing, because the quality of cocaine had decreased markedly due to the semi-success of the War on Drugs. It also helped that the Japanese (always referred to as “The Imports”) were going through a bit of a tough time, with the average salaryman in Nippon now no longer able to afford two six-hundred-horsepower fire-breathing all-wheel-steering Mitsubishi personal luxury coupes and having to settle instead for a cheaper, more reliable family sedan. Without all that pressure, it didn’t really hurt GM any to chuck a 120-horsepower V6 into a Buick and tell their dealers to eat it or beat it.

However, if you look beyond the narrow sociopolitical context of the introduction of the W-body, you’ll find something beautiful. These fucking things seem to run forever, their automotive cockroachdom only to be surpassed by the J-bodied Cavaliers and Sunfires a scant few years later. Now, nothing on them works, but you can still get to your job at the Stripper Mart on I-82 without ever wondering if the temperature gauge is actually working. And that’s the true American way.

[seat-safety-switch]

At the big corporate junkyard near me, they are trying to make additional profit by broadening their customer base. Some egghead manager or market researcher figured out that a lot of regular people need a little hand-holding in order to find the part they’re looking for, and so they forced the regular staff to be as helpful as possible. Of course, I always end up waiting in line behind a father of two as he gets slowly walked through the entire process of identifying what car it is he actually drives and what part he needs.

It’s not that I’m an elitist. Far from it. You’re trying to save $15 in parts. I have a mental illness that compels me to be here at all times. One of us can turn around, walk right out that door, and go on to live a normal life.

They never listen to my psychic messages, though, and walk right into the yard, confident that it can’t be that difficult to pull an automatic transmission out of a double-fatality ‘96 Chrysler Intrepid in the thirty minutes he has before close. Then I have to deal with them later, when they want me to lend them tools or to call an ambulance after a rusted-out subframe turns out to be heavy and sharp.

I don’t think the yards make that much profit off of these people. They never did when I used to go with my father - maybe because my old man taught me first about how to sew a secret pocket into the lining of your coat, which is perfect for hiding relays, fuses and turbocharger plumbing. Perhaps they’re counting on them getting hooked. That would certainly explain the dude I saw every weekend last summer, getting progressively more feral as he moved from pulling a headlight replacement for an ‘03 F-150 to stockpiling AMC 401 log manifolds in his wheelbarrow. He’s the manager now, and boy is he ever helpful if you don’t know your ass from an impact wrench.

[seat-safety-switch]

“Do you swear fealty only to the One True Car, the Chrysler Intrepid, and to no lesser four-door semi-luxury sedans?” asked the cultist at the other end of the snaking obsidian dagger pointed at my heart.

I wanted to ask what happened to the 300M Special, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour in this circumstance. Another better part of valour was my loaded .38 snubnose, from which I discharged hollowpoint justice into the hooded teenager with a quick one-two brap. As he sagged to the ground, the audience went wild, perhaps not yet realizing the gun wasn’t loaded with blanks for their entertainment.

When I was first approached about attending ChryslerCon and taking part in the Early 90s FWD Paradise panel, I figured that they had finally called my number, identified my cries for help as closeted lust for the Dodge Neon. It was not to be, I would soon find - my fellow panelists, like the cultist, were consumed altogether by some kind of strange power that brought their attentions solely on Iacocca’s Revenge, the Cloud Car of lore.

Choosing to seize the moment and build on the momentum that taking a human life had given me, I grabbed my microphone and leaned in conspiratorially. I was going to say something controversial, the crowd realized, and their murmuring about whether or not to call the homicide police fell silent, now hanging on my every word. In my peripheral vision, I could see my fellow panelists, too, were enraptured, drawn from their study of Mopar Action back-issues by the report of the handgun.

“How can you make a good front-wheel-drive car if the engine is installed longitudinally?” I spat into the mic, before hooking my belt loop to the dangling tow rope and letting the helicopter pull me from the hall before the crowd could rush me in delusional anger.

It was only as I ascended through the opened skylight of the Cobo Centre, giving the assembled crowd a furious double-bird that I began to feel regret. I had neglected to pick up an ACR radio delete panel from the swap meet, and now it would just be awkward to go back.