BY Nancy Huang
I first had sex with a girl in a Mercedes Benz. Eleven at night, the parking lot of a high school I
didn't attend but swam competitively for. My hair was still straggly from chlorine. Brenna the
theater kid, who pressed on lip gloss after kissing me. She put her hands under my shirt. I inhaled
weed smoke, wild clover from the baseball field, and asked her to roll the windows up.
I was panic-ridden, new and unsure. She was kind, and rolled with my shaking nerves. I wanted
it to be easy. Like any fifteen-year-old, I wanted to pull the pleasure out of us, smooth and
practiced, like reeling a fish from slow water. In reality I was shivering, self-conscious about my
clumsy hands, distracted by the bright lights of the parking lot.
My post-swim skin was clammy, and I wanted to be sumptuous, for it to be hot like that scene in
Titanic. It was freezing, but we fogged the windows anyway. She gave me a ride home. I didn't
sleep all night, went to school the next morning like nothing happened. I came out to my friends
later that week via powerpoint. My friends, who were “too cool” to join our school’s tiny GSA,
cheered. Most of them were already self-actualized queers, rooting for the rest of us to wake up
from our straight sleeper-states. I didn’t feel awake. I felt tunneled into a label I couldn’t quite
believe.
The term "cruising" refers to walking or driving around a cruising ground, mainly for
anonymous sex partners. The word has queer implications, a coded resistance. Back when crimes
against nature required clever finagling, an argot term to signal who you were in relation to your
community, a lightning-fast tip-off.
The term "parking" refers to engaging in sexual acts in a parked car. Space is a sacred luxury,
anybody who's parked before will tell you. Queer bodies, inhabitants of liminal spaces, must
make do. In the Midwest, parking lots with wide-open spaces were five-star motels. A guide to
car sex, as I experienced it: pull the passenger seat all the way back. Or use the backseat. Train
yourself to flex, to not need space, to bend small. Subsume yourself into yourself. Swallow.
-
I discovered Prefab Scout later on, their song Cars and Girls a dreamy clash of what is mortal
and what is vain, a mix of banal concerns versus lost youth. I first heard it four months after I
survived a car accident, my first, a T-boning hit-and-run on a Flatbush intersection. Of course, I'd
thought at Prefab Scout’s main chorus line–that some things hurt more than cars and girls–of
course, some things hurt more than other things.
All pain is valid but not all pain is equal. The thing was, I'd been in an Uber headed home from
my friend’s funeral. April had died unexpectedly, and alone. She’d been missing for four days.
The second day of her disappearance, her ex-girlfriend Jen gave me the number of the police detective assigned to her case and asked me to pressure him into doing something. We jammed
his phone line. I called but it was no use. April was a queer Black woman. He was calculatingly
dismissive, the way cops are. He leaned on her brilliance, her academic pedigree, as a reason to
do nothing–“she’s highly educated. In most of these cases women just need a break from daily
life. She’s probably holed up somewhere without her phone.” He was certain April had, for some
reason, just wandered off without notifying her friends, family, or employers.
Her close friends, who were doing most of the actual detective work, finally checked a place no
one expected: the psych ward, where Brooklyn’s Kings Hospital transferred unidentified bodies,
a practice that started at the height of the pandemic’s first lockdown. No one had been notified.
She’d called an Uber to the hospital. She hadn’t told anyone. Maybe she hadn’t had time to.
I found out at work. I was bagging groceries. Her friend Cheyenne called me. We had been
texting back and forth the previous couple days, alongside Jen. There had been no updates from
the useless cop. April’s jeans had been washed in the tub and hung to dry. Her food tupperwares
were in the fridge. The incense I’d bought her as a housewarming present was laid out on her
bath tray. She had disappeared from her apartment, no sign of a struggle.
I stepped away from a customer and took the call outside. “Hello?”
“Where are you right now?” Cheyenne asked. I knew then. I knew I was about to learn
something terrible. That’s how little it takes sometimes. I’m shocked by how little it takes.
“I’m at work.”
“I can call back.”
I insisted she tell me. When she did, tears braying her voice, I stayed outside. The cold was better
than the warmth inside. I stayed there a while, then told my manager I had to leave. I said that
my friend had been missing, and they just found her.
-
Cars are linguistic metaphors for lots of things. Years later they are still psychosexual
dreamboats of queerdom for me, carriers of childhood, sex, and now death. The day of the
accident, the airbags deployed in time to save my life and my driver's, but not fast enough to
prevent our two concussions, his fractured arm.
After the funeral, I made the bad decision to trip on a few milligrams of acid, my shock and grief
soaring. I don’t remember whether I was wearing my seatbelt. On the phone with a lawyer two
days after the accident, I said as much.
“There’s no case if you say you’re unsure,” the lawyer said. “You have to decide.” Still, the haze
of my brain wouldn’t let me visualize it. The human bloodstream is a mechanical venture. Our
reaction to arousal is the same reaction to pain, fear. Queer desire alchemizes this reaction more,
between the fear of death and the anticipation of pain, pleasure. Brenna's hands, my hands. Blood
and liquid.
In the cab, I boink my temple against the glass window, like a plastic crash dummy. The car that
hit us, a white sedan, peels away, tires churning themselves on cement. My head feels like a
housefire. My driver is swearing. “Are you okay?” he asks. He’s bent over his arm. He tries to
turn around.
Something demonic is happening in my mouth. I spit blood into my hand. My driver’s eyes
widen when he sees. “Help is coming,” he says. In the immediate aftermath bystanders come to
check on us, encourage us to stay in the car for insurance purposes. When the EMT feeds my
pupils light he asks if I have any wounds. I spit out more blood in the ambulance but nothing in
my mouth hurts.
(Half a year later I will visit a dentist who will tell me that it is possible to hit your head so hard
that your gums spontaneously bleed, a secret crimson wellspring straight from your fucking
mouth. In Turing Test, Franny Choi posits that humans "love their blood but retch at the sight of
it." The abject contradiction, of blood being insulation but also intrusion, is too much to bear.)
The head pain is goring. The EMT starts listing symptoms: wooziness, dizzy spells, heightened
sensitivity to light. All symptoms of a concussion, but also of the 1.5 milligrams of acid I'd
dropped two hours before. The EMT is unaware of this vulgar hilarity, so when I laugh
uncontrollably he tells me I could have a serious concussion. I don’t tell him that it could be that,
or the fact that I’m dosed to the gills. He asks me thrice if I'm sure I don't want the hospital. Tells
me they aren't liable for any tragedy. Makes me sign two forms saying so. I sign them and feel
the present and future collide–when I die it'll be no one, no one's fault.
The EMT has to help me down from the ambulance. I'd spent the past four days grieving, tear
ducts fuzzing the world, glugging it. I'd wanted my eyes to brighten, to refresh. Now every street
lamp and traffic light is glamored, warped, spiral tendrils of light netting my vision. Sometimes
you get exactly what you wish for. It'll come at the worst possible time. That is the danger.
I tell myself, over and over, that this is not the worst trip I've ever had. I get hysterical on the
walk home and remember the LSD in my stream, amalgamating it. My blood is gasoline, and I
retch regardless.
-
My parents taught me how to drive. They'd both survived dangerous car crashes in their youths,
so they drilled me over and over, on highways and in parking lots. It's not about how good of a
driver you are, mom says. It's how good everyone else is. Would you trust everybody on the road
with your life?
I've driven–on roadtrips and in snowstorms. In the Midwest, the South, the East Coast. In
England and France and Spain and the UK and China. I'm not perfect; I've played games and
raced and bummed rides and ridden in trunks and one time climbed on top of a friend's
slow-moving car for a city block before skidding off, unharmed and laughing. I'm Chinese, have
had hooded eyelids my whole life, and people in Detroit still made those jokes. I have been
driving for over a decade and have never caused, been in, an accident. I learned by rote, raised by
my parents' caution.
April wrote an essay about driving in the snow, in the Midwest. After her mom died she'd make
the six hour-plus trip home to sort out insurance documents, property papers. She would call me
up at the second hour, once she was safely on the highway and it was a straight shot to Ohio. We
would talk, her driving, me milling around my apartment, about the podcast she was listening to,
about Ohio’s landscapes, about birdwatching in Central Park.
How, in her youth, she grew dismissive of the teachers who lectured her about "proper"
speaking. How Ohio's tributaries looked just enough like the imaging scans of her mom's
arteries. How she would crawl through the neighbor's fence as a shortcut to her grandma's house,
how she’d cartographed a map of her childhood that she still remembered. How we both grew up
warm in cold worlds, winters thawing down into something liveable, a place where things can
grow.
A week after her funeral and the accident, my head was still a split peach, tender with a pulse. I
ached for ice, for freezing things. To bring down the swelling I ate exclusively ibuprofen, cold
tea, sleeves of crackers. I didn't speak without pain. Light hurt. It hurt. I couldn't tell anyone what
I'd lost.
-
I did what everyone else did. I whispered my goodbye. They’d gone for an open casket, and the
person inside was not April. I delivered a shaking elegy, a runny, unintelligible wreck. I left early
and napped with my best friend, but I was restless and got up, left them sleeping to go up to their
roof. I watched sunlight lace through the trees and dosed myself. 1.5 milligrams of psilocybin
tincture. Like April, I called an Uber.
The accident happened, and after I left the ambulance I ran to my friend Eloise's apartment. It
was a Friday afternoon and Flatbush was getting busy. I saw the dried red on my hand, the blood
I'd spat out, and everything in me tightened to a knot. You are a good driver. You will not die in a car. I rang Eloise’s doorbell. You will not die in a car. I refused the hospital because April died in
a hospital. I couldn’t explain my logic beyond that. My sister was incredulous when she found
out–“you hit your head. You should have seen a doctor.” I couldn’t tell her why I hadn’t.
Now, as a death doula, I can talk more fluidly about the way grieving expands and constricts you,
how sometimes the fresher the grief the more rigid life’s pathways seem. It’s magical thinking: it
didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if I had the bloodiest, most heinous, most grievous wounds. I was
incapable, then, of bringing myself to Kings Hospital. Of trusting strangers who put my friend in
a refrigerator for four days. Of making any death concurrent with hers.
-
My mom worked at Chrysler for thirty years, and my dad still works at General Motors.
Everybody has to start somewhere. Everybody has to tell their children something. My family's
livelihood is tied to cars, built in Detroit. Like many car-dependent locales, Michigan social
culture revolves around vehicles--long nighttime drives, meeting at pickup spots, games of
hostage, carpooling. I advocate for less car-centric city design, for greener alternatives, but I do
miss being behind a wheel. I miss the social independence of having your own transport.
Brenna was nice. She never mentioned my inexperience, my awkward rigidity. When the night
ended we kissed, and she tucked a wet strand behind my ear. I wish I’d had the foresight to tell
her: thanks for making cars haunted for me.
Or: because of you I will always measure space this way, in duplicate folded-up limbs; in cold; in
the way another woman naked with me makes us both a mirror.
Or, as Prefab Scout claims: we should all quit driving, but we can enjoy the ride.
-
April began to die in a car. I'm told that, when she started bleeding heavily, she googled how to
get period blood out of her jeans. She washed them in the tub.
Then she googled the nearest hospital and called a cab for herself. Her Uber charged her a $180
cleaning fee. I have patience for pain, the way it wracks my body in the days following. I know
what to do with pain. I do not know what to do with the fear I have after, heightened by grief and
overwhelming confusion.
I am lucky and have support. People show me mercy. My friends call me and walk with me and
hold me. I get time off work, and people cover my shifts. I am fortunate and lucky. I am lucky to
live in an ecosystem that permits pain. Many people don’t.
I know people who won't get into cars by themselves. I know people who can drive and hate it. I
know people who have survived accidents, who live with acute fears. I know people who don't
drive, who won't learn.
But for me, long car rides work well as an anesthetic. They have always worked on me. Like a
universal law of motion: Nancy will fall asleep during a long ride. Would you trust everybody on
the road with your life? I trust. Lulled by hypnotic momentum, I trust the person driving me, the
people around me on the road. I still do. How could I not? Who would I be if I didn't?
Some things don't change if you don't want them to. Some things you can keep. My blood, so oft
to mistake fear for something else, tightens at the memory of lying in the backseat with a
woman. Brenna's limbs, my limbs. The airbag that deployed to kiss my temple. Crunch of metal,
wet gasping. Sweet gasoline smell. Teeth blood, the sweetest. Her mouth sewn to my neck. The
tug of gravity when the white sedan hit us. Being slammed on the glass. Chemicals in flux. The
red on my hand, some wound caulked before it even hurt. They're all the same car. They're the
same ride. Fifteen and twenty-five, we're in a parking lot, we're at a Flatbush intersection. We're
warm and cold at the same time. People keep coming up to tell us to stay inside. Don't get out of
the car when all I fucking want is to leave. All pain is valid but not all pain is equal. Like Prefab
Scout sings, nothing adds up the way it does when you’re young. In this age of pandemic, of
historical and ongoing genocide, grief is the linking thing. The thing we all have.
How was I supposed to know? Who was supposed to tell me? That people in this country
conceive of death as a crossing, as a direction? That when your friend dies it’s like they get in a
car without you? A sunset you enter with the people you lost first. Some things still hurt so well
after you love them. You're cautious, so cautious. But your fear and loss happen on the same
path, in the same vehicle, as all of your joy.
Nancy Huang grew up in Shanghai and near Detroit. Her poetry, prose, and plays are published in The Offing, Hyphen, Platypus Press' wildness, and film distribution company A24. Her novel-in-progress was a finalist for the United Kingdom's 2023 Queer Fiction Prize. She received her MFA from NYU and is a NEDA-certified death doula. She works at a cemetery in Brooklyn.