Malibu
I hadn’t been in love since Mary McClean all those years before. She, I almost married. Funny thing is, it
started slow, just fooling around. My love for her built over time and faded like a dream. With Georgia, Sweet
Georgia, my love was instantaneous. It was immediate and it was forever.
Of course, Georgia’s actual name wasn’t Georgia at all. And she wasn’t even a she, but that might be
jumping ahead of ourselves. Point is, I’m not a man who’s ever been quick with love, never much worried
about it. Yet there it was. I knew it the moment I saw her.
Whatever I had for a car in those days was speeding. The sun was shining and the air was hot. There was a
passenger, a female passenger; I think it was Brenda Boynton, who I’d known since we were kids. She was
fun, but her teeth were big and her laugh had a way of echoing around inside my head like the late night
tickings of a steam pipe.
I wasn’t paying much attention to driving. Maybe Brenda was jerking me off, but I don’t think so; I think that
was later, or a different day altogether.
The farmhouse went by in a blur, a flash of grays and greens and goldenrods, like so many flashes before.
But there, at that particular farmhouse, there was something different. There, at that farmhouse, was
something special.
My foot jumped off the gas pedal, me not even yet sure I’d seen what I’d seen. I just knew that I’d seen
something. “Did you see that?” I said, still not sure. I wouldn’t be sure, in fact, until I’d turned us around and
gone back, pulled into the slightly overgrown dirt drive and brought us to an earth grinding stop.
The house, a run down cape with a bowed roof and a monstrous barn, was set back in the field, bordering a
tree line two hundred yards from the road.
The field grass was unkempt: yellow and flowery and grown past my knees. The car, the Malibu, was there
amongst it, an electric blue diamond reflecting on a sunny beach.
1972 Chevelle. Super Sport. 2 doors. Eighteen inch rally wheels, shaker hood and jet black racing stripes.
402 Chevy big block. Four speed.
People have always said that I’m overly impulsive, but I disagree. In most cases, I’m stubborn as can be. I
neglect and I procrastinate; I fall gratefully and miserably into ruts. It was my lack of effort, and not my
pension for spontaneity, that drove the final wedge between me and Mary Mclean. But when the moment
strikes me, when I believe in something with absolute certainty, I act and I act quickly. When I know a job is
bad for me, I quit it. When I feel that a relationship just isn’t right, I cut it off without explanation or regret.
When I see something I like, I must have it right then, not a week or a day or an hour down the road. The
Malibu was such a thing. I saw it and I knew.
It was slightly off the driveway, a glowing panther crouched in the grass.
Before I knew what was happening, before speaking even one more word to Brenda Boynton, I was in the
grass with it and my right hand was stroking the front fender like the pearl cheek of a long missed lover.
There was a flattened trail behind the car where it looked to have been driven recently, no earlier than the
day before, more than likely it had been parked that very morning.
I turned my head to look at Brenda, who was just climbing out of the car we’d arrived in. “Look at this sexy
bitch.” My hand never left the car, a cool touch even in the heat, even sparkling in the sun.
Brenda was less than impressed. She opened her mouth to speak, but a fleeting and humid breeze sprang
up low to the ground and raised a swirl of dry dirt into her face. She spun and put her hands up and
managed to choke out a, “What the fuck.” And I almost laughed out loud, but held it back.
Or maybe I didn’t even bother to hold it back. Maybe I laughed like an asshole. It just wouldn’t be honest to
say nobody ever called me one of those.
We got back into my car and continued on the driveway to the house, there met a bright faced older couple
by the name of Thompson, a sturdy and rural pair whose son, the rightful owner of the Malibu, had moved to
the city—a city—and fallen on hard times.
“So it’s for sale, then?” There hadn’t been a sign. I had just assumed.
Hoped.
The old man, to be known as Harold soon enough, was drinking from a coffee mug, though it was past noon
and he was fully dressed, indeed appeared well on with his day. He half lowered one loose eyelid when I
blurted out the question, and he might have curled back the corner of his lip, a subtle move that I could
have just as easily imagined. Then he nodded, and it was not a subtle move at all. Deliberate and
exaggerated. “Yup,” he said. “For sale.”
Leaving, driving from the house and toward the gleaming Malibu, I turned and flashed a crack of smile at
Brenda, who looked out her window and not at me. “Isn’t that always the way?” I asked her.
She was leaning on her hand, staring out at the day. Simply glancing in my direction, me right next to her,
was a practiced effort. “Mmh?” She licked her lips, those pudgy lips, and appeared to me in the wracked
sunlight about as attractive as was possible for her, which was half as attractive as I liked and twice as
attractive as I usually settled for.
“That old man.” We passed by the Malibu and both of us stared. “His boy, off in the city.” I laughed. “Perfect.
Couldn’t have been better if he’d gone off and died in a war.”
“Who?”
“The boy,” I said quick. I glanced over and she was back to staring out the window. “Christ, never mind.”
By now we’d moved on, surrounded by other woods and other fields, other distant farmhouses, other
flattened driveways of dust and stone. “Not in the greatest shape,” Brenda said after a minute or two, after
maybe just a handful of seconds.
“Huh?” I asked her, caught already daydreaming about the Malibu. “Who?”
Brenda heaved out a breath that fell into the dash, covered both of us like a wool cloak. “The car.”
“What? No.” I thought about lighting a cigarette and eventually did. Then I said, “No,” one last time and the
issue fell.
The very next day, early, I went back to the farmhouse, took my brother Chet in place of Brenda Boynton and
thirty five hundred dollars cash. The old man, Harold, received us with open arms.
“Come in. Come in. I knew you’d be back.” His face was bright and his teeth shone like they hadn’t the day
before. Either that, or I just hadn’t noticed.
I hadn’t noticed much. The house, I saw for the first time, was oddly narrow and, while not exceptionally tall
at two and a half stories, seemed up close more like a spire than the old cape it actually was. The siding was
typical rustic clapboard, narrow and weathered and off-handedly crooked, and there was an abrupt little
porch jutting from the front door, where Harold still stood grinning.
He said, “Come in,” one more time, but he made no effort to get out of the way. “No lady friend this
evening?”
It wasn’t even noontime yet; I’d barely slept the night before and had roused my brother long before he was
willing. I nodded though, cocked a thumb over my shoulder and said, “I brought my brother Chet.”
Harold nodded, Chet nodded and the three of us turned to face the Malibu, so distant in the field. “Well,
what do you say, boys?” And with that, the old man was off the porch and walking out toward the car.
I offered him a ride with us and he declined, which put us there alone while he caught up. Chet looked the
Malibu over.
“I don’t know, little brother.” He was in a crouch, inspecting the running boards directly underneath the
driver’s side door. “Already got a shitload of rust along here. Look at this.” He ran his hand up into the front
wheel well and pulled away flakes. “Jesus Christ.”
The car looked great the day before and it still looked great. There was a cloud cover like there hadn’t been,
which took away some luster of the paintjob, and I agreed about the spotty rust—had noticed it the day
before, in fact—but I had fallen in love and there was no deterring me.
“Three and a half grand?” Chet asked me. “Come on, man.”
I had fallen in love, I’ll say it again, and there was no deterring me. He just didn’t see what I saw. “I’m going
to call her Georgia.”
When the old man finally joined us, still smiling but gritting his teeth, trying not to breathe hard, I considered
offering him a ride back to his house, but I knew he would’ve refused. Instead, I paid him cash and drove
away: kicked up rocks in the driveway, laid rubber on the road. Chet followed me in my old car and I felt sorry
for him. My rides, in all my life, have been no better than the ride I had that day in that Malibu.
So the car’s name wasn’t Georgia. So it showed a little wear and tear, and so I paid more than I could
realistically afford. So too, I was to notice quickly, the interior smelled bad, like something between spoiled
milk and kitchen grease. None of it mattered. Nothing mattered but the sight and the sound and the speed,
the passion, the love. When I drove that car, when I looked at that car, when I thought about that car I felt
better than any man deserved. My job didn’t seem so bad. My apartment didn’t seem so small. Life didn’t
seem so hard.
Needless to say, I didn’t see Brenda Boynton again. I saw less of everyone, in fact, and that was fine. My free
time was all but used up on that car.
That was fine, too. For a week or more, I didn’t notice any of the problems.
It guzzled gas. It burned oil. The headlights, at inopportune times, would suddenly dim. And there was that
smell.
But it was fast, and it was powerful and it was the hottest number on four wheels, even if there were nicer
cars, and better drivers. Heads turned; eyes opened. Children raised their little thumbs. Slack-jawed
teenagers lifted their eyebrows and chins in approval. All, for those early days of our courtship, seemed
right with the world. I threw money at it: the rust spots, the oil. I washed it almost every day, changed the
plugs more than was necessary, tightened the belts beyond tightness.
When it started talking, however, when that car began talking to me, our cozy relationship began to change.
That’s what it took for me to notice that things weren’t altogether perfect: actual speech.
The sky was dark all day. It was summertime, and the roads were slick with mist and rain. I’d quit my job, of
course, in a blind moment of passion, and was on the prowl for leads non stop, always in the Malibu. This
day, I actually had an interview, but I’ll be damned if I remember where it was.
On Market Street, there at the base of that monstrous hill, the tires of the Malibu, bald tires, I might add, lost
their grip on the pavement. I still don’t understand exactly what happened. Surely, we were moving too fast.
Probably, I wasn’t paying attention, thinking about how the car looked, how I looked inside it. A traffic light I’d
stopped at dozens if not hundreds of times crept up on me and I was suddenly and almost unconsciously
bearing full weight on the brake pedal.
Early era heavy metal could have been playing on the stereo, and that always gets me going. Iron Maiden.
Motorhead. Judas Priest. Something like that. I can almost see it now.
There were no other cars involved, no other cars even close. The Malibu and I slid into the middle of the
intersection with Park Street, which is five lanes of backed up traffic on its busiest days. There we stopped,
alone. I shut off the radio and sat there for longer than I know, catching my breath and listening to the
windshield wipers squeak on the barely wet glass. After many seconds had passed, I eased off the brake
and moved us on, straight ahead.
“What in the hell are you doing, buddy?”
It happened just like that, just me and the car, it asked me a question. Of course, I didn’t understand and, of
course, I didn’t answer. I was hearing things; that’s what I thought. Although I spoke.
“What?” I continued driving, eyes forward, hands at ten and two o’clock, which they hardly ever were. The
next words I spoke were in my head. Did I just hear a voice? Did something come through the radio? Am I
losing my mind? I did not stop the car and I did not slow down, crossing the interstate overpass and easing
through the five way stop on the campus of a weak and ugly junior college there, pushed up against the
highway like wind blown refuse.
“You could have gotten us killed, man.” That wasn’t me.
I said nothing. I turned the radio back on and would have whistled, if I thought my lips could manage it.
“Hey man.” The voice was almost screaming. “You hearing me?”
I stopped the car, pulled over just past the ill placed campus. The Malibu rumbled beneath me, all around
me, but said nothing more. “Hello?” That was me speaking, out loud, alone. Just me and the car, impatient
drivers building up behind us and swerving around with every sliver of opportunity.
After a few more curious moments, I began to feel like a crazy person, and so I drove on.
The interview did not go well, not just because I was late, and I did not get the job.
For the next few days, indeed a week or more, the world around me and my place within that world seemed
relatively normal. I looked for work, but half-heartedly; I spent some time with friends and my brother’s
family; I had a single date with a woman I met at the museum, which is a place I only ever went to meet
women. Mostly, I drove that car. Sometimes I caught myself listening for it to speak, but that was crazy.
It didn’t speak, couldn’t speak. Until it did. Again.
The first of the month came suddenly and was gone. I began spending time in the Malibu for reasons other
than pure joy. I was away from my apartment as much as possible, because I didn’t have money for rent, and
had paid only half of it the month before, back when I had a job. So I drove. And when I couldn’t stand
driving anymore, or when I was low on gas, I would go down to the beach. It was at the beach, Toppa Beach—
in the car, on the road, at the beach—when I heard the voice again.
Toppa Beach is bordered on the non ocean side by a long and heavily trafficked straightaway, four wide
lanes, slotted parking on either side, turning lane all the way down the middle. Every few blocks, there is a
major intersection, all roads leading to the beach itself, and multi-change traffic lights were sprinkled in to
control what could be a sizable flow in the heart of summer, as this was. Diagonally across the way from Cap’
n Billy’s Super Mini Golf—waiting, waiting, waiting for that stinking light to change—I heard the voice say,
“Hey buddy.” And there was a pause, during which I turned down the radio but did not speak. And the same
words, clear as day: “Hey buddy.” And then: “Check it out.”
For reasons I still don’t quite understand, I let go of the wheel, put my arms in the air like the victim of a stick
up.
“Put your arms down.” I did. “Now, check it out. On your left.”
I turned my head to the left and saw, there in the next lane and awaiting the same light, a convertible BMW,
silver with all the trimmings. In the passenger seat, closest to me, was a stunning blonde, windswept and
smiling in dark glasses and a sleeveless summer top. In the driver’s seat, beside her and paying her close
mind, was a man. He might have been ten years older than she was, out of shape and losing his hair, but
with large golden rings on almost every finger. I looked away, back at the traffic light where my own
business was.
“Check it out, dude.” Another pause, awkward and confusing, as they so often were in those days. “Say
something to her.”
The light changed without me speaking and the other car moved on. Finally, I moved on as well, and I said,
“Hello?” for no good reason at all, and then, “Georgia?” for even less of a good reason.
“Chickenshit.”
Everything I’d intended on doing that day, which honestly wasn’t much, was forgotten then. The beach was
gone; the sun was gone and the smiles; the beautiful women in beautiful cars, without other men behind the
wheels. It was only me, driving slow but at least moving, and it was the voice, what I first took to be madness.
“Chickenshit?” I said. “Did you just call me a chickenshit?”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Say something to who?”
And so it went. The voice told me I should have yelled to that woman, which would have been stupid. There
was a man in the car; there was a man driving.
Good for them. I began to explain my position, but never did. That would have been stupid, too.
I said nothing and that was that; I surrendered all power. What can I say?
Love.
It was a voice full of life, full of personality. It was a voice that saw without eyes, heard without ears. It was a
voice that harassed me without regret. It was my friend and it was my ultimate antagonist. The car was sexy,
but not woman. The voice was masculine, but not a man. It was everything. Sometimes, though, it was just a
car.
“And my name isn’t Georgia,” it said only once, just weeks into our relationship, the two of us coming to a
slow stop downtown, an empty parking lot behind a nameless building where I intended to apply for a job.
“In case you hadn’t figured that out yet.”
“I’m sorry. What is your name?” I wanted to know all that I could.
“I don’t have a name,” the voice shot back. “I’m a car, jackass.”
Within a month, I was evicted from my apartment. The landlord was nice about it, but told me my time had
come. It was an expensive town and he had bills, too. To his credit, he extended chance after chance, long
before I fell for the Malibu.
Most of the things I owned—my television, a dusty crate of LPs, the bookcase my grandfather and I built
when I was nine—I was able to store in my buddy Jack’s basement. I didn’t have the heart to ask him for a
life on his couch, and he didn’t have the heart to ask his wife. So, I became a full time resident of the car.
The transition was not an easy one, not for me and certainly not for the car.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I had an armload of my clothes, folded and organized as pant, shirt and undergarment, and I was filling the
trunk. “I’m moving in.”
“What?” There was a shred of panic in the voice, something new. “You must be joking.” And then: “This is a
joke?”
After closing the trunk, patting the finish and walking around the broad back end, I sat myself in the
passenger position. “Afraid not,” I told the thing.
“You’re a fucking asshole.” This was appalling, but hardly came as a surprise. Indeed, the voice was
appalling by nature, more so as time went by. “I’m not a fucking tour bus.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head and hands. “I’m sorry.”
For weeks, the car’s unrelenting voice judged and criticized every little thing I attempted to do. If I came up
abruptly to a stop sign, it was:
“Watch it, asshole. Easy on the brakes.” If the voice thought I was driving too slow, it was: “Come on, buddy.
Quit pussy footing and give me some gas.”
Yet if I was in a hurry, of if I simply wanted to speed, it was: “Hey, hey, hey. Calm down, little man. You trying
to compensate for something?” Or it
was: “You ding this paintjob, pal, and it’s your ass.”
I couldn’t win. Too much washing and I was threatening the integrity of the paint; not enough, and I didn’t
care about the car’s appearance. If I drove it every day, I was wearing it out, concerned only with my own
selfish needs; if I went a few days without driving it at all, I was neglecting it.
I couldn’t win.
But still, there was the love. It was a beautiful car. Since the initial purchase, I’d fixed up some of the body
work, updated the tires and dropped almost a thousand dollars into a new stereo. Men who saw the Malibu
smiled; women who saw it swooned. The car was attached to me; the car was all I had.
The smell, though, the smell that had never quite gone away, began to bother me, as much time as I spent
inside it. The smell, in fact, along with others newly introduced, intensified. There was a newfound fog, too,
that would rise suddenly from the floor mats, clouding the inside of the windows and infuriating me to no
end. I saw very little of my friends or my brother.
I stopped looking for work.
At the start of autumn, September or October, a man on the street offered to buy the Malibu, straight up,
cash money, almost twice what I’d paid. “Are you crazy?” I asked him, me just enjoying a remarkable day of
heat and haze, the last feeling of summer until the next. When I spoke, when I asked the question, the
rhetorical question, the car moved beneath me. I know it did.
I was leaning on the left rear quarter and I felt it. It shuddered.
Impossible, yes. I felt it.
“Car’s not worth that much,” I continued, lack of anything better.
The guy must have been at least a few years older than me. By the looks of him—with his aching hair line
and the slight touch of gray around the temples, the droop of his cheeks, the dull stain of his teeth—forty
was an age not out of the question. I didn’t ask his age, like I didn’t ask his name. Never did find it out.
“It is to me,” came his response. I’d almost forgotten what he was talking about. He was fading, in and out of
contact with me, staring mostly at the Malibu, which was angry beneath me. I felt that, too.
Half a minute might have passed with him just standing there and me just standing there, and he content to
stare at the car and me content to wait him out. I opened my mouth, finally, to ask for a cigarette, and he
spoke.
He blurted the words like he’d been saving them up. “Sixty eight?”
And I said, “Um, seventy two.”
“Right, right. Gorgeous.” He laid a hand on the hood and I scowled, if only for an instant. Maybe he saw me,
maybe he didn’t, but his hand popped up almost immediately, hovered in the air for a second or two and was
back at his side where it belonged.
I probably could have changed things, then. Surely, I could have decided to be something I had never been.
I could have walked. I could have gone it alone. Seven thousand dollars could have set me straight.
The car pulsed in the sun. I stepped away, half a step, no more, just enough to let it breathe. The sidewalk
was trafficked but the street, a one way side street I didn’t even know the name of, was all but deserted.
Park Street was two blocks over and we could hear the horns, the engines and the tires. All the damned
people, the voices. I could hear further, both directions. Suddenly, there was life around me. Cars were
speeding down the little one way street. People were crowding the sidewalk and almost falling off.
I wanted to touch it; I wanted to touch it all. I wanted to be everywhere.
I wanted to get inside the Malibu and drive, but I didn’t have the guts. I just stood there.
And I looked at the man who was with me. “It’s not for sale.”
By then, I think, he was already walking away. By then, I think, the car was laughing. By then, I think,
everybody could hear.
Brady Alden is a full time resident of Portland, Maine.
He's a graduate of Noble High School, The University
of Southern Maine and he received an MFA from the
Stonecoast Writer's Program in 2005. He works for a
living, and he writes for his life.
Brady Alden
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