On Blowing the Engine, On Growing Up

Graphic by Yinne Smith

It was late August when I signed my death warrant. Right on the balcony of my best friend’s apartment. It was 5:30 a.m. and Newark was heavy on my skin, another scorcher. It was such a hot summer. I sat on the balcony just before leaving for work, finishing my coffee and playing with a Bic lighter. It was one of the patterned ones with the plastic skin. I had put it through the laundry, ripping the edge of the plastic. As I watched the sun meet the smog, I realized I had ripped the decal off the lighter completely, pulling back the purple plastic to reveal a pure-white underbelly. I was out of time. I didn’t have another lighter. Fuck it. I pressed a Marlboro between my teeth and hesitated while looking at the white Bic in my hands. I lit up. 

For those who have never been laid flat-out on basement carpeting, coping with an incense-induced headache and feeling like you’re really hearing Pink Floyd for the first time, smoking with a white lighter is a big no. As legend states, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison died at age 27, white Bics found in each of their pockets. There is no proof of this, in fact, it’s probably not true. Regardless, smoking with a white lighter is off-limits for the overly superstitious, like myself. 

Prior to my lapse in August, I had followed this rule with painstaking compliance; if someone handed me a white lighter I would refuse it. If I let my restlessness get the best of me and peeled back the plastic on a decal lighter, birthing a new, white lighter, I covered it in stickers. I would not consider myself to be among those born with “good luck.” Was I skeptical of the notion that something as seemingly meaningless as the color of a lighter could bring on bad fate? Of course. But, as it would turn out, casting my superstition aside proved near-fatal. 

Forty-five minutes later, I was sailing down the exit off the Garden State Parkway, towards the Cuomo bridge. I was listening to the Doors when I felt it. Right as I was coming off the bridge, in the left lane. It was unmistakable, I heard what can only be described as the sound of tortured metal. In the next split second, the engine blew. Fast and hard. The smoke clouded the windshield immediately, I swerved four lanes blind, praying to God that I wasn’t going to run someone off the road. I made it to the shoulder and jumped out the passenger side. I stood on the side of I-287, crying while watching my car smoke. The car had been fine, no warnings on the dashboard. I stood on the side of the highway urgently trying to remember if anything had been off that morning. I remembered. Not anything pertaining to the state of my now-very-dead car, but I immediately realized the culprit. I screamed, through very snotty sobs, stupid fucking lighter. 

As I resigned myself to the fact that my lack of superstition now had a body (or, autobody) count, it dawned on me that I would have to deal with this situation. I had just moved out of my parent’s house two months ago, and they were five hours away. I had moved from my small town in Upstate New York for Norwalk, Connecticut to work at a coffee shop in Greenwich for the summer. I had no family there, and my friends mainly consisted of my co-workers. I was all alone and stuck in Westchester. Adulthood hit me like a truck in that split second. My parents couldn’t fix it even if they wanted to, no one was coming to peel me off the side of the road and tell me everything would be okay. I called the only number I could think of, AAA, and the Thruway authority towed my car. 

It’s almost December now, I have a new car, and I don’t smoke with white lighters, ever. But I haven’t forgotten about August. That was the first moment when I felt like I was really on my own. In seconds, any feeling of normal went up in smoke, literally. If there’s anything that I’ve picked up from being a college student and half-baked adult throughout 2020, it’s that the normal I knew might be gone forever; everything changes faster than an engine can blow. And all the consequences come just as quickly. Maybe I haven’t really ever left the side of the highway; maybe, in some part, we’re all just on the side of an interstate watching as everything blows up, wishing that somebody would come and fix it for us. Maybe that is normal.