I swear, I am cursed.

In modern America, people depend on their cars. Cars are not a luxury or a perk, they are a necessity.

People love their cars, and in return, the car gets you where you want and need to go. I hate cars, and in return, every car I’ve ever owned has failed me, humiliated me, and drained my scarce financial resources.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, there are only two kinds of people on earth. Those who understand cars and those who don’t. I am solidly in the latter category. Auto dealers and mechanics can sense this about me.

When my car breaks down, approximately every ten minutes, I am forced to go to a mechanic whose eyes get as big as dinner plates as soon as I walk in the door. You can almost see the dollar signs floating in his head. He is thinking, “I can tell this kid anything, and he’ll believe it. Maybe I can afford that new boat this year after all.”

My current car is a 1991 Ford Escort, which for anyone else but me would be a reliable car. My brother, who is mechanically knowledgeable, helped me pick it out and negotiate with the dealer. It’s a good thing he did. If left to my own devices, I would have come home with a rusted-out Yugo and would be making payments until the day I die.

On Sunday, my car broke down again for the 157th time in two years. The sticker in the window says I don’t need to change my oil for another 100 miles, so I don’t understand how anything could be wrong with it.

What is most irritating is that the car is five years old and it sucks. I have a friend who owns a car that was made in the 1970s. Those were the glory days of the American automobiles, when cars were about as big as my apartment. It is a two-tone blue monstrosity and it runs fine.

Traditionally, I have owned American cars. This is due to the fact that my dad is a UAW member. Also, I can’t afford a foreign car that wouldn’t break down when I abuse it through such actions as starting the engine.

I had a Malibu that had an interesting recurring problem. The driver’s side door would from time to time stop working, forcing me to crawl out through the passenger’s side. Boy, there is no cooler feeling in the world than pulling into the high school parking lot and having to crawl out the passenger door.

It was great on dates, too. My girlfriend tried to be understanding, but every time I had to crawl in the car before she could get in, I could tell she was thinking, “Why am I dating this loser?”

My first car was a Monte Carlo. It was ugly, but at least it didn’t run very well. I had it for about a year before some serious mechanical things that I don’t understand started to go wrong. I figured this out because the air filter developed this nasty habit of catching fire.

Even with my limited mechanical knowledge, I knew that when parts of your car catch fire, something is probably wrong. So I took it to a mechanic, who told me I needed a new engine. As an alternative, he gave me a list of things that needed to be fixed, which was a list of an entire engine, including parts I had replaced weeks before.

I had a similar problem this summer when my car wouldn’t start. I called a mechanic who came out to the parking lot where my car was parked. He pulled up in what was probably the first station wagon ever made, and it appeared that he hadn’t cleaned the fast food bags out of the car since the day he brought it home. Snide remarks about his car ran through my head until I realized his ugly car was running, and my good-looking car was not.

He proceeded to tell me about the electronics degree he had received from some trade school, which I guess was supposed to fill me with confidence in his ability. He hooked some meter up to my battery, and the numbers did whatever he thought they would do, which seemed to prove his theory that the battery posts needed cleaned.

As he explained all this to me, I tried not to let him on to the fact that I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I nodded my head and said “Hmmmm.”

Apparently he was not fooled by my ruse, because after charging me $40 to rub steel wool on my battery posts, he told me that if the car failed to start again, it would mean I needed a new battery, which he would be happy to sell me. He actually thought I was going to keep paying him to guess at what was wrong with my car until he got it right. When the car failed to start two days later, I had it jump-started and drove straight to Sears, where I got a new battery.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get my car from the shop. I’m beginning to wish I had gone with the rusted-out Yugo.

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Steven Martens is a senior in journalism mass communication from Cedar Rapids.