You ever need something so badly it scares you to say it aloud, just because the universe might smell that stench of desperation about you and smite your ass back into the existential garbage time you deserve? The way I’ve been feeling about living in New York City qualifies. When I said goodbye to Lauren Theisen last summer, it was crushing. I had seen that sublime summit and would now regress back to the place I regrettably called home. There is, as it turns out, a reason why writers love New York, and my apartment in Tacoma would have given Julian of Norwich seasonal depression. I knew I had to get back no matter what, but as I’ve documented, my constitution is ill suited for the ‘or bust’ suffixes of life.
Luckily, life decided to rub my nose in just how shitty stagnancy smelled. My apartment’s toilet exploded sewage everywhere, wafting the Tacoma aroma upon all of my belongings. In case I hadn’t yet gotten the message, my lazy scummy dirtbag fuckface of a property manager decided this was the right time to raise the rent, supplying me the ample spite that would spur the big move. No time like the present. I needed to get rid of everything I could stomach one day buying again, find every latent dime I was owed or could borrow, and claw my way back to the only city really worth getting bled dry to live in. Most importantly, I needed to sell the Lexus.
In 2004, my uncle made one of the smartest calls that anyone ever got to make on the car market: He bought a brand new Lexus GX 470. It was eye-wateringly expensive, about 80 grand in today’s money, but his construction business was going well, and anyway in his judgment it was sturdier and more comfortable than anything else he test drove. He fucking nailed that one. This was Toyota engineering at the absolute peak of their powers. That GX was no steal, but at few points in history has a family of cars been so utterly far ahead of the competing options in terms of quality as the Toyota SUVs of this era.
The principle of the GX was pretty simple: Toyota essentially took the excellent fourth-generation 4Runner and replaced the bouncy coil spring suspension with some real smooth air bags, then added a few inches to the roof height, making the front seat roomy for lanky adults and the third row roomy for lanky toddlers. They also removed all engine options except the best one, the unbreakable 4.7 liter 2UZ-FE V8, because if you have Lexus money you shouldn’t be worrying about fuel economy. Everything depreciates, but after 100,000 miles my uncle still loved driving it, and after 200,000 nothing really changed. After 300,000 miles of Minnesota salt he reluctantly decided to buy a new car, another GX of course, but he tells me he wishes he could have just bought a brand new ‘04 model. Unfortunately for him, the current car market just doesn’t have outliers of that magnitude. Anyhow, when a granny in a Corolla nearly ended my life two years ago, he generously offered to give me the old Lexus, not as a long-term solution but so that I didn’t have to rush in finding one.
The ‘04 GX is an awesome truck, but it shows its age in many ways. Technology in cars always ages terribly, but in this case it was probably outdated on the dealer lot. The touch-screen navigation system might only have seemed cutting edge before I was born, and the CD-loading procedure wouldn’t feel out of place in Iron Nest. There is some sort of motor behind the steering wheel somewhere that goes haywire from time to time, just making weird annoying noises. These days you don’t have to choose between power and fuel efficiency, and you didn’t have to then either: You got neither. Despite all the engine displacement, the truck has no real interest in acceleration, and if you try to circumvent that by braking less, the truck’s top-heaviness will give you a nice little surprise kegel workout. Despite being slow as shit, the gas mileage is also awful, owing to the monolithic height and weight.
It is, I will concede, a very nice place to take a nap, and the state of my apartment being what it was I ended up writing quite a lot from that comfy driver’s seat. But honestly I don’t think it’s a great compliment to an automobile when the quality of the experience is inversely correlated with speed, or the engine even running at all. It just isn’t my thing, really. Still, people love even the beaters for their off-road capability; after all it’s just a comfy 4Runner. So I figured with a little fixing up it could really cushion my ambitious move. It just needed new brakes, a tune-up, and ideally a replacement for the rusted running board hangers. I could stay with my aunt in Seattle for a few weeks, knock out the repairs in her big-ass garage, make the sale, and go enjoy the New York summer. I might even hit my cousin’s wedding on the way out. It was only May, after all.
I may have mentioned it at one point or another on this site, but I am not Seattle’s biggest fan. The other thing is, I don’t actually like working on cars. I like working on my Miata, the car I picked out. It’s in great condition, and just well-designed for working on. The Lexus is different. It is huge, rusty as shit, and has a European enthusiasm for odd-numbered metric sockets. It took about a week for the parts to finally show up, but that wasn’t such a big deal. The weather was great, and West Seattle is really nice, a sort of idyllic DLC area to Seattle proper, more beautiful and less unrepentantly evil.
When it came time to get to work, it all went downhill in a hurry. First, the car was so tall my regular floor jack just couldn’t reach the high-ass jackpoint, meaning another purchase, another wait. Then my jack stands couldn’t reach high enough to suspend the truck off its wheels, but I managed to solve that with a few bland patio pavers from the Home Despot. Then came disassembly. If you’ve never worked on a truly cancer-ridden car, the thing about rust is it makes every bolt seized and every other bit of metal terrifyingly fragile. Case in point; early on one of the bolts on the truck’s skid plate was seized in. The head rounded off immediately. A sensible mechanic would just drill it out, but I wanted to preserve the threads. I gave it a full hour, trying everything I could think of: penetrating oil, bolt extractors, rocket sockets, and finally the blowtorch. The heat from the torch is a bit like chemotherapy, in that you are hoping to have the metal’s expansion and contraction break the corrosion causing the seize before the heat damages the integrity of anything else, or softens the bolthead such that it is harder to get a grip on. I yanked on the skid plate, hoping this might jar something loose. It did. The metal around the bolt hole was so rusty that the skid plate just ripped clean off with that final bolt still stuck in there.
Everything went like this. I tried to remove any bolt: stuck. I tried to unscrew the brake hardlines; they just disintegrated. I bought new ones. I broke my glasses, and the first time I laid under the truck without them it flung a good sized flake of rust straight into my right eye. As I stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying to gently fish the flake out like a contact lense, I found to my horror that it was breaking into still-smaller flakes of rust on my eyeball. Likewise, I was disintegrating. I hated every second with the truck. I would take any side quest to avoid it. My aunt’s dryer isn’t working? Don’t call a repair man, let me spend all day on it, please!
Early on, I would ask my friends to come kick it while I worked on the thing, but my moods were getting severe. I was just a terrible hang. They stopped coming, suggesting we do other shit, and I couldn’t exactly blame them. My cousin’s wedding came and went. I took the train out to it. One night I forgot to reconnect a hose before starting the car up, flooding the garage with automatic transmission fluid. Later, the jack extension slipped off the jack point and dropped the full weight of the truck onto the oil pan. The Lexus is well-designed to protect the oil pan for offroading, but that also means it's a hilarious ballet to replace. I had to buy more tools to get all the bolts off. My aunt’s neighbor took pity on me and came to lay in ATF-soaked kitty litter to help me knock the thing off with a mallet. Nice guy.
As weeks became months, I fell deeper into this stupid money pit. The hopelessness began to consume me. I had just about lost sight of the point entirely when on July 30, while watching a movie at some friends’ house, I received a text from former Defector intern and current literal angel Abigail Segel. One of her friends from college was moving out of her apartment a bit early and would be subletting her room for the month of September. She wanted to know if I was interested. It was one of those Arrival (2016) type moments where you can feel the fabric of spacetime folded over. I now had tacit permission from the universe to give up on getting the Lexus sold, because I knew where and when I needed to be. I did not say this, because there are some limits to my capacity for cornballing the fuck out. I told her I was interested. As I ventured down the block to the Met Market to get a celebratory banana pudding, I’m not sure my feet touched the ground.
As I sit here in Brooklyn with the din of sirens and honks outside, the rest of the world burning down, little real idea where I will live next month or how I can ever hope to pay down my Wookie life debt to Abigail, I find it almost quaint to remember what having real problems felt like. The Lexus remains in Seattle unsold. I’ll get around to it.
