Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

My favorite 'prosthesis' was a marvelous car named Regina. She was a 1991 Buick Regal, and I loved her. She had a huge Granny style steering wheel, red interior, and she was enormous. My friends and I used to bellow “iceberg ahead” whenever we had to maneuver her around obstacles. This car took me on many wonderful vacations and she even got amazing gas mileage, about 38 miles a gallon on the highway. My favorites include our trips to Yellowstone and Polson Montana as well as the numerous drives from Casper to Denver. I used to take her for scenic drives up and around Casper Mountain as well as midnight escapes to Alcova Lake. Driving down the highway I would feel as though Regina was a physical extension of my body, a tool that helped he escape to where ever I needed to go. It was a beautiful relationship with never ending possibilities, and it seemed as though we were made for each other.     

Five years of adventures and memories passed by quickly, and the entire time my boyfriend and I had Regina we promised that we would take her to the ocean. When we moved from Casper to Olympia the first thing we did was drive Regina to Ocean Shores so that she could finally drive on the beach. After the long drive she started to act funny, and I had to replace her fuel filter and spark plugs. Last September, tragedy struck when we were driving back from a Bill Bragg concert in Seattle. Some guy crashed into the back of Regina on Interstate 5. His car was totaled, but Regina, being the big girl that she was, hardly had any damage at all. She got both me and my boyfriend home safely that night, but she was never the same. A few weeks later she wouldn’t even start. I felt as though she had betrayed me after all of the years I had spent keeping her clean and taking her on exciting expeditions. 

I took Regina to a mechanic who told me that it was not worth spending $2000 to make her run again. He also said that if we decided to fix her she would never run the same again, and her days on the highway were most certainly over. So my boyfriend and I made the decision to have Regina towed to a junk yard, seeing how no one would want to buy a car that cannot run. We ceremoniously took all of the pictures, souvenirs, and mementos out of Regina, cleaned her out, and tore off her hood ornament that miraculously was never stolen. We watched to the large tow truck hook up her lifeless body and we waved as she was pulled up the street and out of sight.

I could never say that I fell out of love with Regina even after she broke down and I had to take the bus to school and to work for a couple months.  Sometimes when I drive my new car I like to pretend I am in old Regina, with her big comfortable seats and huge steering wheel and I smile to myself. In a strange way she is missing to me like a lost pet or a friend that has moved far away and has not been heard from for years.  When these feelings occur I sometimes ponder why I feel this way about a piece of metal. Yes, it is strange to have such strong feelings for a car, but in her own way, she was my very own prosthesis, and therefore irreplaceable.