How not to dispose of an old broken down car

I am now two months into dropping my oldest off at elementary school and there’s all sorts of nostalgia washing over me.

Whether it’s the school lunch menus that haven’t changed in generations (chicken sandwiches, something vaguely resembling ‘pizza’, CHOCOLATE MILK YOU GUYS), that kinda musty smell of old classrooms, or old teachers lecturing my 44 year old ass about where I can and cannot be, schools just….haven’t changed.

But the bit of nostalgia that hit me in right in the heartstrings is seeing a few old beater cars dropping off their kids. We live in a nice area (I mean, it’s Seattle. What isn’t nice?). But I wouldn’t describe it as ultra wealthy. Sure we have Teslas and BMWs and other nice cars that no one in their right mind would let me near. But most of the cars are hondas and toyotas and subarus. Normie cars.

Every now and again when I’m dropping off the girls (on my sweet ass cargo bike!) I see a kid getting dropped off in an old clunker and i’m immediately transported back to 1989 in Houston, Texas.

My parents were divorced and lived in separate apartment complexes separated by a large hill. My mom was the apartment manager of a semi nice complex. It had a pool, maybe 50 or 60 apartments, and was kind of secluded down a dead end street. There were a bunch of kids my age (11) and my younger brother’s age (9) in the complex. As apartment living went, it was nice.

On the other side of the hill, my dad stayed in a real shithole. It was a mega complex with a few hundred apartments. Mostly working class folk (like my dad). His apartment had 1 bed room, no dining room table, 1 couch, and 1 tv. When we slept there, Andy and I would flip for who got the couch. We’d eat dinner sitting on the floor with our dad, play poker with change out of his coin jar, and otherwise act like dumb boys. It was actually pretty fun.

Much like my dad’s apartment aesthetic, his choice in automobiles consisted of whatever he could buy for less than $1,000. In 1989 it happened to be an old 1970s Chevy Impala. The hood was rusted all to hell, it barely started, and the front had a bench seat with cracks in the old leather. The good part about that bench seat is that when Andy and I would argue over who got to sit in the front seat vs. back seat, my dad settled it by putting us both in the front seat. 80s dads did shit that just wouldn’t fly in the 21st century.

This was not my dad’s car but damn if it doesn’t look EXACTLY like it.

When he would drop us off at school, I remember feeling slightly awkward showing up in such an old piece of shit car. My friends didn’t have nice cars there either but they sure as shit didn’t show up in a 15 year old car that looked like it had run the rings of hell before venturing to Teague Middle School.

It’s with this image of his rusted chariot in mind that I now tell you maybe the most frequently shared Bruce Muehleman story of all time. One day he stopped by mom’s apartment complex to drop some things off. When he went to leave, the car had finally died its last death. Bruce knew it. My mom knew it. Even the kids in the complex knew it. He traipsed over the same hill my brother and me had climbed over to his apartment leaving the impala at my mom’s complex. He came back the next day and told me and my brother to round up a few of our friends.

We collected 3 or 4 9, 10, and 11 year olds and met our dad by the car. We weren’t sure what he needed with us but given his long history of bad decisions, we had a hunch we were about to be asked to contribute to something we shouldn’t be doing.

“Boys, help me push this car out of the parking spot” he said. Pushing a car is never an easy job. But pushing a car made in the 70s is akin to pushing a sherman tank up a hill in the rain. They didn’t make those cars out of any kind of lightweight metal we know nowadays. They made them out of fuckin iron (ok they didn’t but it seemed that way).

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Around the corner” he responded.

I looked “around the corner” and it was just the woods behind the apartment complex. I kinda shrugged and went back to pushing the car.

We kept pushing the car through the apartment complex and out onto the street. My dad let kids alternate who was “driving” the car not because he was a good sport but b/c 4 kids 11 and under couldn’t possibly push that brick on wheels without an adult. We needed his old ass to push the car. He stood by the driver’s side door and yanked on the wheel anytime one of us started to stray too close to other parked cars or, heaven forbid, an actual apartment.

When we hit the street we veered to the right towards the woods.

“Where are we going?” I asked again

“Over there….keep pushing, there’s a break in the curb”. He reached into the car and started to turn the wheel so the car veered towards what looked like the beginning of a driveway. But the driveway didn’t go to a house or apartment, it went into the woods (maybe it was a development that begun years before and was abandoned. I don’t know). It was literally the path of least resistance. We were pushing the car into the woods.

The car came to a gentle stop maybe 5 feet past the curb. We didn’t even attempt to “hide” the car. Anyone driving down this dead end street would see the car just sitting there, abandoned and neglected sitting kinda-sorta-but-not-really in the woods.

The boys surrounded the car and asked my pops if we were done. “Yep, thank you boys!” and he walked off.

My mom had been observing all of this and looked at her ex husband and said “aren’t you worried the police are going to give you a ticket or something?” (note: she was not that concerned that her two youngest children and kids from her complex had likely just contributed to a misdemeanor). My dad considered this for a moment, went back to the car, and removed the license plates. The age before easily accessible online databases was a glorious thing friends.

Anytime I see a kid getting dropped off in an old clunker, I think of my dad and helping him dump that car in the woods. I feel little bit of empathy for them and then I wonder “how will their parents get rid of that car when it finally dies?”