Welcome to the tribute page to my one and only car ever, NERVOSA!

She was my best friend for three months, the summer of 1996. A 1985 Chevy Cavalier, Nervosa cost me initially only $400. By the end of the summer, she had cost me over a thousand and was worth no more than the $25 I received from the scrapper. But what she gave me was priceless - freedom.
Nervosa's original color was copper, but along the way she had been painted over with this hallucinogenic teal color, completely flat and unreflective. This was accented by a little red stripe on the side, and the lovely rusting duct tape on the passenger door. On a whim I painted a big UPC symbol over her rear right side, but the paint washed off in little flakes once the first rain came. This, I felt, only added to her charm.

I loved this car like a pet, like that special closeness humans can never have with each other - nothing got in the way. For the first month I would ride around in her, speaking to her and introducing her to my territory. I put two hundred miles on her in the first two weeks just tooling around Portland. To make her more appealing, a fun party girl as it were, I began to add little playthings to her interior. I put black and white spirals around her window cranks, so when you turned them the spirals would rotate hypnotically. On the ceiling of the back seat I stuck a velcro checkers game, so people could amuse themselves when the car was in motion. I hid little porn pictures all over - when you pulled the sun visor down, when you pulled out the seat belt - and on the window I'd taped the news article from the Enquirer when Pee-Wee Herman got caught in that Florida XXX theater. Nervosa had no beverage holder, so I made one out of wire and a tennis ball container. Her back seat was covered for a time with this shiny copper metallic cloth, which would dazzle your eyes in the sun and create distractions to other motorists. She had a white fuzzy K-Mart steering wheel cover, and her patron saint, Barry, was prominently displayed over the rearview mirror. Glow-in-the-dark stars covered the interior. And finally, on the rearview itself, sparkling in the sun, hung a little disco ball.

I'm not quite sure how Nervosa got her name, which grew over time to Morphea Xiola Lysergia Nervosa (Lysergia Nervosa was her original name). Knowing she was special, I renamed all her gears. Reverse was "funk", and when I'd open her up on the highway I'd put her in "lyserge" and just cruise. Unfortunately, her clutch was her downfall...

Nervosa's ailing last days

Little did I know, however, that when I bought Nervosa she had only a few months left in her. Rather than telling me, though, she was considerate enough to keep her condition to herself until the very end. I should have known when, two weeks into our relationship, she sprung a leak of some very Ecto-Cooler-like fluid in my driveway. Her radiator was replaced, and I thought I'd heard the end of it. But then her horn went. I was trying to honk at some inconsiderate pickup at a red light, and when I expected Nervosa's booming yet melodic voice to ring out, I got a quiet "Whaaaaah", very much like an asthmatic duck. Her brakes then slowed, making driving her a vigilant task from beginning to end, and then I began to notice that it took about ten seconds from the time I pushed on the gas in first gear for her to actually start rolling. I was careful to stay in the city, not to accelerate too much, and not to go over thirty miles an hour. I mean, I loved this car. She had shared some very good and very bad times with me, even in the short summer I'd known her. But late one night, out on a country road, Nervosa's sad cancer overcame her. I smelled burning rubber but refused to face reality. Her locked brakes slowed me to a crawl, and I pulled over. Nothing would make her start again. I stood out on the shoulder, a young girl alone, and managed to hitch a ride to a phone booth from a nice hick with a little kid and a dog in the cab of a pickup. We towed her poor corpse to the shop where she'd spent a lot of time over the summer. When I learned that the clutch, brakes and engine were shot, I knew Nervosa was gone for good. I cried as I removed all the little ornaments from her, the mementoes of a summer gone, a friendship lost. And I can only now console myself with the thought that when I die, I'll have a ride waiting for me in the afterlife, a little green car with a smile.

Return to the Opium Den.