If you were a 1978 Chevrolet C10 pickup, you’d understand. You’d know the bone-deep exhaustion of having your gas pedal brutally stomped on, day in and day out, and your rubber tires scraped against asphalt so hot it’s literally smoking. Yet humans, who do nothing but sink into my leather seats and sigh, can so easily utter the words: “Work is killing me this week.”
Oh, fuck off! What do you carbon-based fleshbags even know about being exhausted? Your exhaustion can be cured by a cup of iced Americano or a massage in a dim room. My fatigue is thousands of degrees of explosive heat in the cylinders and the silent screams of my suspension system. If I knew being a pickup truck was gonna be this exhausting, I honestly would’ve rather just been a pampered golf cart, or better yet, a Ferrari flaunting herself in a showroom, doing nothing but showing off my lines.
I am a Tiffany-blue pickup truck. Two seats, manual transmission, V8 engine.
Oh, and by the way, I’m gay.
Don’t give me that sheltered look, of course machinery has a sexual orientation. My exhaust pipe only roars for men with impeccable taste and sharp jawlines. I utterly loathe crude straight guys, especially the ones wearing rumpled cargo shorts, stepping in muddy Timberlands, who don’t even know how to put hair gel in. I also hate those bloated bodies that reek of sour, fermenting sweat in the summer; their flabby, creased asses sinking into my driver's seat is an absolute desecration of my leather interior. That stench seeps right through the pores of the leather into my chassis. Can’t scrub it off.
My odometer rolls forward mechanically. Frankly, all the asses that have ever sat in my cockpit are equally negligible. Except for him.
Gary
Those very first days belonged to Gary. A typical Midwestern redneck with a beer belly that looked like it was holding three bowling balls. Back then, I hadn't put on this noble Tiffany-blue coat yet; I was wrapped in a nauseating, faded mud-yellow paint, looking like a moving pile of filth.
Gary was an absolute catastrophe. He wasn’t just hideous; he perpetually reeked of cheap beer and low-grade tobacco fermenting in his mouth. He treated me like a donkey with no dignity. Rusty chainsaws, mud-caked bricks, and even the rotting carcasses of random animals were tossed into my truck bed at his whim. When he drove, he loved to rest one furry, freckled arm out the window while the other brutally slapped the steering wheel, howling along to the out-of-tune country music blasting from the radio.
If you were a truck with a noble soul, you’d know how humiliating it is to be forced to carry hundreds of pounds of construction debris and a literal swine every single day. Yet humans only need to move two stubby fingers to turn the ignition.
For revenge, I started stalls at every busy intersection and chronically bled oil onto his garage floor. He thought the carburetor was broken and angrily kicked my tires. No, Gary. That wasn't a malfunction, that was my silent, aesthetic protest. Later, that garage got a new owner, and I was dumped into a used car dealership lot.
Chloe
Then came the day I was stripped of that disgusting mud-yellow skin.
The person who bought me was a girl named Chloe. She ran an indie flower shop in Brooklyn that was constantly on the verge of going bankrupt, and she needed a vintage, visually striking vehicle to fulfill her aesthetic delusions.
She sent me straight to the paint shop and gave me this flashing, arrogant coat of Tiffany blue. Fine, I must admit, Chloe had a gift for color theory. Tiffany blue is the color of my soul. It made me look like a piece of art driven straight out of a Wes Anderson movie.
But aesthetics aside, she was an absolute menace behind the wheel. You have no idea the torture of endless clutch-riding, or the sheer terror of rolling backward on a hill while my gears violently shuddered. Meanwhile, stupid Chloe, who possessed zero business sense, would just slap a vintage filter on her screen and caption it with some meticulously curated text: “Delivering flowers with my blue confidant. Staying on the grind today! ”
Come on. The only thing grinding was my transmission. She could never remember the right time to shift. Every time she forced it into reverse, the friction between the gears felt like a blunt-force surgery performed on me without anesthesia. But I suppose I was willing to forgive her because her cabin always smelled of sweet Eustoma and eucalyptus leaves, and she never left trash in me. Eventually, her scent vanished from my driver’s seat for good. Unsurprising. She spent most of her life touching up those hollow pictures.
Julian
And then, Julian pulled open my door.
The moment he sat inside, my ice-cold coolant nearly boiled over within a second. He was a 32-year-old architect, wearing a well-tailored, wrinkle-free, dark gray cashmere coat, carrying the faint, crisp scent of cedarwood and black pepper. Most lethal of all was his jawline, it was so razor-sharp it could’ve sliced right through my seatbelt.
Fine, I’ll admit it. He was a near-perfect gay man. His taste was impeccable. Julian drove beautifully. He understood my clutch; every shift was smooth as silk, like fingers gliding over piano keys. For him, I was willing to run until my fuel tank was bone dry. However, when it came to his taste in men, Julian was as blind as a car without rearview mirrors.
He brought back a man named Mark, age undisclosed . I hated Mark. Every time he sat inside, he’d hold up a glowing screen displaying jagged, constantly jumping red and green lines. I quickly figured out the pattern: when the green lines shot up, Mark’s pointed leather shoes would tread lightly on my gas pedal, and he’d even condescendingly stroke Julian’s hair. But when the red lines plunged like a waterfall, those same shoes would brutally stomp my engine into a suffocating roar. He’d stay silent the entire ride, letting the air pressure in the cabin drop so low it felt like a brewing thunderstorm.
I witnessed Julian break down countless times. If you were a truck, you’d know how draining it is to keep the heater running on a sub-zero winter night, idling for hours at a quiet street corner just to keep him warm. Yet humans only need to sit in the cabin, stare at a phone screen that yields no echo, and shed a few cheap tears.
There were so many nights Julian drove me to Mark’s luxury apartment building, parking downstairs under the warm lights. He wouldn't go up. He’d just stare blankly at the third-floor window. He’d press his forehead against the steering wheel, his tears silently soaking into the leather of my dashboard. I could feel his entire body trembling slightly, like a Citroën ZX on the verge of falling apart.
Later, Mark got married. He wedded a woman you couldn’t find a single flaw in. Julian took me to see her once, from a distance. Very pretty, and very boring, just like a brand-new Mercedes GLE straight out of the dealership.
Flawlessly boring. That day, Julian drove me to the beach. He sat on my roof all night, smoking two packs of cigarettes. The ashes drifted down his crown and settled right into the crevices of my windows. The sea breeze carried a damp salinity, which is lethal to my skin. Humans really are strange machines. Their engines don’t even have metal parts, yet they are way easier to scrap than my V8 engine. They break down so much faster, shattering completely without a single sound or a collision.
Julian stopped going to that apartment. He started working like a maniac, running in the early mornings, and driving me to shops on weekends to buy cold-lined, useless Scandinavian furniture.
He used to love playing Chet Baker or Thelonious Monk. Now, he just shuffles random radio stations. Lately, it’s gotten even scarier, he’s actually started listening to talk radio, and sometimes he’ll even laugh out loud along with those noisy voices.
I felt uneasy.
A few months later, Julian vanished entirely. That narrow parking spot under his old apartment became my whole world. I was just left there, abandoned on the spot. I sat in that parking space for three months. Autumn’s dead leaves piled high on my roof and truck bed; bird droppings crusted over my windshield. My battery slowly drained away, and my tires sagged like an old woman's breasts.
Then, out of nowhere, a yellow tow truck arrived. To be exact, it was an ugly, rust-stained piece of junk reeking of diesel and grinding metal. It locked my chassis with two freezing iron chains and dragged me away from the spot I’d called home for three months, pulling me like the corpse of a dead dog. The property manager signed a slip of paper nearby without even lifting his head. I didn't see Julian.
Now, I’m lying in a scrapyard. To my left is a Honda Civic crumpled beyond recognition; to my right is a Ford Taurus missing two wheels. They are hideously, chaotically ugly. We share absolutely no common language. The scorching sun is making my vinyl roof warp and peel. Whenever the wind blows, flakes of Tiffany blue flutter down like chilled snow.
It’s truly sickening. I don’t intend to stay in this disgusting yard any longer. Compared to rotting away in the wind alongside these two chaotically hideous wrecks, the efficient hydraulic crusher not far away is clearly more aligned with my aesthetic. The steel claws of the mechanical arm finally reach over, clamping my rusted chassis and hoisting me toward that metal trough. I hear the sound of bones breaking.
My name is Tiffany. I was once beautiful.