When a person is full of vigor and endurance, you say that they have backbone; stamina, you call it. Stick-to-itiveness. Balls. They just keep on truckin’.
When it’s a car, you call it a nightmare.
After 13 long, disgraceful years on this Earth, my 1995 Eagle Summit finally bit the bullet this December. Like a persistent water boy at an Indian buffet, he did not know when to give up, and this remarkable resilience was the bane of my existence frm the time that I adopted him almost two years ago after a disastrous collision on a 990 off-ramp that rendered my old Saturn useless. Hearty, rugged, and the color of sickly baby shit, “The Bandit,” as we called him, certainly did not know when to quit. Despite almost constant minor repairs, robberies, blown-out tires and almost consistent mid-intersection stalls, he continued to thrive on a day-by-day basis. For his continued effort at being the best darn economy car with a sliding door on the market over a decade ago, he was a champion. For being the most unreliable, unattractive, incapable piece of shit car in Western New York, I wish him an unfortunate eternity in POS purgatory.
The Bandit was about as reliable as the obese coke-head car dealer that sold him to me, but it was my insistence that he would live forever that truly challenged his capabilities. He made close to a dozen round-trips from Buffalo to Toledo, and crossed the Pennsylvania border many times just for late night eating adventures. He has been issued countless citations, some accomplished simply by my own misinterpretation of New York State law, and one because the thing was just “too fucking loud.” One time a prostitute on Jarvis Street in Toronto had me park the car illegally (there was no solicitiation, it is a long story, I swear) and the end result involved me trekking across the T Dot at ten a.m. to free him from the impound lot. Despite his cracked rear-view mirror and inability to exceed 70 m.p.h., my naivety and arrogance convinced me that he would ride until the day he died. And now, that day has come.
In true Buffalo fashion, the big guy finally passed on a few weeks back after the transmission was destroyed while trying to rev myself out of a snow bank, shifting from gear to gear. The only thing funny about this is being able to tell people that I “blew a tranny,” but is that even that funny, really? Alright, it is. Zing.
But in the end, this is really the story of The Bandit—one great big joke. He was ridiculed on every parking lot and highway he graced, and mechanics rejoiced when I pushed him up to their garage door each and every time. There is a reason you don’t see many ’95 Summits on the road—not only are they hideous and embarrassing, but they are god awful. In a way, it was the beastly characteristics of my ride that gave him character. He might not have been pretty, and he was far from reliable, but it was his unwanted persistence that kept me from towing him to the junkyard eighteen months earlier. Rest in peace, Bandit. I fucking hated you.
Hey, want your friends to laugh at you and be mocked by girls!? This is the car for you. Half station wagon, half monkey’s ass—I bet you never thought driving a car with a sliding door could be this fun.
