A Tribute to Whitney, and Our Time Together

Today, I got a car sold. It has been one hell of a journey to get to this point, and my feelings about the sell are as bittersweet as my feelings about the car itself.

Her name is Whitney. She is a first-generation Honda Fit (called the Honda Jazz in the UK.) Tiny little subcompact hatchback. It took less than a full day for her name to take hold; the original owner left the soundtrack to the 1992 film The Bodyguard, which prominently featured Whitney Houston, in the CD player. Whitney the Fitney has more personality per square inch than any car I have ever owned.

One thing to know about me before I go forward: I am a bit of a car person, er, goose. Not to say I am mechanically inclined, but I am definitely an enthusiast who loves cars. My dad and I have bonded over a car that he’s had since well before I was born. It’s a 60s Ford Mustang that he got for a couple hundred bucks when he was just out of high school, and he’s held onto it all this time, only recently being in a place financially to give it the TLC it needed.

For better or for worse, cars have been "more than just cars" for me as long as I can remember. Part of me wishes that I saw them as mere machines or tools. It'd save me some heartache at least. But the heart wants what it wants, and my heart wants vroom vroom.

When I started driving, he found me an Acura Integra, a staple of 90s tuner culture. It was kind of a piece of crap. It had over 300 thousand miles, the alternator turned into a pumpkin and left me stranded multiple times, it had failing motor mounts, which made the car shake like a teacup chihuahua at stoplights, and it had a hole in the front cowl that shot water into the passenger front floorboard any time it rained. But god it was fun to drive. This thing set me up for a fatal attraction for Hondas with problems.

With that car, and every car I have had since, they have tended to correspond to the chapter of life that they’re carrying me through. Any time I reflect on a particular phase of my life, I think of the people I spent time with, the goals I was chasing, and where my self-image was at the time. Which makes me think of the road trips I took with family and friends, the places I drove to, and the self-reflection that comes from a long drive on rural highways.

A couple years ago, Whitney entered the picture from dubious origins, and was a key part of one of the hardest times in my life. A couple years ago, I had to let go of a 2010s Honda Civic way earlier than I wanted, because of a transmission failure. It would have cost a few thousand dollars to fix, and I still owed nearly that much on it. I simply could not bear that, so I sold it to a national used car chain, getting just a hair more for it than I owed. While I figured out my next steps, I borrowed a 2010s Subaru Forester from my parents. They originally got it for my grandma, but she stubbornly refused to drive it, opting instead to drive a failing Ford Taurus, so I took it for a bit.

A few weeks later, I went through a natural disaster that wrecked my neighborhood, leaving my then-partner homeless and my own home inaccessible. This Forester took the brunt of it and only took some minor cosmetic damage from the ordeal, so it carried my partner and I through the emergency and recovery effort. It was instrumental in getting them moved out of their old apartment, and moved into my place.

Over the couple months that followed, living with my partner, waiting for recovery to move forward, I started wrestling with a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. I was thankful that my home stood, but this whole side of town looked like a war zone for a long while, and every time I left the house, something pulled me back into the moment we left the shelter and discovered the destruction. I wanted to escape, to run away and leave this place behind me, but that just couldn’t happen.

I also felt mixed up about the relationship I was in. We lived together for nearly 3 months, and while we dearly cared for each other, it became increasingly obvious that the chemistry between us would never grow past a fond friendship. We had been together for over two years, and I found myself still waiting on a spark that was clearly never going to come. We were at a crossroads, where either we needed to commit to each other, or cut each other loose. I was not happy with them, but I also came to lean on the security of the relationship; at least someone was there. Someone who made the effort to be in my life and who treated me kindly. But they deserve to be desired after, and so do I.

We had also started having some bigger arguments in the leadup to them moving back into their own place. They came to feel that I was pushing them out and wanting to reclaim my space. They weren’t wrong, though I tried to frame it as wanting to help them get back to some normalcy.

As I struggled with this relationship, I came to hate my parents’ Forester. It was just like theirs , which felt so superfluous. I am also a small-car goose and really prefer a nimble and peppy driving experience, and the Forester felt so lumbering compared to everything I had ever driven. I also had to get a few special interest-related stickers on the rear window because it was so easy to lose in a parking lot. It was just another silver crossover SUV in an endless sea of silver crossover SUVs. I was so uninspired by it that I couldn't bring myself to give it a name. It felt so devoid of personality and charm I could conjure nothing that would stick.

I wanted something weird, something little, something fun, and something me.

After some looking on Facebook Marketplace, I found a handful of Honda Fits and Toyota Yarises (Yarii?) for sale, and zeroed in on one with lower mileage. When my partner and I went to take a test drive, it had some cosmetic wear and tear, but ran wonderfully. It was far from fast, but had a lot of pep when it first takes off from a stop light. It also had PADDLE SHIFTERS(!!!!) which is a feature you usually see in fancy sport coupes. My partner could tell from the grin on my face doing a highway pull, I found the car for me.

The one red flag we saw was that it had an airbag light on. I spent some time looking through car forums and r/hondafit threads, and gathered enough data to prop up my confirmation bias, deciding that it was likely a switch under the seat that needed replaced, simple and easy to fix.

[Protip: Don’t do that!]

Had I been in a better mental state [not reeling from a major natural disaster, questioning the long term relationship I was in, and looking for some proxy for my identity], I probably would have been more careful about this purchase. But alas, I made a foolish decision under duress. I did not discover the problem until after taking it in for maintenance. The first trip made it clear it had some body work fixed and front suspension pieces adjusted, but the evidence was still obvious.

What was that evidence? Let me tell you real quick! 1) That airbag light? Shoulda assumed the worst. A side-curtain airbag deployed, which rendered the airbag system inoperative until things got fixed. 2) Visible paint damage along the seams of the body work on the accident-affected section. That missing paint meant that those body panels overlapped and rubbed together, indicating accident damage. 3) under-body damage that made it clear an impact happened. If I got it inspected, I would have been warned. 4) The CARFAX had evidence of what happened, something I never checked.

The second trip to get work done was devastating: First, I had a tire blow on the way to the shop, and had to limp the car off the road on an urban highway during the morning rush hour. Turns out, the tires were really old and dry-rotting. I had to get the car towed to the shop, then they connected me with a tire service who got all four replaced. After that, they replaced the serpentine belt and took the front-left wheel off and discovered a hack-job on the front suspension, where the wheel connects to the shocks. The original owner cut away a big section of metal to force things to line up, rendering the whole assembly terribly unsafe.

By the time this second mechanic visit came about, I was already in shambles. That relationship came to a sudden close when they asked to take a break, to take account of why they felt their needs weren’t being met. I responded that mine weren’t either, and I didn’t see anything changing with time that would rectify it. We broke up that night, they retrieved the last of their stuff, and we went our separate ways. My grandfather was on his death bed under hospice care, and would pass a couple days after this trip. I had also had a partial ceiling collapse at my home, rendering half of my upstairs uninhabitable. My world already felt like it was unraveling, and the mechanic calling me into the shop because I “needed to see this” made me nearly pass out on the spot. He showed me what was wrong, told me he could not complete the work planned without a ton of work to rectify the problem, and placed an “UNSAFE TO DRIVE” warning on the invoice, indicating safety-critical repairs had to be done.

I drove home gingerly, hoping the thing wouldn’t fall apart on the way home. I sat in front of my home, shell-shocked, wondering what I could possibly do. After weighing my options to try and resell (and deciding it would be a huge violation of my personal ethic to sell this thing without disclosing its issues), I was moved to tears with the feeling that I could not give up on it. I spent too much of my life feeling like damaged goods to be willing to call it quits until trying to make things work.

Thankfully, my dad’s mechanic has helped us out with cars since they attended vo-tech classes in high school. He asked us to bring the car to him to evaluate and see if he can fix before I throw in the towel. Two months later, he had her road-worthy again. She’s needed small fixes here and there since then, but those key fixes have held strong. Basically, the original fix was way more work than replacing one piece. Once that was done, everything else lined up fine. He also had to weld up a small section of subframe, where a bolt wouldn’t fully thread, to keep it from making a concerning noise. Everything is firm and secure now, but makes a little creak when you first give it gas from a stop.

Since getting it fixed, I have constantly found myself vacillating between absolutely loving the driving experience, and worrying about every new sound, wondering if it’s the sign that everything is going to fall apart. Over the course of a year and change, it proved to be more trustworthy than I gave it credit for. Aside from a wheel hub replacement, all it has needed is regular maintenance, carrying me through the existential crises of new singleness, a quarter-life crisis and the slow process of returning to normal life after everything got turned upside down. Despite the challenges and the many cosmetic blemishes, she has been the most fun little car I have ever owned. And she's so practical too! You can fit a whole-ass 8 foot kayak in her, if you put the seats down! My neighbors marveled as I started pulling one out. As I backed up, more and more boat kept coming out. She also has a ton of storage space inside, which was a godsend to a couple I'm close friends with who needed help moving.

Fast forward to this summer, and she has made it through a couple oil change intervals without any major issues. Over the course of a few weeks, my parents and grandparents filled me in on some folks in our family who were going through some financial hardship, compounded by car failures. Three cars turned to two, then one, than nothing. All were on their last legs and had catastrophic failures that would take multiple thousands of dollars to fix. By the time I had gotten a full picture of the situation, they were attempting a DIY fix on a head gasket and timing chain assembly that broke while trying to fix the former. It was a “fix it ourselves, or be stuck with nothing” situation. They were provisionally borrowing an old Chevy Suburban from in-laws, but it was a stop-gap that chugged gasoline.

The more I thought about it, the more their situation stuck to me. I have heard a lot of people criticize this family member, feeling they’re too foolish and unwilling to listen to reason to help; the more I thought of them, the more the same motivation for fixing Whitney creeped back in: I was worth not giving up on. Whitney was worth not giving up on. My family is worth not giving up on.

I took it in for one last oil change and some brake work, and while it was in the shop, I took them out for dinner to find out about their situation from their perspective. I offered to sell it to them for around what I currently owed on it, let them know it’s no pressure if they need to do something else, and that I wasn’t in a rush to sell it, so I can wait it out if they need time to get things figured out. They wanted to explore all their options with their current cars before committing, but expressed interest if all else fails. They then got ahold of me a couple weeks ago, letting me know they’d need to get the money together but were interested. I drove back to my hometown after work and took them on a test drive, then left it at my mom and dad’s for them to get a closer look, ask questions, and have it nearby in case they commit to buying it.

After a couple weeks of radio silence, I called home and told my parents I planned on making a day trip this week to come and get Whitney, so they could have their Forester back. I got off the phone, headed back up to my office for work, looked down and saw a text saying they were ready to buy.

“Oh? Shoot, okay that works!”

A couple years later and I’m back in the Forester, though now the amount my parents owe is well within my means to refinance and take over. The fact it can be my car, and not the one my parents are letting me drive, makes a huge difference. And now that time has healed some of the ennui I felt about the Forester as a proxy for a failing relationship, I have come to appreciate its steadfastness, its sturdy build and capacity to keep on keeping on through hardship. I better recognize its value for getting me through the most traumatizing month of my life, in an already-traumatizing half decade and change, and I even found a name for it.

Buell. It’s unelegant, terribly unsexy. But, it’s taken from a horse from the game Red Dead Redemption 2. I won’t spoil this game in the midst of a reflection on a car, but the horse enters the main character’s life in a moment when he is confonting hard questions and seeing the writing on the wall for his situation. Yet, it carries him through to the end. As I pour one out for Whitney and the end of our time together, I also want to say a toast to Buell and wherever life is taking us.

Whitney was an absolute rollercoaster of a car. She suffered great injury and was patched up haphazardly by people trying to just pass her off to the next fool. Thankfully, she found her way to a fool who saw a bit of themself in her. Someone who also had a lot of past trauma and pain, but who has come to realize there’s a lot more life to live, and life worth living. “Her motor is good and her transmission is good. She has too much life in her to just let her go.”

She has demanded commitment and diligence in much the same way that deliberate personal growth does. She needed someone willing to see her problems for what they really are, call them what they are, and invest in setting things right. Likewise, these last couple years have been humbling, as I have been made to reckon with parts of myself that desparately need more work, and areas where I have grown beyond what I could have previously imagined.

And as this summer has progressed, Whitney and I have both gotten opportunities to step in help meet some significant needs. I have kept you all posted with my friend who has been through hell these last few weeks, and I count myself fortunate to have been able to get out of my self-centered little brain bubble to support them, help them think through their next steps, keep them sane and helping prevent a doom spiral, and rally friends to help. I have learned to ask for help for myself, and I am finally secure enough in my relationship to others to step out and ask on behalf of others. And as it turns out, most everyone in my circle proved to be the sorts of people to give where they can. One really surprised me; she knows nothing more of my friend than that they’re my friend, and that if I am stepping out of my comfort zone to ask for assistance, they must be worth it.

Likewise, Whitney has gotten the care and attention needed to keep her on the road, where she’s happy. I am sad that the last time I drove her is likely the last time I’ll ever drive her, but I am abundantly thankful that I was in a position to offer her up at a price they could afford. Her spirited driving will carry two people I dearly love through the coming months, hopefully years. If life allows it, I really hope she’s ready for another trip here to bring them down to visit soon.