Like me, my 1997 BMW Z3 convertible is slightly broken in places.
The front seat has a stripped bushing. During a hard stop, me and the seat roll back and forth like a bowling ball on one of those carnival games where you try to push the ball over a steel hump.
The passenger door sometimes sticks. Sometimes to open it, I have to whack it like Floyd Mayweather taking it to a guy’s kidneys.
The air conditioner has an inferiority complex to the convertible top and has given up trying to cool anything.
The shocks and struts leak like a barnacle-crusted-sea-captain’s rheumy-eye and the metallic black paint is scarred with white chips from errant street gravel.
While I keep telling myself the world tends toward entropy, that nothing can be preserved, I rarely accept this. The thing that’ll kill me is the stress of my obsession with maintaining order. These are only things and things are temporary I tell myself. And yet, while I’m not OCD, for some reason, external breakage continues to manifest as heart-rends, and wrinkles in my spirit.
But with the Z3, none of this applies. The deterioration is character. This is MY car. There isn’t another like it in the world. What Nelson Algren said about the city of Chicago also applies to the Z3: “Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
They say teenage brains are poor at long term planning. I wanted to be a doctor and a pro tennis player back then, so I can affirm that generally this observation is true. But, the fact that I own the Z3 is the manifestation of some kind of prepubescent adherence to The Secret.
The convertible I really wanted was a 1998 Volkswagen Golf Cabrio because Mercedes Lane (LOL) aka Heather Graham drove one with the Coreys in License to Drive. I blew all my money on skiing the trash heaps of Michigan, so no one was buying a German auto.
My best friend Jason’s dad however was an executive at Chrysler and got incredible deals on cars, so Jason was gifted a cherry red 1992 Lebaron GTC convertible, which was my de facto transportation all through high school and ultimately why a kid from a state where snow takes up at least four months of the year was obsessed with top-down life.
Jason and I were very committed to rooflessness. Even though temps had dropped to like 50F on a long road trip, I turned the heater on full blast and zipped myself into a sleeping bag in the passenger seat just so I could see the stars as we flew across I-75 late one night.
Then Goldeneye came out. There she was. Pierce Brosnan, James Bond, behind the wheel of the snub nose hood, the ridged shark fin air intakes, and the tiny metallic BMW dual-radiator grill cover of the Z3.
I wanted that car. But there was an issue, sort’ve. My father was a UAW organizer. No “foreign” cars were allowed in our driveway. No Yugos. No Renaults. No Hondas, only products from The Big 3. However, there was a promising loophole. German cars, due to their spectacular engineering, were basically domestic in his mind. I had a chance. Except, like I said, my money was tied up in winter sports.
Then, my mom, in midlife, was looking for adventure. I suggested she take a look at the Z3. I went to college.
I came back one summer, and there it was, my black metallic destiny. I drove the BMW a few times and then returned back to my Ford Focus, a Ford Contour, and eventually a Ford Escape. Then I became a dad and made like Mark Wahlberg in Daddy’s Home and even though we only had two small boys, I assumed I needed a Hummer-sized vehicle to cart everyone around and committed to a series of Ford Flexes.
My kids got bigger. My mom got older. She barely drove the Z3 anymore. She could see my spirit sagging as a glorified Uber driver for my kids. She called me one day and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
And that is how I find myself this afternoon in the Z3, sun on my shoulders, Persol sunglasses above my cheeks (incidentally Daniel Craig’s James Bond wore these – I swear I do not have a Bond obsession-you will never find vodka in my martini) shooting down Fullerton Avenue.
Though the pandemic has waned, I still need to convince myself I’m allowed to roam freely. Given the constraints of the last two years, driving the convertible in rare temperate spring weather (swamp and snow being the primary Chicago seasons) feels like a giant exhalation.
A dude in a minivan – the wood-paneled kind – pulls up and yells “Dude is that a 97?” I say “Yes!” He yells, “Classic, bro!” and putts off. Though I am very much him in every way, in this moment, I feel like a golden god.
We all have a little douche in us. But, on balance I’m not a d-bag, I swear. I’ve spent my entire journalism career trying to be anonymous. Even when I’m not reviewing a restaurant, I use fake names (Jack White was a fave, Ryan Adams another – once when I entered under Ryan, the restaurant was playing Adams’ Heartbreaker album in the lobby – 4 stars! JK) because I don’t like the fuss. But in the BMW, in this moment, the affirmation of another dad is absolutely something I somehow need. Guys don’t eat, pray, and love as much as they drive, brood, and bro out.
It turns out, I too am an absolute classic. The reason for my journey was to get double zero finely milled flour from Caputo’s market in Elmwood park to make pizza. Five minutes ago when I checked out, the cashier asked me if I was eligible for a senior discount. Though I’m in my forties, I can see how I might look like geriatric Gollum to the fourteen-year-old cashier.
But it’s not the gaze of others, but my own grinning one in the mirror that matters right now. I love this drive between Logan Square and Elmwood Park. As any drive down any long street in the city, it’s like a cutaway of an archeological dig, exposing the strata of our city. There’s Mexican groceries and Puerto Rican tire repair shops, Chinese restos and the Italian grocer I just left, Caputo’s. Caputo’s doesn’t even really serve the Italian community anymore. Most of them have moved west. The deli counter filled with cecina and cevapcici features a mélange of Ukrainian and Spanish accents now.
On this drive I get especially excited every time I roll past 4100 W. Fullerton. You may see a giant U-Haul storage facility, but I see the old factory for the Mills Novelty corporation. I’m antique-obsessed and Mills manufactured what are now some of the coolest collectible artifacts. They were the leader in turn-of-century coin-op, one of the earliest slot machine manufacturers, and the creator of the Mills Violano Virtuoso. Sure, self-playing pianos in bars were great, but this was a self-playing violin, and who doesn’t need a little automatic Pachelbel “Canon in D” with their Pabst.
The thing about getting older is that change stops being gradual and then it just happens suddenly. For half a century Mills Novelty ruled Chicago, but no one has heard of it today. I’m not saying this because I like the old ways. It’s just a fact. Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein were Paris in the 1920s, and then they weren’t.
One of the quirks of a 25-year-old car is that it does not have a single cupholder – obviously James Bond would have someone in the passenger seat feed him martinis through a straw. Taking the place of a cupholder is an eight-cassette storage unit, because, of course, the Z3 has a tape deck.
I collect vinyl, but I’m not hipster enough to collect cassettes yet. The only tapes I have are mix tapes from the 90s that were given to me, or because I married my college sweetheart, mix tapes I made her. Most of the cases are long gone. I have no idea what’s on them, but I have thrown them in the Z3 to discover.
I generally have little shame, but it’s very embarrassing when Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up” greets the fine people of Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood. These are the risks of Memorex-roulette.
Eventually, Whirling Road’s “Whispering the Words” comes out of the speakers. If the car is a memory maker, this tape is a time machine. The tape is significant in that, even though we like to believe that in our on-demand culture, everything is available, you will not find this album or this track on Spotify or Tidal. If you want to hear it, you’re gonna have to ride with me, or buy an out-of-print physical copy.
Unless you went to school in Ann Arbor in the mid-1990s, you also won’t know Whirling Road, but you will know a local band that you were sure was gonna make it big that didn’t. Whirling Road is that band. In those days, I saw two bands more than any other, Nine Inch Nails and Whirling Road. I was usually accompanied by my buddy Jeremy and these two bands were so psychically linked, we often joked during Whirling Road sets at the tiny Ann Arbor club, The Blind Pig, that maybe Trent Reznor would show up and do a collab with Whirling Road one night.
It never happened, but Bob Ritchie, aka Kid Rock, did do turntables on one of their tracks (don’t hold it against them). Whirling Road was led by the Peters’ brothers, Chris and Drew. Drew had two long Pippi Longstocking braids that he adorned with a leopard print fez at gigs.
Whirling Road did sort of make it. Though the Peters’ brothers started out with djangly REM-type guitars, they eventually evolved to double buzzsaw electric riffs over drum machines bolstered by the attack of live drumming from Dan Carroll, a style similar to Garbage, the Butch Vig/Shirley Manson band. They gave vocals to a woman named Dina Harrison and became Getaway Cruiser. GC was signed to Sony. They made a track with Pras of the Fugees
Chris and Drew and Dina and Dan were cool, but it was their bassist Mark Dundon with his Beatles flop-top and Keanu-cool vacant gaze that we idolized. Our obsession however was not the world’s. After poor sales, the band broke up in 1999. I recently discovered Dundon is now the principle in a law firm.
Bassists become lawyers. Bands don’t make it. Dads drudge with dad stuff. But also, here and now, in my own getaway cruiser, the Z3, change is beauty. Change is life.
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Obviously this wasn’t a super food-focused piece (I did make pizza!). That’s because it’s a cross post from my other newsletter, F1Fanatic, the thoughts of a Formula 1 obsessed American. As you can see, I don’t write only about racing, or if I do, I try to make it interesting for non-race fans. If you’re curious, check it out.
I love the way you write, Michael! Glad the Z3 is still enjoying the warm sun with you at the helm!!! Love you! Mom!
I have a similar obsession with my 2007 Pontiac Solstice GXP. Bought her on eBay, warts and all, but nothing beats shifting gears on LSD with the top down on a perfect spring morning.