My last girlfriend broke up with me via GChat after seven months. That's one of the two things you need to know about our romance. At its genesis, the seemingly pleasant non-driver came to my apartment, where we ate pizza and talked. I gave her a ride home. Later, she informed me that she had wanted to kiss as I was dropping her off, but she opened the door a crack first, activating the automatic seatbelt of my 1992 Ford Festiva, which apparently startled her enough to scuttle the attempt. So, in essence, my beloved car tried to save me from what wound up being one of the most disastrous relationships I've endured.
ARCHIVE DIVE: 1986 Ford RS200 Rally Car
The Festiva has been a constant for me for the past 11 years. Given as a wedding gift by my brother (though he failed to give me the title for another three months, making it impossible to register in New York, but he's family, so all I can do is passive-aggressively write about it 10 years later), the tiny red hatchback carted me and co-authors around the northeast to book events and excursions, hauled friends and furniture from IKEA to their shabby Brooklyn apartments, and held countless loads of bathroom tissue and soda from Costco for my in-office bodega. I have even used it to do reverse donuts on loose gravel and attempted to impress comedian friends by "greasing 'em off and grabbing second," or at least coming as close as I could with its 1.3-liter engine.
It's the ultimate city car. It's small, gets great gas mileage, can hold an unfathomable volume of cargo for a car its size, and it looks so shitty that no one will ever try to steal it. It has also outlived the marriage for which it was given, a job I held for 19 years, and the aforementioned trainwreck of a relationship. Thus, when it came time to choose a tattoo—I say this as if I was somehow obligated to plunk down hundreds of dollars to possibly bring shame to my family—the obvious choice was to immortalize the Festiva on my body (courtesy of Smith Street Tattoo in Brooklyn by a tattoo artist named Daniel Santoro. - Ed.). And none too soon. A cascade of brake, bearing, and spindle problems nearly broke the bank, and I fear I will have to put it out to pasture with the next catastrophic system failure.
In the meantime, it continues to get me around. Also important, my current romantic interest is far less easily startled and is the first girlfriend I've had who can drive the car with ease, manual transmission and all. She gets the Festiva seal of approval.
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