"What...what happened to my dashboard?"
Today (October 26th) my oldest brother turns 55. To describe him as wayward would be an understatement. I will go years without knowing his whereabouts. I only heard from him a few weeks ago after not hearing from him for almost an entire year. In that conversation he mentioned to me how he had recently and abruptly decided to move from Savannah to St. Petersburg, FL and on his first night in town he met a Ukrainian woman and moved in with her. That Night. So, yeah, the dude is unique I guess?
Here’s a story not about his birthday but about my birthday. My 18th birthday to be exact.
At the time, I drove a 1988 Toyota Corolla. It was a 5 speed, had no power steering, no power windows, no power locks, no power anything (except the wheels I suppose). The one thing that the car did have was something that my older brother coveted: it had a cassette deck.
Ladies understandably lost their damn minds when they saw me driving around in this thing.
This was 1995. CDs had stormed onto the scene several years before but I had never mustered enough money to swap out the tape deck for a more “modern” CD player. I was that one schmuck who rolled around the high school parking lot rummaging around my floor looking for cassette tapes not knowing if the song I wanted to listen to was on the A side or the B side. Finding the song I wanted to listen to was a matter of clumsily hitting the forward button, then the back button, then the forward button back again until I finally said “fuck it, I can start this song 3 seconds into it”. People think drunk driving is dangerous but have you ever tried to find “Jeremy” on Pearl Jam’s Ten album while navigating Atlanta traffic?
My brother, on the other hand, loved cassette tapes. This is probably because the high point in his life was achieved in 1984 when The Cars released “Heartbeat City”, an album he has foisted on me about a billion times in my life. Chris carried around a cassette briefcase with his favorite tapes in it. He always had it with him no matter where he was or what he was doing. This posed a particular problem for him when he bought a brand new Jeep Wrangler in 1995. It came standard with a CD player. He would listen to sports talk radio and bitch about “progress” and “technology” and “lasers” and how he couldn’t listen to his tapes. And I would bitch about “old people” and “analog” and “tape” and how I couldn’t listen to my CDs. It was all this grousing to each other that my brother struck upon a great gift for my upcoming birthday.
“TJ, I’m going to borrow your car for the day” he told me on some saturday. I was headed out with friends or something so I didn’t really need the car.
“But you have a bitchin Jeep Wrangler. Why would you want to drive my dirty ass car”
“Just leave it with me”
“Whatever” I thought and went about my day.
I came home late in the afternoon and walked past my car sitting in the driveway like nothing had happened. It looked exactly as I had left it. I thought nothing of it.
“Did you look in the car?!?” Chris asked me eagerly
“No?” “Go check it out!”
I have to admit. I was excited. I was young and naive and not accustomed to the fact that my brother has regularly and routinely fucked things up for my entire life.
I walked up to the car not really knowing what to expect. Had he washed my car? Had he put in one of those totally sweet massage seat thingys? I had no idea! As I approached the car I noticed the dashboard looked a little funky. I couldn’t quite make out what had happened but it almost looked….detached from the rest of the car. I opened the car door was greeted by what can only be described as a complete fucking disaster. My brother had removed the tape deck from my car and the CD player from his car and swapped them. Intentions were good, yes. But execution was poor, indeed. He had basically disassembled the dash of my car to get the tape deck out. And when he reinstalled the CD player he couldn’t quite things back together so he just…left them. Bolts and plastic clips and screws lay strewn everywhere. To his credit, the CD player did work.
I looked at Chris and said “what….what happened to the dashboard of my car?”. He looked at me surprised as if I was not appreciating enough his grand act of kindness.
“Oh, the dashboard will be easy to fix. BUT YOU HAVE A CD PLAYER!!” I would come to find out over the next several weeks that the dashboard was not, in fact, easy to repair and that listening to a CD player that is not securely bolted into the car is kinda fucking terrible. Scratched CDs, tracks skipping all over the place like a kindergartner hopped up on ice cream, bolts and screws and plastic doodads rolling everywhere. It was a disaster. And here’s the kicker. After I finished surveying my car, I looked at Chris and said “sooooo the tape player is in your car now?” and he said “yeah, come look!” and wouldn’t you know it, the tape deck was perfectly installed in his car.