El Camino Car Quotes

There was nothing a man couldn't do with three thousand dollars and a suitcase full of canned tuna fish and pregnancy brassieres. The car was called an El Camino for a reason. (Telegraph Avenue, p399)

The anecdote appears in Théophile Gautier's 1859 biography of Balzac. I wondered if it could be shown that Babel had read Gautier. Then I wondered whether there was anything to eat at home. There wasn't. I got in my car and was driving down El Camino Real when my cell phone started ringing.

Remember when I said I was a bit scattered? It wasn’t just when it came to jobs. I had a slew of strange ex-boyfriends, too. There was George, who liked to wear my underwear . . . everyday. Not just to prance around in—he wore them under his Levi’s at work. As a construction worker. That didn’t go over well with his co-workers once they found out. He works at Jamba Juice now. I don’t think anyone cares about what kind of underwear he wears at Jamba Juice. Then there was Curtis. He had an irrational fear of El Caminos. Yes, the car. He just hated them so much that he became really fearful of seeing one. He’d say, “I don’t understand, is it a car or a truck?” The confusion would bring him to tears. When we were walking on the street together, I had to lead him like a blind person because he didn’t want to open his eyes and spot an El Camino. If he did, it would completely ruin his day. He would cry out, “There’s another one. Why, God?” And then he would have to blink seven times and say four Hail Marys facing in a southerly direction. I don’t know what happened to Curtis. He’s probably in his house playing video games and collecting disability. After Curtis came Randall, who will never be forgotten. He was an expert sign spinner. You know those people who stand on the corner spinning signs? Randall had made a career of it. He was proud and protective of his title as best spinner in LA. I met him when he was spinning signs for Jesus Christ Bail Bonds on Fifth Street. He was skillfully flipping a giant arrow that said, “Let God Free You!” and his enthusiasm struck me. I smiled at him from the turn lane. He set the sign down, waved me over, and asked for my phone number. We started dating immediately. He called himself an Arrow Advertising executive when people would ask what he did for a living. He could spin, kick, and toss that sign like it weighed nothing. But when he’d put his bright-red Beats by Dre headphones on, he could break, krump, jerk, turf, float, pop, lock, crip-walk, and b-boy around that six-foot arrow like nobody’s business. He was the best around and I really liked him, but he dumped me for Alicia, who worked at Liberty Tax in the same strip mall. She would stand on the opposite corner, wearing a Statue of Liberty outfit, and dance to the National Anthem. They were destined for each other. After Randall was Paul. Ugh, Paul. That, I will admit, was completely my fault.

Father Time remains undefeated. So it’s not him you should be angling to beat. It’s that gnawing cry for purpose that will eat straight through you if you let it.

In truth, I killed the real Theresa in my mind that day, replacing her with a copy spawned from my own head, a perfect duplicate who shared none of the inner qualities of the real thing, only reflecting back what I wanted her to be. And while this copy would be filled in over the years, looking back, that was the moment I already lost her, before our relationship even began.

Point is, there comes a time you need to deal with reality. I reached a certain age when I had to accept it wasn’t so easy to find my one true amor, accept that I would never father any children, or probably ever have a home of my own. And I learned to be satisfied with that. As the doors of your life start to close one by one, there is a tendency to romanticize the past, the what-ifs and that what-could-be. That, my dear Dan, is just death of a different kind.

They said he was buried weeks ago.” I nodded. “Back in July. His mom also passed away right afterward, so that just compounded the family chaos. His sister reckoned she died of a broken heart.” “Tragedy breeds more tragedy,” Martina said, studying the smiling face of Old William in the photograph on top of the shrine. I still couldn’t quite imagine the two of them as an item, but that was love in the end. It could tie you to people you would never expect. “Father Time is undefeated,” I said. “Old William told that to me once. It was why he tried to enjoy his life to the fullest. And live without regrets.” “That’s a nice thing to say,” she said. “But reality is always messier than we would like.

The night before my final day on duty, I tapped the grandfather clock for my rounds as I always did, growing strangely nostalgic for the now-silent building. It had caused me a great deal of stress over the prior three months, but I realized then how well I knew every inch of it. Perhaps that is what belonging to a place meant. Not necessarily loving it, but knowing it as well as you knew yourself.

Catholic medieval memento mori symbolism. ‘Remember, you shall too die.’ Native iconography. Worship of the dead. Because they understood we don’t only live for just ourselves. We live for all who came before. All who will come after. For those we love today. Everything is connected.

The El Camino gifted me with knowledge that night, a secret knowledge most people were blissfully unaware of. I had seen how my life, how all my lives would play out. I witnessed myself doomed to the same mistakes, the same selfishness, the same stupidity over and over again. It was a certainty that no matter what path I took, I was always destined to end up alone. Not because of any bad luck or ill fortune from the world, but because of the flaws inherent in me as a human being.

With the added years of my own emotional maturity, I now realized how selfish I had been that entire era, how utterly deluded in my perspective, how I had failed to read any of the real signals Theresa had given me, or to even treat her as the beautiful, complicated, uncertain human being she was, rather than the ideal of her I had held in my head.

And somehow, in telling these long-kept secrets of mine, I felt a strange comfort as well. Keeping the worst of yourself locked away is not always the best way to keep moving forward.