My first and only car in high school was a maroon 1989 Toyota Camry. The story of its name ("The Mateskobule") is fairly simple. One of its previous owners was sitting in her house one day when she received a call from a telemarketer. They asked her if her mother was there, except they butchered her last name to be "Mateskobule". When I bought the car, it sounded vaguely enough like "Matesko-mobile" that I thought it'd make a good name. I have a few stories to go along with this car.

For a few months of its first year, I had a pencil sharpener installed in the Mateskobule. My family's AC/DC converter and a multi-outlet strip were plugged into my cigarette lighter, and the pencil sharpener, taped to the arm rest in between the front two seats, was plugged into all that. Alas, the pencil sharpener took up so much energy that the car had to be running for it to work, and when the car was left in the sun too long, the tape melted.

Besides the fact that the front seats of my car did not resemble an airplane cockpit, the fact that I didn't have a car phone, and the fact that the pencil sharpener only had one available sharpening hole, this is exactly how it looked.

One time after post-scholars' bowl Taco Bell, a bunch of people were sitting in the back seat and we kept hearing a scraping noise that I'd never heard before. Someone got out to look and discovered that my muffler was dragging along on the street. When we stopped later, we realized that I didn't actually have a muffler, since the "muffler" that was still hanging on to the car was corroded and full of holes. It fell off a few weeks later.

A defining characteristic of my car throughout its tenure under my "care" was that I habitually did not clean it. Rarely would I throw anything away when there was an opportunity to just leave it in the car. When I finally did clean out the car (completely) in order to find a tiny piece of electronics that had fallen into the rubbish, I discovered 45 empty cans of Mountain Dew and 23 cups from Taco Bell. The rest of the clean-ups contents are all written down on some sheets of paper somewhere in my parents' house.

I'm not even kidding. There were 45 of these when I counted them all up. This is just a small sample of the greatness.

After I got the battery changed, the dashboard clock was wrong. This clock was the kind where you have to press those little buttons to change the time, so I started to correct it with a pencil. When I pushed in the minute button, it stuck, so the minute digits kept cycling through the numbers zero to fifty-nine. I never managed to fix it. Eventually, even the hour was off, and it was impossible to tell what time it was while riding in my car.

Another time somebody rolled my car with toilet paper on a Saturday night. On the driver's side window they wrote "Crack this Tito" in some kind of red paint and they put the cardboard things from the toilet papers on the ends of the windshield wipers. This wouldn't have been that bad, but, if I remember correctly, it rained on the toilet paper, making it more difficult to clean up. For a month or so I didn't talk to anyone about it in an effort to figure out who it was, but no one ever talked. I am sorry to say that I never did crack the case.

Seriously, what did I do to deserve this? Were my friends really that bored?

The last story is about how I got rid of the car. One day I decided that it had seen its last times and I left my house to drive it to a junk dealer. The car stalled out so many times during the trip that I turned around, drove it back home, and donated the car to the National Kidney Foundation a few months later. They didn't receive any proceeds from the transaction, but at least I got it off of my parents' driveway.