It's A Rental, Baby

Seventy-four dollars and eighty-four cents for seventy-two hours and unlimited mileage. I paid the man, took the escalator, and walked to the “Mid-Size” sign. Choose any car, they’d told me, and I had nine sad, deeply tired choices before me. Dirty and dented, scattered across the concrete tier. Welcome to Dollar Rent-A-Car.

The rental fleets are aging, and it’s no mystery why. Fewer than fifty-four of the dollars I turned over to Dollar actually stayed in their hands; the rest went to a staggering variety of user fees and local taxes. If they could rent their mid-sizers every day without interruption, there would be five hundred and twenty-five dollars available in a month. Simply financing a brand-new Sonata, Fusion, or Optima over five years is a $450/month proposition, and we all know that anybody who does such a thing is “in the bucket” for years.

I walked up and down the line of cars, checking odometers and feeling for tread depth. I had eleven hundred miles to cover, much of it in conditions where snow would be more of a probability than a possibility. A burgundy Sonata offered 48,200 miles and tire grooves that were mere suggestions. Next to it, a silver Optima promised plenty of grip on the outside shoulder but the smooth rubber near the inside told a tale of indifferent alignment.

Sonata, Optima, Sonata, Optima… Avenger? Forty-seven K and shadows of tread pattern. The Somali expatriate working Dollar’s exit gate started to wander semi-purposefully in my direction. The crazy white man in the camel-hair coat was getting in and out of all the cars, kneeling next to them. It couldn’t mean anything good.

Last car in line was a white Sonata. A newish set of mismatched sixteen-inch all-seasons. Combat damage to all quarters, torn patches on the door panels. The hood had a dent/ding/scratch pattern that spoke of vandalism, monstrous hail, or perhaps a mountain lion with a propensity for sharpening its claws on steel. I briefly imagined a terrified renter cowering in the driver’s seat as the big cat growled. My mental image of the growling mountain lion, I realized, was taken directly from an early-Nineties Mercury ad.

Mercury is dead. Hyundai lives. Turn the key. Thirty-something thousand miles. The ESC light came on and stayed on. Not a problem. I will trade tire depth for some indifferently-programmed electronic nanny. A nice surprise: XM Radio is activated and working. Fire up “The Groove”. I’m loaded and backing up just as the gate attendant reaches me; he jogs after like a neighborhood dog doing the bare minimum of intimidation. When he catches up, I hand him a carbon-paper damage diagram that resembles the Rosetta Stone and he sighs deeply.

“Car scratch and dent bad, man, but okay, right?”

“Okay,” I reply. It’s a failing of mine to assign souls to automobiles, the same way my son isn’t quite sure whether his Kota is really alive. I think of my Porsche 911, sleeping peacefully through the winters and joyfully growling across the Hocking Hills in the summers. My Plymouth Neon is a fierce competitor, longing for the clash of fenders and the bravada of the late pass. Even the new arrival at the house, my Town Car, seems satisfied as we quietly roll through the forty-two-mile morning commute.

Pope John Paul II said, “Also the animals possess a soul. Men must love and feel solidarity with our smaller brethren.” He was silent on the matter of automobiles. In truth, the soul they have is the soul we give them. Model T, E-Type Jag, Hyundai Sonata. All metal and nothing more. Returning this car would not be like adopting an abused animal and then returning it to the shelter. I repeated that sentence again and again in my head. After a while, I almost believed it.

Thanks to Jessica Janson [link NSFW] for the title of this article, and much love to the working girls everywhere, past and present, particularly the one who will never read this…