All hail the Red Dragon

An elegy for a long lost 1991 Dodge Spirit

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On a Pontiac Vibe, a Dodge Spirit and driving life’s toughest roads

Maybe she hit a curb, I’m not really sure. Whatever happened, someone drove up beside my daughter, told her our 2007 Pontiac Vibe had a flat tire, and followed her as she pulled into a gas station.

That someone turned out to be the dad of someone she works with and a stellar dad at that. He changed the tire for her. (Pro tip: Be that kind of dad.)

I’m worried this might be the start of the Vibe’s slow descent into car oblivion.

And I’m getting a little weepy about it.

I don’t care who knows, I love that Vibe and have since the day we bought her, even though now she’s older than smart phones and streaming services and if she was a person she’d be able to drive herself.

She’ll be 17 years old in a few weeks, and she has seen better days. I already crashed her once, and after she was fixed the shop told me she should have been totaled. Today she’s covered in dings and scratches, some caused by me, some caused by my daughter.

The automatic window buttons are starting to fail. The radio works unless you want to know what station it’s on. No matter how many alignments she gets, she pulls pretty hard to the right. It would help if I stopped running over parking blocks.

That car has been our companion through the highs and lows of life. I drove her in 25 of the 30 craziest, most unbelievable, most memorable minutes of my life. She moved with us from St. Louis to Charlotte, and she moved with us back, both of which were emotionally exhausting. I strapped both of my kids into car seats in her countless times, and now one of them drives her and the other one will soon enough.

Nobody’s going to buy a 2007 Pontiac Vibe, and I wouldn’t sell her anyway because she’s a great car for a teen-ager, by which I mean she runs and is paid off. My 14-year-old is already asking me to teach her to drive. If she can learn to drive a 2007 Pontiac Vibe, she can learn to drive anything.

The Vibe is like a time machine. I rent cars often when I’m on assignment, and they are always new. Then I get home and drive the Vibe, and it’s like a flashback scene in a movie.

I think my F3 friends would be disappointed if I sold the Vibe. She’s famous, or infamous, for how I park her at workouts. I either pull in so close to someone that they can’t get into or out of their car, or I “T” them in so they can’t back out.

One time, I T’d someone in at 5:25 a.m. near some woods. A few seconds after I got out of her, a woman came walking out of the trees. “Is that where you’re going to park?” she asked me. I had blocked her in, thinking it was one of my F3 buddies.

What she was doing in the woods at 5:25 a.m. I never figured out.

One way or the other, we’ll drive the wheels off the thing, which has made me wistful for the last car I drove the wheels off of.

I called her the Red Dragon, and she was a 1991 Dodge Spirit. She was mostly red, with splotches of pink on the hood and elegant splashes of rust along each side. Felt drooped from the ceiling, making the interior feel like the inside of a circus tent (and never mind the clown behind the wheel).

The radio worked randomly—sometimes all of it, sometimes just one speaker, sometimes none of it. At least the presets were consistent: Three of the five always worked. And the windows caused no problems whatsoever unless I tried to roll them down. The headlights worked just fine as long as I remembered to change the tape that held them in place.

She shook at 45 miles per hour and again at 70 but was pretty smooth in between. I couldn’t get her to top 70 to see whether there was a third level of shakitude.

My wife drove the Dragon only if her car was engulfed in flames, and even then no she didn’t. My friends made it clear that if my then infant daughter (now 17) ever got anywhere near the Dragon, they would call child-protective services.

The Spirit became the Red Dragon one night in 1997. I was listening to a song by Rush called “Countdown,” about a space-shuttle launch. “Countdown” describes the space shuttle as a “sleeping white dragon.” Listening to that song, linking the lyrics to the car parked outside under a streetlight ... I obviously had no life whatsoever. 

And 10 years later, neither did the Dragon.

Her end came abruptly, as in she stopped running while I was in rush hour traffic on the interstate. Seriously she just turned off and wouldn’t turn back on no matter how loudly I swore.

Somehow I drifted three lanes to the right and snuggled up against a barrier. I had her towed, a mechanic changed a spark plug, got her running, took her for a ride, and she stopped running again. He had to walk back to the shop. My car was such a disaster a mechanic I hired to fix her abandoned her on the side of the road, which was the funniest thing I had ever heard.

He did not see it that way.

I took some solace in the fact the Dragon’s final days were peaceful. They certainly were quiet, as the radio never came on in the last three months.

While trying to decide whether to trade in the Dragon or donate her to charity, I looked up what I should expect a dealer to offer me: $50 (and that was assuming the radio and air worked). The saleslady offered me $100, and I took it with a huge smile. I was worried she’d ask me to give her $100.

I would have taken that deal, too.