Hubby and I went through medical school together. Because our schedules were the same, it was easy to share a battered blue Toyota Tercel, a hand-me-down from my mother. When we moved to the Bronx for residency training in psychiatry, we needed a second car and bought a rusty-red beater Honda Accord from a friend of Hubby’s dad. It became my car and served me well for the four years of the residency and two years after, when I worked days as an attending in the psychiatric emergency room of North Central Bronx Hospital, the Bronx equivalent of Manhattan’s Bellevue. Evenings, I drove south into Manhattan to my little private practice office on the street level of a pre-war building on the corner of 86th and Amsterdam. Very upper West Side, very Woody Allen. I had to allow about twenty minutes to find a legal parking spot on a nearby street.  

It was the early 90’s. Crack cocaine, cheap and plentiful, was burning like an unchecked forest fire through the City. Emaciated addicts, suicidal and psychotic in the crash following the high, swamped my emergency room. Car break-ins by users desperate for quick cash were all too frequent. But parking the car in a garage was ruinously expensive. Riding the subway into Manhattan added an hour to the round-trip. I kept driving in and parking on the street, fingers crossed, hoping for the best.  

Of course my car was broken into. The first time, the thief trashed the driver-side window and ripped the radio out of the dashboard. I didn’t replace it or repair the gash—why bother?— though it hurt my heart every time I laid eyes on the wound. The second time, the thief popped the trunk and stole my backpack stuffed with academic reading, papers and journals, from a workshop I had attended on crack and heroin addiction. I had to laugh. Shaking my head, I slammed the trunk shut, praying I’d get home before the damaged lock gave. 

I accepted reality and started parking in an over-priced underground garage (they were all over-priced). A few months later, around nine at night, when I returned to retrieve my car, the attendant told me that two attendants had been held up at gun point earlier, and several cars stolen. That was it. Why hemorrhage money and risk walking in on an armed robbery? No thank you. I went back to parking on the street.

Not even three weeks later, I left my office around eight thirty. It was August, hot and muggy. The sun had just set. I swear I saw Michelle Pfeiffer of Cat Woman fame (Bat Man Returns had just come out) waiting at the corner crosswalk I was approaching. It was twilight; the street lamps cast shadows across her profile; the traffic light changed; and she walked ahead of me. I’ll never be sure it was her. Still. A New York moment! A possible celebrity sighting!

I walked purposefully from 86th up to 88th on Amsterdam, where I had parked my car. It wasn’t there. I had that awful, crushing feeling of confusion—could I have forgotten where I parked it? Please, please, let that be the explanation. But I knew—my car had been stolen. I searched—sweaty, heart racing and short of breath—for about half an hour before yielding to the inevitable. I called Hubby to pick me up at the subway, rode it home to the Bronx, and reported the theft to the police.  

Weeks later, we got the call my trusty beater had been found. We met the police at a derelict parking lot surrounded by sagging chain link fence at the northern tip of Manhattan by the East River. There she was, barely recognizable: a hollowed-out carcass without doors, steering wheel, or tires; body blackened and scorched; the entire dash ripped out, a few sad wires dangling; front seats missing and back seats slashed, white guts spilling out. Hubby and I looked at each other. I actually teared up.

“That’s no way to go,” Hubby said mournfully, putting his arm around me.

“Your car was stripped for parts in a chop shop, then dumped here,” the cop said.

“Yeah,” I said. Addictions are insanely profitable to the purveyors and secondary criminal enterprises that pop up to take advantage of users. The ruination of addicts that ensues—lying, stealing, and worse—spreads in a ripple effect to families, neighbors and communities. I was coping with it professionally—just that day, a heart-breakingly pathetic addict had thrown himself sobbing onto the filthy emergency room floor: Just kill me, I want to die. Now, with the death of my car, the ripple had reached me, close and personal.

Hubby pulled me in tighter. I put my arm around his waist and leaned my head on his shoulder. We took a moment of silence, then walked back to our aged blue Toyota Tercel, the car we’d shared in med school and would now be sharing again.