Why I Love My Pontiac Torrent and Hate Corporate America

On Monday, Melissa and I traded in our ’02 Saturn SL1 5-speed compact for a Pontiac Torrent. There is no way to sugar-coat it: three weeks into parenthood, and Melissa and I have already capitulated to the status quo, buying our first SUV (it is officially labeled a “small crossover”, but I won’t even pretend that label will protect me from ridicule by at least a couple readers of this site, who over the years have endured my rather predictable tirades on SUV-driving suburbanites). I’ll just note that we could not comfortably fit both the kid’s car seat and the dog carrier in either my Buick Regal or Melissa’s Saturn when we tried driving the crew out to visit my in-laws in Downers Grove this past week. I’ll also point out that I’ve never had anything against minivans and suburban cul-de-sacs, per se, just that I resent being fed that lifestyle as a given rather than as one of many options. While Melissa and I may one day move somewhere more bucolic, we may very well stay put in our Northwest Side bungalow for the next 30 years, and I hope that the fear of sending my kid to a school filled with a lot of minority children who live in the apartment buildings down the street will not unnecessarily color whatever decision we make.

I don’t believe in the concept of creating the perfect lifestyle for yourself. It’s one of the reasons that I settled down in Chicago in the late 80’s rather than continuing to roam the country, because here was a city with a lot of interesting people, most of whom were just trying to live out their lives rather than perfect a lifestyle. As a refugee from the West Coast, I liked that you could see great bands and get good beer on tap, but that the place didn’t put up with pretensions, that it was the anti-Boulder of happening cities.

So I reject the idea of families being pushed into one of a couple cookie-cutter lifestyle choices. Hey, most kids grow up fine in the suburbs, but they can grow up fine in the city, too. I don’t think you have to weigh the benefits to your kids of diversity versus liebensraum when deciding whether to stay in Andersonville or move to Wilmette. Neither concept is a trump card, and neither place is de facto better than the other. And right now, for us, the Northwest Side is a fine place to be.

The American obsession with picking the right car is a lot like our drive to have the perfect lifestyle. Until recently, for many that meant choosing the biggest monstrosity one could find to hog the road, another manifestation of our seemingly never-ending quest to have enough elbow room. Of course now, with $4 gas, that has all changed. I can’t take my 50cc Kimco scooter out for a spin without someone looking at it admiringly and asking questions about how much it cost or what kind of mileage it gets. As recently as a year ago, I was the butt of many a joke from the guys in the alley, calling me Easy Rider or asking when I was going to graduate to a Harley. But that has all changed.

The quest for the “right” car has led the educated set, be they urban or suburban, from soccer mom to boho, to treat the entire endeavor like a high school term paper, to research what are the sensible, superior alternatives, and that generally means a car made by the Japanese. Now, I have nothing against Japanese cars. My first car, which I got when I was 19-years old, was a Mazda 626. It was a perfectly fine if rather dull vehicle, which I put about 100,000 miles on, including a couple of cross-country treks, before leaving it in California after packing my bags into my girlfriend’s ‘72 Olds 98 and taking off for Chicago. I’m sure that most of the Toyotas, Hondas, and Subarus that folks are driving these days are perfectly good cars. I just don’t buy the notion that they are the only good cars.

Even though I generally regard the automobile with a rather callous practicality, I can’t shake a deep-seated love for almost all things General Motors. My dad mostly bought GM cars. When I was growing up, he drove a ’64 Cadillac Sedan DeVille and then a ’72 Chevy Monte Carlo, both of which were beautiful machines, although as a kid on road trips, I preferred the wide-open backseat of the Caddy. After he passed away last year, Melissa and I drove my dad’s ’98 Buick Regal back from California, and I fell in love with its smooth ride, how the leather seats cradled your body, driving 2,000+ miles with nary a sore muscle between the two of us.

Lately, General Motors has been taking it on the chin. The attacks have come from many corners, but perhaps the most vicious have come out of Wall Street, which suffers from what I call Eddie Lampert Syndrome. Sears was a fine, if rather humdrum, company until a few years ago, when Eddie Lampert bought it. Sears sold solid products, from to tools to appliances, that a huge percentage of Americans had come to trust. Sears had a reasonably priced men’s clothing department that, after the demise of Montgomery Ward’s a few years ago, was where I bought my casual shirts, my jeans, socks, and underclothes. But Sears, while making a solid profit, suffered from a lack of growth, which according to Wall Street wisdom is a cardinal sin. Actually, the dagger pointed at Sears’ heart was at face value an asset, namely the billions of dollars in cash the company still had on hand from its spin-off of Allstate several years before, making it a ripe takeover target for an entrepreneur arrogant enough to believe that he knew more about the retail trade than the thousands of folks at Sears who had spent their careers in the field. Enter Eddie Lampert.

Lampert tried to work his entrepreneurial magic on the old standby. He looked to improve margins by cutting middle-to-entry level salaries at the stores and shaking up entire departments at the main office in Hoffman Estates. But guess what: Sears’ sales and profits have plummeted since Eddie Lampert took over the company. It turns out that being an entrepreneur with no merchandising experience isn’t necessarily the best qualification for running a retail company. Go figure. But perhaps the most basic problem with Lampert’s style of management is that if you pay your employees like shit (like Eddie Lampert does), and you treat your employees like shit (like Eddie Lampert has), then you end up with shit employees (like Eddie Lampert is now saddled with). It used to be that I could go into the Sears at Six Corners and be serviced by friendly, knowledgeable people. Shopping there was a pleasant experience. Now, it seems as if half the staff only took the job so that they could keep getting welfare checks or stay on the right side of their parole officer. A lot of them act like they are doing you a favor by taking your money. Much of the business media, like the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, talk about Lampert like he is some kind of a tragic hero, his hubris driving him to put the Sears albatross around his neck. But the plain fact is that the albatross was flying just fine until Lampert came along.

To be direct: Wall Street and its mania for continual profit growth is killing some of the best businesses in the country. The fact is that General Motors is still one of the two best selling car companies on the planet, with global sales of $178 billion last year. If a young internet company had 1% of those sales, even if it was leaking money like a sieve, investment analysts would be jumping over themselves proclaiming what a great buying opportunity is at hand. OK, so GM is probably not as efficient of a corporation as Honda or Toyota, but GM still makes lots of great cars; in fact, as a whole, they make better, more interesting, more dependable cars than they made twenty years ago. But to the talking heads on Wall Street, GM is on the wrong end of the trend, and to them that’s all that matters.

I also have a problem with Japanese car companies (and German ones too, for that matter) treating America like we treat banana republics, putting up factories in union-unfriendly, right-to-work states, most of them south of the Mason-Dixon line, states with a laissez faire autocracy that the citizens of Japan or Germany wouldn’t stand for in their own countries. When the 2010 Census gives a sackful of new electoral votes to these states while taking votes away from the states of the upper Midwest, where all those auto jobs used to be, everyone who bought Nissans or Toyotas should know that they are at least a little complicit, because it is foreign manufacturers such as these Japanese car makers that have fueled much of the growth in the New South. The end result will be a further pandering to the South’s backward economic and social agenda, as this part of the country will soon hold even wider sway on the national political stage.

So, when it came time to look for a larger replacement for our Saturn, my first impulse was to get another GM. However, most of the suggestions from friends and acquaintances were to check out the Subaru Outback or Forrester, the Toyota RAV4, or one of the Honda crossovers. We actually test drove the Subaru Forrester, which was a fine vehicle, although the 4-cylinder engine struck me as rather anemic and tinny when I tried flooring it coming out of the intersection, and the sticker was about $5,000 more than I wanted to spend. Besides, there were a couple of Forresters in our neighborhood that I’d pass when walking the dog, and, while I really don’t have much of a fashion sense about automobiles, when I imagined trying to live out my mid-life crisis in the vehicle, pulling a Cerwin Vega amp and a Fender bass out of the back, I couldn’t help thinking how uncool I’d look coming out of that car, sending out a dweeb dad band vibe in all directions. I might as well dress myself in a nice, fuzzy sweater with elbow patches right now, write a few songs about animal friends who recycle, and book a gig at the Heartland Café.

I can’t say that I immediately fell in love with the Torrent, but I liked it, and it grew on me over the past week as I tried out other cars. I liked its V-6 engine. I liked its ample cargo space, and how its back seat could be adjusted to provide more room for stiff, rangy middle-aged men like myself. I liked that the Torrent didn’t do what so many other crossovers try to do, namely look small, like they are some kind of outsized sports cars. And the headlights on the Torrent are a bit arrogant, like a car that might be driven by an asshole. Melissa and I actually had a debate as to whether it was better to be thought of as a yuppie or an asshole as you drove down the road (I assume you can guess what end of the teeter-totter I sat on that one). And the fact that the Torrent is not the educated choice de jour meant that I got $2,500 cash back and was able to haggle a few hundred more off at the closing, allowing Melissa to get her sunroof and for us to save about $3,500 versus what we would have paid for the Subaru.

Other than my home, it was the most that I’ve paid for anything in my life. While we’ve only had it three days, and I may feel more passion for my dad’s Buick, right now the bloom is still on the rose.

My First Week as a Dad

The warning signs were there, which I chose to ignore: folks talking about how it takes men awhile to bond with their babies, that the early, gurgling grabber stage is not satisfying for us. And I recognize that I am a victim of the modern age, insisting on some kind of instant gratification for this decidedly long-term project Melissa and I have undertaken. But I was not prepared for the sheer drag it is going round-the-clock, day after day, with this sucking, shitting, pissing flesh bag I now call my son. At his worst as a puppy, my dog was so much less demanding, more comprehensible, more fun.

There are few more effective ways to ruin my day than to spend it in the company of women. And that’s one of the things that no one warned me about this whole baby thing, that women would soon be circling our home like sharks smelling blood, wanting to hold the baby, to feed him, to talk about how “handsome” he is. In one sense, I’m all for the visits, be they from friend, neighbor, or mother-in-law, as it means that much less time that I have to deal with my vacant-eyed lump. But all that cute baby convo has left me lurching somewhere between existential angst and the loony bin.

There’s a good man that I worked with, Nick, a proper Christian, a tosser of pints, a fan of Oingo Boingo and the Who, a father of four. When he was asked about how his night or his weekend went, Nick would typically respond with something along the lines of “I have four kids under the age of eight, how do you think it went?” Or sometimes he would opt for the more direct one-word response: “Brutal”.

At the time, I read this as the droll humor of a humble Midwesterner, not wanting to brag about being blessed with a big family. But now I wonder if there was not more than a dollop of straight talk in his comments, that maybe Nick was the only one direct enough to tell me the unvarnished truth.

And so I wonder what’s next. I’ve been told about the happiness I will feel the first time my son smiles up at me in recognition, about the 1,001 joys and surprises that await. So, at least intellectually, I am patient. But somewhere lurks the whispering suspicion that maybe it’s all a quiet conspiracy, and now that I am in on the joke, one of my friends who is a father and likes to hold court on the clever lines in “Ratatouille” or how much fun he has practicing T-ball with his son will nudge me at his next barbeque and snicker: “Gotcha”.