In the late 1990s, Bay Area roads were full of cars from the sixties and seventies: Maroon Mustangs, Gold Novas, Orange Karmann Ghias—spewing exhaust up and down El Camino Real in the peninsula suburbs where I lived and went to high school. Like a car would seem from the mid-nineties today, they were old but not quite classics yet and you could still find them cheap at impound lots and in the pages of Auto Trader. My first car was a 1972 VW Super Beetle—robin’s egg blue except for an orange trunk fitted over the engine that rattled once accelerated past 50 mph, blowing the car across freeway lanes in Bay Area winds, all of which was exciting. 

The Super Beetles are an abomination to real VW people. A later model, they were slightly larger with plastic moon-shaped vents on the side panels and a chunkier, less elegant bumper. But it drove and it was cheap: $2,500, an amount that I’d saved from a series of fluke radio commercials I’d done as a kid. This Super Beetle was also part of a larger teenaged project of drafting one’s life out of borrowed narratives. In this case, a character detail lifted from a Drew Barrymore movie in which she played a troubled, Beetle-driving transfer student who attends punk shows. By the time I turned 16, I, too, was a perpetual “new girl” and on my third high school. As someone constantly arriving, I needed a way to announce myself quickly and sensed (and still believe) that culturally discontinued objects have a sorting power—sending a rapid signal that intrigues the like-minded and warns off everybody else. I drove the loud car and carried a flower-power suitcase instead of a backpack, which also sent a flamboyant distress signal to all around, something like “I am desperate to be known.” At the time, of course, I thought it gave the opposite: “You cannot know me.” For this was the very image I hoped to cultivate then while adrift in the wreckage of my family.

My constant transfer status was the result of a re-marriage followed by a shift in custody. By sophomore year I was working under the table at a record store (incredibly named The Vinyl Solution, though they insisted the Holocaust pun was accidental) and running away from home periodically, staying with older friends or occasionally on Berkeley streets after shows. I was romantic, defiant, and a little feral. At least one of the moves was an attempt by my mom to separate me from delinquent friends at a prior school which proved unsuccessful—I would quickly fall in with a similar crowd at each successive school. I have especially fond memories of the School #2 stoners, who rode around in a convoy of hand-me-down muscle cars. Each day we would caravan to Randy’s Donuts for lunch, occasionally returning for afternoon classes, but more often going to smoke weed on some hill; there was also the mysterious Pulgas Water Temple through which water from the Sierras flows into the Crystal Springs Reservoir. In the seventies, kids used to jump into the temple with inner tubes and float out into the reservoir itself. By the nineties, we could only stare down at the rushing water through the metal grate and inhale the fresh chlorine, which served as a perfect metaphor for our nineties brand of liberty fused with fantasy—a far less wild reenactment of a past world that felt close but was rapidly receding. The Bay Area still felt like it belonged to the counter-culture, the traces of the recent past being so plentiful then that it seemed impossible any of it could disappear. 

Aside from myself, there were three students with Bugs at School #3 and one was Tracy, a future friend. Hers was lovingly restored by her father and mint green with the original VW flower vase and a roof rack, where, had it been mine, I could have strapped my floral suitcase. My Beetle was, by contrast, disheveled, a rolling symptom of my interior state. For further flare, I guess, I had strung rows of yarn dingle balls across the interior ceiling so that they were visible in the windows. The car may have looked like the site of a carnival to a passerby. By that time, I worked at Barnes and Nobles where I considered theft an employee benefit and my trunk (and bedroom) was overflowing with books and a flood of things found in abundance in thrift stores: Mexican tooled-leather, Precious Moments plaques, metallic decal tees, argyle socks, Avon perfume girls, macrame market bags. A Cure record played continually in my room and a Fifteen tape in my car. It felt like living in no era in particular, which was great, as it suggested an escape from the particular disaster of my own time and family.

While I had technically come to live with my dad after Sophomore year, I lived alone a lot of the time. He was scrambling to get a business venture off the ground in Vietnam, having lost everything in the divorce, and was often gone for weeks at a time. While I succeeded in occupying multiple continuums while driving my old car around, they converged every time I went back to our dirty, nondescript apartment. I remember the electricity being turned off once and staying with Tracy, sleeping in her beautiful house with her beautiful Bug parked outside. Another time I tried to shoplift groceries from Safeway during a period when my dad was out of the country. Eggo waffles and syrup, I recall, were part of the lift. I made it out to the parking lot and almost back to the Beetle when I heard an employee yell across the parking lot “Miss!” and took off running. I ran several blocks and found myself hiding under a truck for a while. When I emerged to peek over a fence at my car, I saw Safeway employees looking through the inside—I had left it unlocked with the keys in the ignition. I waited several hours for the store to close and returned to my car to find they had taken the keys: I would have to confess to get the car back. My keychain also carried my house keys. My older brother, who lived a few towns over, was not amused when I called him collect, sobbing, from a payphone. The store didn’t press charges.

The Safeway incident may have ruined the Beetle for me. A clean slate felt appropriate and I soon found it in a new car, the Valiant. It was a 1966 white Plymouth four-door with a sexy red and chrome interior. It had a slant-six engine and a three-on-the-tree stick shift on the red steering wheel. I bought it from an impound lot called Airport Towing where something about “an engine problem” was noted. The car cost under a thousand dollars which seemed like a decent price for however long the dream would last. I sold the Beetle to a girl at my school, the cost including whatever was in the trunk.