“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” - C.S. Lewis
A couple of years ago I noticed a little green car parked out front of our neighbor’s driveway. When I say little, I’m talking about the kind of small car that one could fit inside another car. I am not much of a car guy, so I don’t go to the Frog Follies or hang out at Auto Zone looking for better car mats, but this car caught my eye. Roundish, green and comical, the only thing I had to compare it to was an avocado –yes, a very green avocado on wheels.
A little research revealed that I was looking at a Fiat 500, an Italian car invented to get the traffic moving again in stagnate and torn post WWII Italy. Italy has never been known for its wide streets, so it was determined that a new car needed on the market that was cheap, easy to park and negotiate the narrow streets and get businesses thriving again after the war. And man, did those catch on. Within a couple of years, production pushed out about a million of them. Colorful, easy to maneuver and tiny, they were soon buzzing around everywhere you looked.
And one of them was buzzing around in my head as well. As I took in the cartoonish design and oblong profile, a slow disintegration into craving and greed began to overtake my inner sanctum. What if I had a car like that? What if I had a cartoon car, a little car just for fun, a car for doing donuts in my driveway, or perhaps peeling down one of my neighbor’s garden paths in the middle of the night. I could let out a little beep-beep, like the Road Runner does in the cartoon, leaving only a cloud of dust, or mulch, behind.
Excited, I began thinking of all kinds of things I could do with a tiny car. Like cut in line and buzz around other cars at my favorite coffee place. I saw myself swerving right below their side windows where they couldn’t see me, then swoop in to grab their drink right out of the drive through window before they knew what hit them. I would be a cartoon coffee thief in my cartoon car. And I could adopt an entirely new personality, reinvent myself, like the Robin Hood of coffee, become an urban legend delivering coffee to the poor, the destitute, and especially those under-caffeinated.
Of course, there were risks involved with my new persona. When you start messing with other people’s coffee you may be asking for trouble…
“911. What is your emergency?”
“Yes, my coffee was just stolen at a drive through.”
“Can you describe the vehicle?”
“Small and green, tiny, tiny and green, like pocket-size, miniature. Looked like a really fun car. Yes, I would describe it as a very small, fun, very green car.”
“And you say your coffee was stolen?”
“Yes, it was a matcha green tea, small, with extra cold foam. It’s a fun drink, dark green.. In fact, I think I saw some of the foam fly out of the top when the burglar sped away, but…”
“Sir, we can’t do anything about your foam. Did you get the make of the car?”
“Yes, it was a go-cart, and green.”
“Go-cart? Ok. How about the license plate number?”
“Yes, I got that too, are you ready?”
“Ready when you are, sir.”
“Letters S-M-L-S-P-R-G-L-N.” That’s S as in Sierra, M as in Mike, L as in Lima, S as in Sierra, P as in Papa…
“Sir…
“R as in Romeo, G as in…
Sir! I got it, I got…”
“Oh, now that I look at it, well, would you look at that… those letters sound like ‘smiles per gallon if you say it out loud! Isn’t that fun! It’s a play on words! HA! A fun car with a fun license plate. I told you it was a fun car, didn’t I?”
“Sir, let’s go back to the foam again…” and on and on it would go…
So, this obsession of getting a small car continued. I started looking on CarFax, and SmallFax, and of course FunFAx, anywhere I could to find someone selling a green Fiat 500.
Several weeks later when my wife and I went to Florida on vacation we even took a day to meet a salesman who drove an available Fiat down to the beach for us. However, as the salesman stepped out, we realized he weighed nearly as much as the car. In fact, upon exiting the car, the Fiat made a noticeable shift to its other side, a recover it wasn’t designed to make. For several violent seconds, the car seemed to shudder as if it had just eaten a greasy hamburger. When I do that, I shove down a couple of Tums and prepare myself for a digestive battle, but I didn’t think that approach worked with a car I just met.
There were other red flags as well. For one, the salesman introduced himself as Rusty, a most unfortunate name for a man selling motor vehicles, and certainly not one that filled me with inner confidence about the car’s condition. Secondly, Rusty informed me that he had to be with me in the car for the test drive, a feat that might have gone over in the 1950’s when college fraternities tried to see how many people they could fit in a Volkswagen. However, in this instance, I was just hoping one person could fit in the car, that being me, the prospective buyer.
Yet somehow, I managed to squeeze in the driver’s seat, and since we couldn’t just leave my wife stranded at a rest stop, she managed to contort herself into the back. There was a moment when I thought she’d be safer on top of the luggage rack, but Rusty had already bungie corded his sack lunch up there, so that option was out.
If you are a math person, you would have looked at us packed in like sardines and quickly surmised that the salesman took up half of the car’s insides, and my wife and I each got the other half of our third. That put us each having one eighteenth of an area that we normally have. Nothing in geometry class ever prepared me for how little space that would be, but it was most uncomfortable.
As we sped along with visibility near zero, mostly because our body heat had fogged over the windshield. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw my wife desperately trying to get some air. Apparently, when small cars are disproportionally weighted, as in our case, a vacuum is created that sucks out all remaining air. Clearly, I had to make a decision, and fast. Either turn around and head back to the roadside stop, or watch my wife turn ghostly pale and pass out from oxygen deprivation, better known in the auto industry as “sudden fiat syndrome.”
Listing badly to one side, re-breathing the used air of the large man next to me, this car suddenly didn’t seem like that much fun anymore. It felt like a very heavy, very claustrophobic armpit, and in bad need of a new purpose, possibly a spot on a carnival wheel. Where before I had entertained visions of driving a cartoon car around town to get coffee, of playing the part of a new superhero who would swoop in and steal other people’s coffee at the drive-through and hand it out to the poor and needy, I now was simply hoping I could get back alive and hose down at the beach.
Thoughts of attending trade shows in my Fiat as my new persona, Avocado Man, the man with a green cape and a spoon with superpowers, all but disappeared. Ambitions of stepping out to sign comic books sadly slipped away during this test drive. I had a wife and the life of a large salesman to think about. In this situation, what would Batman have done? In one of his movies, faced with a dastardly villain, I believe Batman spoke rather eloquently, saying that you either die in a Fiat, or live long enough to see yourself become the guacamole. Yes, I remember that line quite well.
And so, I steadied the wheel and focused on the road ahead. Salesman Rusty, smelling slightly of peppermint, had adjusted his seat back for a little nap, and taken a position that seemed to magnify his sleep apnea. My wife face was still pressed to the window and I realized this situation was not about a car purchase, or having fun or making my debut as The Man from Fiat in a future movie franchise. I had been put here for some great purpose, and we know from the history of our superheroes that with great Fiats come great responsibility.
I slowly eased the car into a U-turn, a maneuver that felt vaguely similar to the rotation of a Lazy Susan and limped back to our starting point. My wife and I slipped quietly out of the avocado and left Rusty sleeping soundly. Out of respect for his sales effort and his size, we wrote him this note on the steamy window:
Dear Rusty,
“In spite of becoming closer to you during our test drive, we have decided to pass on the Fiat. We left you the spare oxygen mask from the Italian emergency kit that comes with this vehicle. We thought you might need it should the Fiat suddenly experience a sudden loss of cabin pressure, and/or space.” Goodbye, or the equivalent in Italian, Jeff.
In postscript, I did finally purchase a Fiat 500 from a dealer in Spokane Washington. However, I have no intentions of ever driving it. Instead, I plan to fly out and pick it up, and have it towed to various sites and pose with it for funny pictures I can send to friends back home. For example, I would like to see my Fiat 500 in a stand-off with a bison in Yellowstone National Park. I think the figure of the American Bison, looking affectionately down at a Fiat it could easily smash to bits, would be inspirational and a symbol of strength and national pride. I would get a picture of myself posing in front of my new car in the avocado fields of California, which would give my Fiat one last chance to say goodbye to its green heritage. Finally, I think it only appropriate, as I head east towards Indiana, to buzz though The Exit 11 Coffee Shop in Brentwood, Missouri, one of the few coffee shops that accommodate semis and tow trucks with Fiats. There, I would wait for the right moment to swerve past a customer waiting in line, and steal their coffee for someone less fortunate, before peeling off towards my hometown of Evanspatch, Indiana. Those watching in awe would report that my new Fiat let out a noticeable beep-beep like the Road Runner does in the cartoon and then rounded the coffee shop listing quite badly to the left with my superhero cape flapping wildly in the wind.