I Still Don’t Know if I Want Pepe le Porsche
Inheriting stuff from alive people can be tricky. Especially if it's been driven off a cliff.
Listen to Erin read this story:
There was a moment when I thought Pepe le Porsche was dead. Totaled, in proper car speak. He was perched on the side of a rocky cliff in the Phoenix foothills, terrain tiny Boxsters generally don’t excel on. He could not move and needed backup. This came in the form of two men in jumpsuits, who decided the only way to lift him off the jagged slope was to hook one tow truck to the front bumper and one to the back, then engage their winches at the same time on the count of three. They discussed no other options.
On three, both bumpers ripped off. Then the undercarriage dragged across the rocks, while a palo verde tree scratched the paint and soft convertible top, for effect.
Pepe’d had a good three-year run. In 1998, this particular color of Boxster was sold to roadster enthusiasts like my dad under the claim that it was “Zenith Blue Metallic.” It was, in fact, purple. And that is the color I chose years earlier as a tween, when I believed picking out colors for cars that did not yet exist but were promised to be delivered years later, was simply a fun game and not something that required a down payment.
I cried for a month when Pepe came home. I believed I had stuck my dad, a six-foot-two, 200-pound man with a mustache, in a candy-colored toy car.
He’s not usually a wordy guy, but one way to rev him up is to talk about cars. We bonded over antique models at the Barrett Jackson auto auction, and took an annual pilgrimage to the Phoenix car show to critique the newest crop, waltzing around like petty fashion critics: That red’s too orangey! Those tail lights are winking at me! Why on earth would you put a cup holder there?
Father-daughter time also included waxing dad’s ’74 TR6, a noisy British roadster he’d kept for decades, presumably so he’d have something old and yellow to wax with his future children. I can only imagine the devastation he must’ve felt when we had to stop because the paint started to rub off.
After about a year of Pepe’s continuous existence in our garage, I accepted that maybe my dad liked the purple hue because he never said he didn’t. (In hindsight, the TR6’s staying power should’ve been my clue that dad was—and had been, long before I existed—into candy colored toy cars.)
One night, dad came home and, in a tone I can only describe as oddly jovial, like when you’re so mad you release a cackle like exhaust so your body doesn’t blow up, he told us a stranger had fallen on Pepe; there was a butt-shaped dent on the hood.
Eager to fact-check, my brother and I ran out to the garage to find there was, in fact, dude-shaped damage. Like a footballer faking a foul, a guy had flopped while Pepe was stopped at a red light. His performance was unconvincing, so he got a ticket. But Pepe still had cheekmarks. I was secretly thrilled, because my dad’s nearly-emotional reaction to the walk-by assing silenced any lingering doubts I had about my color choice; he loved that car.
Of course, there were questions about how Pepe ended up on the cliff, stuck on those Phoenician boulders in a far more serious incident than Buttgate. Particularly because that cliff was in a guarded neighborhood approximately seven miles from my family’s home.
It would make sense to point a finger at 18-year old me. But only if you didn’t know that I once killed Pepe’s engine not one, not two, but five times attempting to cross a street with traffic that did not stop. This enraged not one, not two, but seven neighbors and the mailman, who were all stuck for minutes behind the bucking Boxster before I screamed “Chinese fire drill!” at my dad (I didn’t know better), jumped out, ran around the back of the car, and made him run around the front until he was in the driver’s seat and could use his magic four-limbed coordination to blast Pepe across the street at the exact moment necessary to avoid a crash.
No, I was not the one who drove Pepe off a small cliff. But I was the one who found him. More accurately, I found my dad. From his slurred speech when he called our landline, I knew he’d been in an accident. Probably because he said something along the lines of, “Erin? I’ve been in an accident.”
In this situation, one might be tempted to call a third party—say, the police—for help. But if cops find someone behind the wheel of a wrecked car, speech askew, that someone tends to get their license taken away. My mom did not, I repeat, did not, want to drive my dad to and from work every day. Becoming his chauffeur was an untenable breach of all motherly progress. I was already out of the house, and my brother could drive himself. She was no longer, and would never again be, our family’s cabbie. A job that once required two 5 a.m. drives per week, because I was on the high school swim team. That shift can haunt a person, and my dad tended to leave for work early.
So, while my mom ran to find her map book, a book of all the roads in Phoenix up until about the date of publication, I called the cops. They had no record of any recent accidents and offered to look around. I told them thank you and hung up to realize I’d just started a race to see who could find him first. Then dad called again, to give me a leg up.
This time, he was a little more coherent than the last. He described his surroundings: foothills, darkness. The wee cliff in what sounded like a planned neighborhood because he said all the houses looked the same. I began to picture him in the community where my friend’s hot divorcée mom lived.
I drove to the gatehouse with my hot unspeaking mom in the passenger seat. This was not quite the family time I’d envisioned upon my first visit home as a college freshman, but here we were, my hot mom watching me try to convince Mark’s hot mom’s gate guard that my dad had crashed his car somewhere up in the foothills. No, no, we’re not here to murder him, I probably said. Or Mark’s mom. We don’t want to murder her either. You don’t have any calls about a wreck?
Despite my explicit statements of non-murderous intentions, the guard still thought we were out for blood and refused entry. I wished he were right. A love triangle would’ve been much more fun than the truth, which is that the lack of a properly functioning pancreas had reduced my dad to a big drunkish man-child incapable of piloting a Porsche Boxster while in the process of piloting a Porsche Boxster. A fate my mother, brother, and I had all silently feared for years had just happened.
But I did not tell Monsieur le Gate Guard this diabetic detail. Out of respect for my mom’s autonomy, we were now trying to outpace the cops, not get this flustered Fredo to call them for backup. One 18-year old woman (that would be me), the police could ignore. But a gate guard? In uniform?
The Guard was in quite the pickle. My mother and I could be plotting to destroy a potential adulterer and his mistress. Or, we could be telling the truth, but not the whole truth, and the guard would have to admit that a non-HOA member might have slipped past him, presumably for the simple thrill of off-roading in a Boxster.
Upon weighing these options, a process that played out visibly on his full, white face, he decided to stand firm. He would not, could not raise the gate. And just when he was about to tell me, again, to loop around and buzz off, my dad appeared. Floofy blond hair amiss, work shirt unbuttoned, stumbling toward the light of guard house. Indiana Jones at the end of a long chase sequence, all hunky and weirdly unscathed from his adventures.
That’s the funny thing about diabetes: You can be a sliver away from death, then eat a cookie and be perfectly normal.
The sound of Pepe’s engine pulling into our garage every day around 6 p.m. was a relief. That asthmatic whirr meant dad had made it home without going hypo, a thing that happened unpredictably, as both exogenous insulin and my dad’s Type 1 diabetes, acquired at 42, were unpredictable. Because pancreases don’t always croak. Sometimes they’re more like a Monty Python character, squirting out insulin while shouting, “I’m not dead yet!” just after you bolused up to level out a pretzel.
My family never spoke of The Tiny Cliff Incident again, a title I have just dubbed that night in which I found my dad before the Phoenix police. Not a word was said, even the next day, as my mom and I watched Pepe le Porsche get julienned while my dad took mom’s car to work and my little brother went to high school. Perhaps mom let out a small cry as the bumpers simultaneously ripped off. Less out of concern for Pepe’s pain, and more out of rage at the future added cost of reattachment.
More than a decade after that, after Pepe had been rebuilt, repainted, and re-topped, dad decided to give him to me. I assume because it’s against the law sell a car that has once been stuck on a cliff. And thus, I became the only woman in the world who nearly turned down a free Porsche. Certainly the only woman in Los Angeles.
I was into obstacle course racing, at the time. My life was muddy. I couldn’t hop in a Porsche after a day of slithering under barbed wire and wading through cow-pasture puddles. That’s Suburau stuff. Jeep, at best. I pictured myself pulling up to lunch with friends who’d wonder how I’d turned athletic mediocrity into a Porsche. “It’s been totaled once!” I’d say.
Then I did what everyone does upon inheriting something from a living person: I named it. I gave it pronouns. So I would care about him. So I would not offend the generous original owner by bringing up for the first time, more than a decade later, the Tiny Cliff Incident.
The Boxster became Pepe. And I, at the age of 30, had to figure out how to park the embodiment of my dad’s Horatio Alger story in a one-car apartment garage my husband and I had already filled with bikes.
The first thing Pepe did in my care was come down with a potentially fatal illness. Someone in Germany, surely, discovered that a bearing deep within Pepe’s bowels could, at any moment, come loose and explode, embedding shards of itself in every entrail, rendering Pepe kaput.
The ‘box engine’ that gave the Boxster its name sits right up in the middle of the car. If you open the hood, there’s a frunk. If you open the trunk, there’s a trunk. To get to the engine, the car must lifted, like a prima ballerina. This makes Pepe and his siblings very pricey to service. To replace the kamikaze bearing that all ’98 Boxsters may or may not have, cost the same as a not-bonkers used car a decade younger than Pepe.
At that point, I would’ve liked to ask my dad for advice. But he was the one who pointed out this new development by sending me the link to 986forum.com, where Boxster enthusiasts around the world pondered how much they were willing to pay to play Russian roulette with their babies. A man of many words, dad titled his email: consider. No further commentary appeared in the body. No recommendations. No sign of whether or not he expected me, upon reading a forum that hadn’t updated its look since Pepe debuted, to keep the grape. The grape that made me have to stuff all of my bikes into my living room, and take out additional insurance. Insurance that would not pay out in the event of Pepe’s own suicide.
When I went to college, I started to run. I ran largely because New York has this thing called weather that makes it tough to ride a bike outside every day like I loved to in Phoenix. So whenever I came home, dad and I would wash cars, and if the timing was right, we’d go to the Barrett Jackson auto show. But we’d also run, because now I could.
He had regular 5 and 7 mile routes, and the occasional 10, and we’d trot and he’d talk. Like really talk. Full-on conversational gabbing, as if his lips were connected by strings to his feet. Had I known this trick at 12, would I now have such strong opinions about the size of Rivians and the bulbous turn Mercedes has taken?
He talked about his family, about my mom’s family. About Catholic school and the drugged-out college roommate who tried to fly out their dorm window, convinced he was a dragon. Dad let him, so he’d get the room to himself. Kidding! He pulled him in then got him arrested, so he’d get the room to himself. That’s not true either. I’m not saying I internalized every detail, but I was listening.
Some of the stories I’ve heard before, but I don’t interrupt. Partly because I’ve been his continuous glucose monitor since before they existed, and his speech is an important blood sugar gauge. And because, after 22 years of running together, those stories are taking on new dimensions. The man who totaled Pepe then went to work the next day as if it never happened is now, I dare say, contemplative. I have even witnessed his acknowledgement of the existence of feelings.
Nearly none of our adult bonding time has occurred in or around cars. Now retired, dad rarely drives. Pepe’s bigger, newer brother, the Blusche, gets pulled out of the garage once a month for a wash and wax, to admire the marriage of engineering and design wrapped in a sparkly blue (for real this time) hue. And to lament the electronic uprising that deleted a physical parking brake from behind the stick shift. It even automatically holds itself in place on hills, no four-limbed dance required.
You can’t wrench on these babies like we used to pretend to. There’s no pride in properly diagnosing a mechanical issue. Now the car will tell you exactly what’s wrong with it and sit there nagging you until you get it fixed. Like a dog who knows it’s their dinner time and OH GOD WHY HAVEN’T YOU FED ME YET?! WHY? WHY? WHY?
Even the ’74 TR6, the car we could physically stick a wrench in without a lift, got its restoration outsourced to some guy in Ohio. My dad, the king of roadsters, is no longer a heavy user. Now he’s more of an admirer.
Pepe is now 26. That’s 103 in people years. If tested, I’m sure his airbags would puff out dust. He is a bona fide classic car, eligible for reduced license and insurance fees because he is, at this point, worth nothing. I looked it up. I just sold a bike for more than Pepe could get.
I have aged with him, and the beautiful thing about age is you give a lot less effs it can morph your memories. Blasts of fear and anxiety from when I was a kid don’t cloud up the rest anymore. Now Pepe reminds me of my childhood as the beautiful, complicated thing it was, not just the one night, when I was 18, when dad almost died in that car.
Pepe still sports dad’s license plate frame, the one we got him for Christmas that says, “Sometimes I go topless.” So far nobody’s asked me to prove it. Insulting, really. Nevertheless, now, I think, I don’t want to not have Pepe. His oily leather smell, his low-speed asthmatic wheeze, that purple paint and black bra that I have to take off to wash him. It all reminds me of dad, when I was a kid, and how he spent all of his non-working time with me and my brother, going to car shows, driving aimlessly through the desert, just to be together.
Maybe dad feels the same about the TR6, bought at 24, not long after he married mom. Memories of apartments and houses, wins and tragedies swirling around in that yellow paint that started to rub off when we waxed it. (That dude in Ohio better do a good job on the restoration!) Would some memories be lost without our cars? Hoarders would say yes.
But dad’s alive! I don’t need Pepe to remember shared moments from my childhood. We can FaceTime and reminisce! I can drive dad through the desert!
On a walk last winter, dad and I were, of course, talking about cars. We’re skeptics that a bunch of ginormous electric trucks will save the world. We talked about how some of them have even bricked themselves. How they’ll probably be undriveable if you miss a payment. That they’ll lock everyone into leases for eternity because nobody wants to own an electric car. And that’s when I said, “I guess that’s what’s nice about Pepe: he’s mechanical. Nobody can hack him.”
And then dad said, “That thing? I thought you would have sold it a long time ago.”
