“THE NEW BARBIE DREAM CAR”
[winner of the University of Pittsburgh Creative Nonfiction Award]
I’m walking between the rows of hulking metal, trying not to hit my head on the side-view mirrors. I’m here, at this never-ending parking lot of H2’s, the new generation Hummers, because I need to know if I could own one. Not in terms of the price tag, but in terms of conscience. On one hand, I think Hummers are a waste, a giant, gas-and-oil guzzling, too-damn-big-for-its-own-good waste. On the other hand, I have a Jeep. I’m scared my little SUV may be a gateway drug to hardcore SUVS, the Escalades and the Sequoias and the mother lode, the Hummer. So I’ve come to try to figure out who this salesman and this company think the Hummer people are. Are they people like me, who start with a smaller SUV and just keep upsizing? Are they people with McMansions, who worship at Mega-churches, who need a car that matches the bigness of everything else in their lives? Or are they like me—a possibility I at least need to face—people who eventually forgot about their causes and are now just looking for convenience, a little luxury?
When I meet Robert, the Hummer salesman, I wish for a moment I had long acrylic nails, perfectly French manicured, rather than my bitten down ones, nails that still show a bit of neuroses and guilt and concern. Someone buying a Hummer, I hope, has none of that neurotic guilt and concern left, or never had any to begin with. Because I’m terrified here that I’m not as far from them as I want to be, as I used to be. I need to know how close I really am to who used to be the enemy.
Really, despite my Jeep, I’m a vintage VW convertible person. Or a fake-wood siding station wagon person. I am someone who doesn’t care about status and showing off money and making life easy. Or maybe I was?
Robert is the salesman who will later tell me to put a picture of myself driving the Hummer on my parents’ refrigerator, because then my daddy will buy it for me. Works every time, he says. Once you imagine yourself in it, act like you already own it, it’s as good as yours.
“Also, start saying ‘my Hummer,’” he recommends.
I know that 28,610 people bought a Hummer last year. I wonder how they justify buying a car so big. Are they using the same line as me, it’s just more convenient? Do they still donate to the World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra Club, as I do, a tithe of guilt? Or have they found a way to stop being consumed by guilt, to just enjoy getting what they want? If parking spaces are getting fewer and smaller, and emissions laws are getting tighter, and jobs are getting outsourced, and gas prices are getting higher, and the Arctic temperature is going up from global warming, then why does our dream car keep getting bigger? I can’t tell if it’s a willful turning away from the world’s problems and pretending they don’t exist, or thinking they’re someone else’s responsibility to deal with, or that they can’t be solved anyway.
We walk out to the lot of shining metal, and I tell Robert how I used to feel safe in my Jeep Cherokee, but now it just feels too small with all those other SUVs on the road, that I need something bigger and newer and more stylish.
“Well, take your pick,” he says, extending his arm towards the rows of Hummers, and I point to the school bus yellow one.
He says, “I’ll go get the tags,” and disappears into the showroom, leaving me beside the sculpted steel and chrome, the chrome which the H2 brochure claims is included to “elevate the aesthetic.” The “elevated aesthetic” reminds me more of a skyscraper or a bulldozer than a car, an actual car that I could drive on actual roads, next to motorcycles and Miatas and bike riders. I can’t stop thinking that this car is for people who’ve stopped caring. I also can’t quiet that little voice reminding me that I’m one of them.
I open the car door and attempt to gracefully step into the driver’s seat, but I end up grappling and swinging in a way that makes me feel like a tiny monkey. I feel even tinier inside, dwarfed by the size of the cushy leather seats and the moon roof that spans forever like the horizon in the desert. I rest my hand on the chrome, utilitarian gear-shift and fiddle with the swanky stereo system, satellite radio with no commercials. The H2 is a strange blend of machismo and regal indulgence—like if a tank accidentally drove onto the set of Masterpiece Theatre, and decided to stay.
Robert shows me the single button that can control all of the windows at super-speed, for busy people who don’t like waiting around. There are switches and knobs and levers and buttons everywhere, three separate ones just to control the seat position. There’s a button to press if you’re towing a trailer so that it doesn’t push the car or wobble around.
“For towing a boat or a jet ski,” Robert says.
“I don’t have those,” I say.
“Maybe you don’t have them because you didn’t have an easy way to tow them,” he says. “And now you do.”
The Hummer people seem to come with a lot of stuff. They have boats and Ski Doos that require special towing attachments. They have CDs to load into the six-CD changer. They have gadgets to plug into the car’s sixpower points. But I have stuff, too—a big dog, a new bureau from Ikea, crap to haul around. They have money to spend on gasoline—with a 25 gallon regular tank and a 17 gallon reserve tank, where I’m from in Pennsylvania (this week, with diesel prices at $2.95 per gallon), it would cost me $123.90 every time I went to the gas station.
# # #
AM General started making High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles for the U.S. Army in 1983. The military eventually shortened the acronym HMMWV to the not-exactly-phonetic Humvee, maybe because Humwiv doesn’t have the same ring to it. At the urging of Arnold Schwarzenegger, AM General introduced a civilian version of the HMMWV to sell to the public. That was in 1992, and the first time the car was officially called a Hummer. Now General Motors, however, makes the H2, which is built on the same frame as their other trucks and sport-utility vehicles, such as the Suburban, Tahoe, Yukon, and Escalade.
So, bigger than a Suburban, bigger than an Escalade. Bigger than a Tahoe, named after the lake that contains 39 trillion gallons of water. Bigger than a Yukon, a 483,450 square kilometer region of Canada. If cars are trees, the H2 is a sequoia. If cars are buildings, the H2 is Trump Tower. And if cars are countries, the H2 is America.
Hummers are classified by the government as Class 3 trucks, but they do not require a special license to drive them. The difference between the Suburban and myriad other SUVs, which are now mostly made for city and highway driving, and the Hummer, is that the Hummer is still designed to be used off-road. This is a car that can climb a 16-inch vertical wall. It can drive over a 60% grade, a 40% side slope, and through 30 inches—that’s almost two and a half feet—of water. This is a car to make us feel prepared for tsunamis or Osama Bin Laden, to appease all fear of what we cannot control. In these cars, we are big and rich and menacing and no one would dare mess with us; we are the embodiment of pre-September 11th America. In these cars, we are big and rich and menacing, and we can drive over mountains, through rivers.
# # #
“Start her up,” Robert says, giving directions out of the parking lot and onto the highway. But, oh. Even though I’m used to driving my SUV, my dad’s big SUV, and my brother’s bigger SUV, I can’t stop thinking oh, no no. I’m panicking. I can’t do this. You actually expect me to drive this thing? Don’t I need some kind of special license? An operating manual? And what if I kill someone?
I stop and wait to turn right out of the dealership. When I press on the gas, used to the quick pickup of my Jeep, nothing happens. I press harder, and we zoom onto the highway. The car drives smooth like pudding, but it feels huge. We stop at a light behind a station wagon, a car which used to be considered big, and it feels like we’re double its height and its width.
“This car feels as big as a tank,” I say.
“It is safe, but it’s really not that big,” Robert says. “See that station wagon ahead of us? You’re not any bigger than that, it’s just you’re squared off, so it seems bigger.”
At over two feet higher than a Honda Accord, and weighing twice as much, H2 buyers are quite obviously getting a sense of physical superiority—so why do the salesman and all the glossy brochures keep insisting it’s not that big? Are they just telling us what we want to hear, assuaging our guilt, singing us a lullaby, passing us the Kool-Aid we’re so thirsty for?
# # #
Hummers are big. How can we not know it? The vast majority people—including me—who own SUVs never take them off-road. I’m trying to figure out what’s so appealing about big cars. Maybe it’s machismo. For me, I think it’s in part for convenience (to have room to haul around my stuff and my dog), paired with the desire to drive a car that’s socially cooler than a station wagon, which would have nearly identical functionality in my life. I had my SUV before 9/11, and so did many, many other people. But there was a spike in Hummer sales after 9/11, when customers were forced to wait for months to take home a Hummer, even bidding above the sticker price in an attempt to get one.
A reporter from the BBC wrote that after 9/11, the most “striking and immediate impact on buying patterns has been the rush to improve individual security.” And a huge military-inspired car can certainly feel like it improves individual security. Cultural critics have pointed to the endless cycle of fear and consumption, especially how, post-9/11, many of us felt a heightened state of anxiety. We knew we couldn’t control whether our plane was the one crashing into New York, or whether our office was on the 76th floor, or whether our drinking water was swimming with smallpox. We were freaked out. So maybe that’s why more Americans were willing to do the one thing we could control: buy a Hummer as big and tough as a military tank, one that can drive up mountains, through rivers of blood, over and pyres of burning rubble.
Also, Hummers are cool. Showy and arrogant, they’re a perfect match for the rich and famous, and the price is right for celebrities, too; the most expensive packages set the cost of a new H2 at about $120,000. With the new H2 he received for his last birthday, Arnold Schwarzenegger reportedly now has eight of them. Sports tough guys have Hummers—Dennis Rodman, Mike Tyson, Patrick Ewing, and Roger Clemens. When LeBron James made it big in basketball, he bought a Hummer for every guy on his high school team. Tupac Shakur had one. Hugh Heffner has been seen in one. Oscar-winning movie stars, like Adrien Brody, have Hummers. They’re rich; they’re famous; they’re also all men. We want to be like them, if not be them, and driving their same car is just a more expensive—and decidedly, more male—version of the Jennifer Aniston haircut craze. And we indoctrinate early; the children’s toy company Nikko sells a perfect-to-scale, remote-control H2 for $99.99.
The Hummer is obviously not the first big car in America. Both the road trip and the big car are so quintessentially American, storied and mythologized in the American past. In May of 2001, when Ari Fleischer was President Bush’s press secretary, Fleischer was asked about whether Americans should consider changing our lifestyle to consume less energy, considering we consume more energy per capita than any country in the world. Fleischer responded an emphatic “no,” going on to say, “the President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.”
And he’s right. Embarrassingly, it’s how the American way is viewed by much of the rest of the world—not giving two shits about gas prices, or the ozone, or what happens when you crash your three-ton car into someone else. Sucks to be all of you!, driving a Hummer screams. But it’s fucking great to be me!
# # #
“What about gas mileage?” I say.
“It’s actually pretty good on gas, about 17 miles per gallon.”
G.M. doesn’t report the H2’s gas mileage, but actual users say they tend to get about 10mpg. And since Hummers each have a gross vehicle weight rating of above 8,500 lbs, the EPA does not release their gas mileage ratings, since they fall under the classification of “heavy vehicles,” similar to shuttle buses and ambulances. Also, because they’re considered Class 3 trucks, Hummers are exempt from many DOT safety regulations, such as passive restraints and third brake lights. And under President Bush's tax plan, business owners can legally deduct up to $100,000 for their Hummer purchase, because the vehicle weighs over 6,000 lbs. You can find aggravating Hummer-facts like this on the website for the group Fuck You and Your H2 (www.fuh2.com), which also publishes over 1,000 submitted photos of people flicking off H2s.
Well, what about these pissed-off, anti-Hummer activists? Are they, as some Hummer owners argue (invoking a much-used line by overweight strippers being booed off the Jerry Springer show), just jealous? With a good amount of conviction, I can say I doubt that. The anti-Hummer people were my old crew. Young and politically-active, with bed-head and messenger bags, militant dumpster-diving vegans—we were people living for the cause. When I was one of them, I felt superior for not having a Hummer, the same way I assumed Hummer owners must feel superior for having one; I just figured that both groups had an equal level of pride in their ownership or non-ownership. The kids on their bikes, wearing black hooded sweatshirts all sewn up with patches of bands you’ve never heard of, we wouldn’t get in your Hummer, even if you offered us a ride to the G8 protest. I think of them now, my old friends. Some of them—the ones who I only tend to see when I run into them, who can, without a word, make me feel embarrassed about my decisions—are still getting tattoos on their necks, still piling in a van and driving to DC to march. Some of us went the Pottery Barn route, and these are the friends from that group who I am still close with—likely because we made similar decisions, to get mortgages and eat meat and buy stuff that isn’t from a thrift store and drive around in big cars. We helps each other forget where we came from and not feel as ashamed of where we’re going.
The Earth Liberation Front is perhaps the most extreme example of pissed-off vigilantes, people I would’ve known through mutual friends, but never been close to. The group caused one million dollars worth of damage in the end of 2003 by setting fire to Hummers at a California dealership. They also claimed responsibility for spray painting slogans such as "Fat, Lazy Americans" on SUVs at other dealerships in the state. They don’t just want to boycott Hummers for themselves; they don’t want you driving them, either.
It’s apparent that lots of non-Hummer-owners love feeling superior, or at least guilt-free. Even though I have an SUV, so in many people’s minds I’m just as guilty, I still love to point fingers at the Hummer owners, to separate them out as the worst. It’s a tiny bit of the satisfaction I felt as a live-small devotee, then free to wash my hands of the war in Iraq, the blood spilled for oil, the drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I loved the feeling of eschewing all responsibility, placing the blame entirely on others who increased the oil demand. It’s an appealing moral liberty, my old anarchy- kid-on-a-bike self wasn’t the only one clinging to it—hybrid car owners, MINI Cooper owners, even smaller-SUV owners like myself now can agree on one thing: blaming the Hummer people.
But I know I’m implicated too. More than once I’ve stopped at a red light next to a Hummer and looked out my window and thought, Why do they need that abomination? They’re never going to take it off-road, and they’re using too much gasoline, and they only want that car because they think it looks cool, and why aren’t they riding the bus, anyway, those selfish, stupid idiots? I’ve thought this, though, while looking at a Hummer through the window of my Jeep Cherokee, which I’ve only taken off-road once, and which uses more gasoline than I really need, and I mostly got this car because it looks cool, and right now I’m not riding the bus, either. Damn. So if most of us are also contributing to the SUV problems of pollution and traffic and war for oil, then why do we have such contempt for the Hummer people? Aren’t they doing what we’re doing, only they’re doing it bigger and better? Are we displacing anger with our own responsibility, compounded by our own guilt, and projecting it onto them, an easy-to-identify enemy? Is it just easier to hate the Hummer than to hate ourselves?
# # #
I’m not a very technical Hummer driver, with questions about horsepower or cylinders or catalytic converters. Basically, I can check my oil and pump my own gas. I picked my particular Jeep because it is what the dealership calls “flame” red, and my friend calls “seduction, seduction” red, and the Pittsburgh police call “No, you’re not getting off with just a warning” red.
So it was strange when I noticed a car enough to comment aloud. I was in France last summer, and I admired the women in flouncy skirts and stilettos, zipping around on their bicycles and Vespas. I admired the narrow, cobblestone streets and the cars weaving and honking. I admired all of this as I walked home from drinking along the Seine with some other American, non-car-noticing women. We were lamenting that all of the best patisseries in St. Germain des Pres were closed at this hour, and as we crossed the street, we saw it: the Smartcar. It was so tiny that I half-expected a boy with a remote control to be following behind. It was abrupt and silly, like if a regular sedan accidentally parked under a guillotine, and the back got chopped off. My friends and I laughed. We laughed so hard—this was an actual car? In the actual street?—that we clung to each other to remain standing. Later in the week, we found a parked Smartcar and took more pictures of ourselves in front of it than the Eiffel Tower. It seemed one of those quintessentially European things, something that would never, could never, crossover to America, the land of the urban tank, and the home of the Hummer.
I wanted to drive a Smartcar, but since they’re not selling them in America yet, I test drove a MINI Cooper instead. I picked out one that was the same color red as my car, only it had a Union Jack flag printed across the roof. As soon as I got out of the parking lot, I stepped on the gas, zooming and stopping and weaving in a way that made me turn up the radio and think, Awwww, yeah! I pressed the button to open the panoramic moon roof. I felt like I was in complete control, like when I still had training wheels on my bike but knew I didn’t need them anymore, but kept them on for a few extra weeks so I could be fast and reckless and zip around corners without wobbling. I pulled into a parking spot to try parking, a spot that in my Jeep would’ve required some delicate backing up and inching forward and turning maneuvers. I thought: why hasn’t all of America jumped on the tiny-car bandwagon? Can’t we organize some kind of massive test drive? I thought: can I trade in my SUV? I thought: will this make my old friends think I’m less of a sell-out?
But I came to a stoplight. I was singing along to Mick Jagger on the radio, belting out, “You can’t always get what you want.” I felt good. I felt like I could buy this car, could save myself and my country and the environment in one fell swoop. And then I turned to look out my window, to sing the chorus of “But if you try sometimes, well you might find, you just might find, you get what you neeeeeed” to the pedestrians on the corner. Except, there were no pedestrians. There was not even a window. In its place was a Hummer, or the wheel of a Hummer, filling up my field of vision like a picture of the world’s biggest tire with the world’s shiniest rims painted onto my entire window. Oh, I thought. Damn. I thought about what would happen if that car accidentally slid into mine. I imagined that giant, shiny tire crushing through my cockpit-like dashboard, and over my dog yelping in the backseat, and over my bags of groceries, tomatoes and jugs of milk exploding under the weight. So this is why people might not be jumping on the tiny car bandwagon. My favorite part of the song still hummed in the background, but I drove to the dealership in silence, got in my Jeep, and went home.
# # #
I’m remembering this wheel-filling-up-my-window moment, which made me start to wonder about the spectrum, about how similar I really am to these Hummer people. They make me angry, both with them and with myself. I think about how terrible Hummers are for the environment, how I should maybe trade in my Jeep for a MINI Cooper, and then trade my MINI Cooper in for a bicycle and a black hooded sweatshirt, go back to the old days, live with less impact, even if it means less convenience. Logically, I know I don’t need a giant SUV, and I know that not many other people do, either. But then I think about how the Hummer people and Escalade people and Tahoe people and a million zillion other people are all driving huge trucks, trucks that could smush me without even noticing, I think: forget the environment. Forget the war for oil in Iraq. Forget everyone’s else’s safety. And then this makes me think: fuck me for thinking like this, and fuck them for making me think like this. So I’m all confused and cussing in my head when Robert tells me that buying a Hummer will actually help protect the environment.
“You’ll be part of a community,” he says, handing me a glossy brochure. He then explains about the Hummer Driving Academy, in which I can learn to drive my Hummer in “ditch crossings, water crossings, and boulder navigation.” As part of the franchise agreement, each Hummer dealership is required to host a minimum of four off-road driving events every year.
“They also have Hummers you can rent once you get there, so you don’t get yours all muddy,” he says.
After the Driving Academy part of the brochure, which discusses all the wildlife me and my hulking car can run over, is a section called Tread Lightly!, which explains how Hummer owners have a responsibility to “protect terrain and its fragile ecosystems.” Which is why, as a Hummer owner, you also receive a free lifetime membership to Tread Lightly!, a nonprofit group which protects land and water resources.
“It’s cool, if you’re into that kind of thing,” Robert says.
Then Robert suggests I upgrade my Hummer package to include a chrome brush guard in front of the car’s grill. This costs an extra $525, but he doesn’t mention that.
“It’ll protect your car,” he says.
More likely than rogue branches, I’d need the brush guard to protect my lights from breaking when I accidentally back this Titanic car into a telephone poll.
Except when he asks me to turn into a parking lot and pull this massive rectangle of steel into a space made for normal cars, I can do it. I think I must be crooked, or taking up three spots, or pinning several stray shoppers beneath my massive tires, but when I get out to look, I’ve done it perfectly.
“Perfect!” Robert says, over and over. “You’re a natural.”
I can’t believe that me, 5’3’’ in high heels me, always got hit in the head by a ball in gym class me, is driving this massive, hulking beast, and doing it well. My ego swells. Getting back into the car, though it is still not an effortless motion, now has me feeling more like a rock star and less like a monkey.
# # #
Robert warns me the H2 is not an amphibious vehicle, nor a submarine. It cannot float. He does not advise driving it in tsunamis or flash flooding or blizzards. Since the car is, for the most part, sealed against the elements, Hummers are equipped to drive through up to 30 inches of water. The military Humvees have a snorkel kit extending the exhaust and air intake to roof level, making it possible to operate in 60 inches of water. That is five feet, just about equal with how tall I stand. I have to pause to take in the James Bond factor of the U.S. military driving snorkeling cars. Though I know in a million billion years, I would never use this feature—if there’s five feet of water, I should probably either drive around it or go home—but for a moment, I want to know I have it. Just in case. But the civilian Hummers cannot use the snorkel kit because certain parts aren’t waterproof. I understand why the military needs such big, bad trucks—but who do soccer moms? I’m trying to figure out why civilian-use Hummers seem so American. Is it because they’re big, or irresponsible, or inconsiderate? Because they’re self-important, or awe-inspiring, or ostentatious? And what is so quintessentially American about having more than you could ever possibly need?
# # #
Robert wants to think of some vanity plates for me. On the full fold-out H2 poster he’s included with my brochures, he writes in capitals letters: Y NOT and GRRL TOY.
“I’m going to make this even nicer for you,” Robert says. He flips a switch to turn on the heated seat, and it feels so lush and fabulous that I realize I will never again sit in a chair this comfortable, unless I am sitting in the Sharper Image. Then he flips down a little leather novelty armrest, and I’m struck by the adorableness of such a tiny detail in such a looming, huge-mongous car. For a moment, a telegraphic message from the past flashes through my conscience: There! Are! People! Starving!, but I just set my elbow on the armrest and keep driving. It is soft and cushy and warm, and this radio station is playing my favorite song with no commercials.
“I have the perfect plate for you,” Robert says, and then pauses for a moment.
“H2 BAR B,” he says, annunciating each letter. “Get it? Like Barbie?”
Oh, I get it. I laugh and accelerate up the hill, feel the power under the hood like a volcano waiting to go off as soon as I say go. I’m feeling tough and powerful and luscious and sexy. We fly past the other cars, filled with tiny, boring people. I’m a huge, shiny monster; I can crush you without breaking a nail. Get the hell out of my way. I’m driving this H2, and it’s yellow like nylon Barbie hair and its tires are four feet high and the engine zooms like a bus on PCP and I could squash your little Hondas like toys, and did I mention you should get the hell out of my way? I am rich and tough and I have this real-life Tonka truck and I could run over you and your car and your mom’s car all stacked on top of each other and not even feel it, because my seats are leather and heated and comfortable like I should be sitting by a fire, reading Shakespeare, but I could drive sideways up Mt. Everest and laugh at the people with their rappelling gear—people, human people, walking, actually walking, when they could be in this car, this huge and giant and fabulous car that makes me a rock star, only much tougher, like a professional prize fighter rock star, except more glamorous, like a professional prize fighter rock star with velvet elbow-length gloves and a cigarette holder.
“This car might intimidate some guys,” Robert says, “but only the weak ones, the kind you wouldn’t want anyway.”
I imagine the litany of my former boyfriends: skinny, cardigan-wearing, bespectacled vegans. Then I imagine the kind of man who would look good sitting next to me in this car: tanned from St. Tropez, wine-drinking, with muscles thick like truck tires pushing up against his shirt with the little alligator logo. Our voices ringing out in unison, we’ll shout “Get the hell out of our way!” and I’ll be Barbie and he’ll be G.I. Joe and I am beautiful and lethal and we could run right over you and your sardine can of a car and not even feel it, because this Hummer drives like pudding and we are tough and sexy.
“It definitely sends a message. You know, not everyone can drive a Hummer.”
“I know,” I say. “Oh, I know.” I hear the words come out, though in a voice I don’t recognize as my own. The words resonate with entitlement, bouncing off the leather and glass and chrome, and settle on my skin with the delicate sting of pinpricks. I cringe. I hear the voiceover from the 1980s public service announcement: This is your brain. This is your brain on Hummer.
I know now that I wouldn’t allow myself to buy a Hummer—my inner hippie, though dormant, still exists. But I also see the glamour and the allure of shushing that inner voice by running it the hell over, squashing all your guilt with that temporary rush, the ecstasy of being free to do and have whatever you want.
“I think it’s time to turn around,” I say.
“Just remind me to take a picture,” Robert says, “for your ‘fridge.”
# # #
A few months later, I see an ad that makes me breathe a sigh of relief. Hummer is coming out with the new 2006 H3, a smaller, more reasonable Hummer, one that promises to be better on gas mileage and more maneuverable in heavy traffic. I feel reassured about Americans, about what a benevolent power we have to demand that our cars—and our lifestyles in general—stop endlessly Supersizing, at a cost to our wallets and our environment and our safety. The photograph of the scaled-down H3 makes me believe in the sincere goodness of American ingenuity the same way my great-grandparents must have felt upon seeing the first images of the Model T. That’s when I notice the capital letters off to the left of the page, just beneath the word Hummer: “EVEN WHEN WE GO SMALL, WE GO BIG.”
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