IN MEMORIAM : TAKOTRON PAYS TRIBUTE TO THE DEATH OF A '91 CIVIC

After my freshman year of college I continued my pursuit of stick-shift perfection, which I had begun in High School on the family '84 civic hatchback. That summer I couldn't find a job, so I spent the days becoming inebriated and spackling and painting around the house, watching Mets games, listening to Mets games on WFAN, listening to Hot 97, and building models. It was a heavenly summer, if a bit lazy. Like I said, I couldn't find a job. At the end of the summer, my mom gave me her '91 four door Civic LX sedan, since she had just purchased a 2000 Civic coupe. Notice how my family drives Civics exclusively.

 

  
We bought the blue 4dr during the summer of 1991. That same week we went to my grandmother's house on the Jersey shore, an annual custom. Seaside Park was a tasteful beach village, where as a 9 year old I enjoyed boogie-boarding until my nipples became unbearably chafed, digging for sand crabs, and avoiding washed up jellyfish, hypodermic needles, and mysterious hospital waste. It was also just down the boardwalk from Seaside Heights, which my grandmother hated for its sleazyiness and grime and airbrushed "Italian Princess" T-shirts. Carnies with patchy mustaches and flowing mullets, and fat loud semi-nude NJ natives hung out there. But my cousins, sister, and I liked it because it had cheese fries and funnel cake and arcades and rickety old rides that you could tell were just waiting for you to stick your arm out to be mauled as a sacrifice to the Jersey Shore Carnie God with his substandard creaky but unstoppable machinery.
This car had served the family well, and had something like 160,000 miles on it by the time I became chief pilot. The Ford Taurus' odometer doesn't even have a 100,000 place, because you will never get more than 99,999 miles from that car. The civic then proceeded to serve me well, and I would take it back and forth between Long Island and Grinnell, IA: Sunken Meadow Pkwy>Northern State Pkwy>Grand Central Pkwy>Clearview Expwy>CrossBronxExpwy>I-80>I-80>I-80. It trekked through many states: NY, NJ, PA, OH, IN, IL, IA, TN, AK, MI, LA, KY, MO, MS, MD, DC. It accumulated more than 182,000 miles. And then its time had come...

 

 

 
I filled it with all my crap and moved to Chicago after graduation followed by a LI summer. I lived accross from a dumpy little park, Ekhart Park, on the 1300s block of Chicago Ave, a somewhat decrepit but charming and convenient neighborhood. One evening I parked on the street (which was well lit and always busy with people on foot and in cars. I just went up to my apartment for an hour or so, but came back to a smashed window and stolen CD/radio. So that sucked, and then came all the insurance bullshit. I eventually got the window fixed, but less than a month later, some asshole broke the same window with a hunk of curb the size of a softball (I found it on the back seat among the splintered glass). They went through all my stuff, and of course found nothing of value. They weren't interested in the floppy disk with my resume on it.

About the same time my fuel mileage was getting inconsistent, and the idle was going all weird. But then I went to my car one evening and found the drivers side all caved in. A note on my windshield read, "I saw the person who hit your car and will report it to the police." The passenger side had been slammed into the curb and the tire was flattened and the axle bent. It happened on a rainy Saturday night, while I was parked on the street in front of my place. I called the police who were of no help and told me they had no reports of anything like that quickly enough to cast doubt on whether they even looked it up. They said I could go to the precinct office and fill out so forms. I didn't. A AAA guy to come and pried off the hexbolts so I could put on the spare tire. Then I took it to a garage specializing in Hondas to get a diagnosis. The carriage and axle were all bent up, which are death-signifiers for a car that old. It also turned out the timing computer was busted (causing the idle/mileage problem), which itself would have cost more to replace than the value of the car. So that was the sad end. I even had trouble finding someone who would take it as a donation.

R.I.P.

1991-2004