A lesson learned the hard way.

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Brakes don't work when a car is airborne.

It's a simple lesson in physics. It's the clearest memory of the crash. My foot on the brake pedal. That dependable, sturdy chunk of steel mashed all the way to the floor. The car gliding through the damp December air. The stereo playing 311 at an eardrum-rattling volume. Seventeen-year-old blood pumping through my veins.

The speedometer needle pointed somewhere north of 75 miles per hour before the car went Pegasus. My friend's Camaro, much to my delight, was a distant set of darting headlights in my rear-view mirror. Gene, my best friend and copilot, had queued up the track. We were immortal.

A small rise catapulted us through the air, sending my Honda across the center line on a diagonal. It was a 1999 Accord coupe with an all-leather interior and a V6 under the hood that churned out 200 horsepower. The dual overhead cams sang an intoxicating siren song when the forest-green dart bounded above 100 miles per hour. With slight hesitation, the automatic transmission would lurch into a lower gear when you stomped the accelerator. That pause was the car saying, in its own mechanized language, "OK, you want it? You've got it, asshole."

The Accord nosedived through a telephone pole at speed. Nearly all of the glass surfaces shattered on impact. The stereo cut out and left us gasping for the air that had been knocked out of our lungs in the silence. When I could breathe again, I asked Gene if he was OK. He said yes, and got out of the passenger door. To this day -- I don't know why -- I crawled through the safety glass, which littered the leather interior like a fresh snowfall, and out the passenger door.

The pole I had plowed down carried a transformer. I didn't know it then, but a quarter of the town had just lost power. Months later, Gene would point out that there were live wires draped across my car door, and a lake of flammable transformer fluid had fanned out below the car. Had I exited through the driver's side, I would have been electrocuted or burned alive.

Instead, I was fine. But Gene's sternum was broken -- an injury that plagues him to this day. A few days went by before I learned the severity of his injury and his pain. There was no justice to it. I was the one who deserved to be broken. And what if I had killed him, I asked myself then, and nearly every time I start a car to this day. What if I had killed my best friend?

Before I wrote this, I texted Gene to ask if he'd be comfortable with me sharing this experience. He wrote, "Of course you know my POV is that I was just as guilty; either of us would have been stupid enough to do exactly the same thing in the driver's seat at that point in time."

It's true, though it does little to assuage my guilt and remorse. I recall our car crash often. I remember my eyes darting from Gene, and back to the twisted steel, from Gene, and back to the splintered telephone pole, from Gene, and back to the snowfall of auto glass.

I remember that we are more like glass than steel.

Zen and the Art of Chevy Cavalier Maintenance.

My wife has a 2003 Chevy Cavalier that her parents gave her, so now, I have a 2003 Chevy Cavalier, too. On our first date, I got my first glimpse of it: cobalt blue with its fading and cracked University of Georgia super G plastered to its rear window. I thought then that she needed a new car, and that was four years ago.

The amazing thing is, aside from some cosmetic damage, there is nothing wrong with the car. Sure, it sounds like a broken hairdryer, the driver's sun visor gave up and is now lying on the passenger side floor, and the dash has a fist-sized hole in it from where a shady Jersey City mechanic did a curbside speedometer repair -- but there's something endearing about the Blue Bastard. Maybe it's the memory of my wife -- then my girlfriend -- pulling up to my Montclair apartment listening to the first mix tape I made her.

Now that I'm her husband, I feel like it has fallen to me to do husbandly things, like keep the damn thing running. This is no hardship. I enjoy working on cars, though I'm only slightly north of inept when it comes to auto repair. The Blue Bastard has had its way with me. Twice.

There's a keloid across the back of my right hand from the passenger side brake caliper. One of the bolts holding it in place would not budge. With all of my weight bearing down on the allen wrench, it popped out of its socket, and the back of my hand scraped across the caliper, taking a good chunk of flesh with it.

Most recently, the oil drain plug got the better of me. Since I began doing basic car maintenance, I've only owned Japanese vehicles. Working on an American car, I assumed the drain plug would be a standard size. Wrong. I stripped the 13 mm bolt down to about 12 mm before giving up and realizing the error of my ways hours later. Forty dollars later for a set of bolt extractors and a new drain plug, the lesson has been learned. (Never use a crescent wrench for anything on an automobile. And never assume anything, no matter how logical.)

By its very definition, maintaining my wife's Chevy Cavalier is a labor of love. It gives me great satisfaction to do these small things, personally, to keep her moving and keep her safe. And I appreciate her patience when I say I'm going to attempt a repair, and the job comes in late and over budget.

Eventually, the Blue Bastard will give up the ghost. My wife will get the hybrid she wants and my Chevy maintenance days will be over. Though I will be released from my Cavalier custodial duties, I will relinquish them with a heavy heart.

Plus, there's no way I'll be getting near the inner workings of any hybrid. Electricity terrifies me.