Make Love in My Car | Episode 1: Thanks for Smashing
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Make Love In My Car is a regular music column by Kendra Allen. The name of the column is a reference to the song “Make Out in My Car” by Moses Sumney. The slight change in meaning is intended to amplify the camaraderie, comedy, and closeness of riding in a car with a great playlist, whether alone or with someone else. In this episode, she writes about Doja Cat and how listening to good songs in cars makes you wanna die a lil bit.
My cousin Breeze be driving like a bat out of hell and she don’t get it from her mama. We’re leaving the liquor store. Or maybe we’re leaving the smash room—I’m not sure; time is fickle and reality is rage. It’s chilly outside, but I have on a crop top cause it’s cozy in her car. Being Texans won’t really allow us to believe in umbrellas or winter coats, even though it’s raining a timely tune. It’s loud in here thanks to the music, but as my senses start to heighten, I hear it less and less. The melodies are replaced by sounds outside of the car, like the tires slapping against the slick concrete or the sigh the windshield wiper releases before it swipes left.
I ate too many brownies last night and I ate too many cookies today. This is my last trip to Houston. I know everything ends how it begins. I get tested and drive here as a birthday present to myself. I tell Breeze I’m coming but only to smoke her weed, then eat her mama’s food, and that’s exactly what I do. I tell her I been traveling to them my whole life and it makes no sense cause everybody got cars and she says yea, yea, just come this last time and I tell her if they wanna see me after Sunday, they better hop they ass into one and this is just the motion.
I’m shotgun in her white Chevy Cruz—a car whose guts smell of ashes and air freshener. She’s a stoner. It’s rare I actually smoke, mostly because I got asthma, but really I just don’t feel the effects. My friend tells me it don’t work because it’s a head high and I be thinking too much. See, you like a body high, she says—which is why I taught myself how to make edibles. And that’s too high—which is true, and probably why I believe I can hear a bell ring before the stoplight changes from yellow to red. If I can’t feel my entire body vibrating, I don’t really see the point. And if I’m getting high and it don’t last for an entire workday, I don’t wanna do it at all. This nature of excess is the reason I had already decided I’m done with it once this trip is over. I do things obsessively until I no longer care and I think this means I got an addictive personality but really I just got an addict family, both sides. If I’m drinking, I’m drinking to get drunk. If I’m getting high, I’m getting high enough to eat a star. And now neither satisfies me and I wanna try shrooms, so maybe weed really is the gateway they said it was all along and I should’ve worn that sticker. Regardless, I’ve done enough drugs this year that I’ve exhausted all possibility.
You ain’t supposed to be getting high to think more. You gotta allow your brain to relax, she tells me. But I don’t know what allow or relax means; the ceiling is just a blur.
My fingertips caress the fabric of Breeze’s roof trying not to slide over into the passenger car door as she makes a Fast & Furious turn. The rain is slow and sweet now, the exact thing I wish to wake up to every morning, the rhythm of it turning sluggish enough to be poetic.
Can you play “Streets”? I ask real fast like a child asking a mama can their friends spend the night last minute. It’s been on the tip of my tongue for minutes—I was trying not to complain since what’s been playing ain’t bad; it just ain’t for this moment, this weather. She chuckles, probably because she know I been holding a suggestion in forever. I don’t even care about being predictable as long as she picks up that phone.
Hey Siri, play “Streets,” she says. And if I had to think about the love I value most, it’s this one—her trusting my instinct. I don’t even mention how her talking to Siri for everything be getting on my nerves. She ask Siri shit Siri don’t need to be knowing about, but I be quiet because this is important.
Now playing “Streets” by Doja Cat, Siri announces.
I wouldn’t call myself a big fan of Doja Cat, but I do think she’s an extreme and exceptional talent who’s probably good at most things she tries simply because she tries. Plus, “Rules” was already a song worthy of the rafters in my book by the time her album Hot Pink dropped. Before she blew, I knew of her and enjoyed a few of her songs—specifically “Wine Pon You”—but I never sat with a full project. When I first listened to this big-label release, it was cool; I thought the album was trendy and did its job of solidifying her place in the pop world, but I knew I wouldn’t revisit most of it.
So imagine my surprise when I’m minding my business and I hear the blessing that is “Streets” for the first time. I sit straight up because for one, the track samples “Streets Is Callin’,” by B2K, from the You Got Served soundtrack—which honestly, has some gems on it. If you know, you know—shout out to “Sprung.”
Hol’ UP, I say aloud and alone. Twenty seconds into the song, I know I need to hear this behind the wheel because the way the beat drops is so crazy, my heart speeds up. The car is the test after the headphones; I need both intimate settings to make sure I love the thing as much as I do. I immediately download it and scream into the ether of my half-empty apartment WHHHHHHYYYY like somebody died.
It’s me.
I immediately text it to Breeze simply saying BRO.
I know this is her lane. It’s smooth enough to smoke to and alt enough not to be considered R&B. I’m a lover of most music but especially R&B. Really I just love to sing, to mimic vocalists for a pastime even though I ain’t good at it. I find it fascinating how the good ones use their voices as instruments, manipulating emotions and memory in the process. Breeze on the other hand loves to say she don’t like R&B “like that”
because she don’t got no respect. So of course, all I do is try and change her mind, saying that shit is not only embarrassing but I take it personally. Maybe she means she doesn’t like what we all traditionally love about the genre: the begging and whining and wheezing and moaning all up and throughout the tracks that became the quintessential sound of our 90s. But even some of the stuff in the subgenres she tolerates ain’t that far off, so I’m never fully understanding. I send her things anyway and hope for the blues.
A MF HIT, she responds five minutes later.
My bat-swinging form is impeccable. As a birthday present, she takes me to Smash Therapy, a place whose slogan is “For everyday people who need a ‘break.’ ”
It’s all pretty self-explanatory—you pay for a room where you smash the abandoned junk inside of it. On the website it says a referral from a mental health professional is PREFERRED, but they also have a disclaimer stating how they ain’t a therapeutic clinic, psychiatric care center, or healthcare facility of any kind and that their services are not recommended for those who suffer from severe mental health illnesses, so I’m confused about its intentions. Regardless, I tell Breeze to get the cheapest room for ten minutes cause ain’t nobody got the energy or upper body strength to be swinging on nothing or nobody for anything longer than that.
The nice lady working there leads us to the door that’s a literal closet after showing us where all the gear is. We each grab a different set of weapons, so that way we can share and switch; there are bats and hammers and two-by-fours and metal poles and our feet when she closes us all inside and starts saying what I think is a script as I look around for the speaker she said I could connect my phone to.
In here, you can scream, you can yell, you can cry, you can sit. Whatever it is. You can be anything in this room, hit anything in this room, just don’t hit the walls. Because then we gotta fine you.
We tighten our helmets and secure our face shields and goggles. The room is called “Break A Leg,” and I think these names are so bad that they’re good. There are sets of china in all the corners, a wooden chair by the door, and a monitor in the middle. There’s an old printer in the middle, too, that’s sitting on top of a tire that I’m not sure how we’d go about dismantling but I’m regretting wearing white shoes. I’m regretting this all a bit after she gives her speech because what I’m not finna do is be crying in front of my cousin. Even if our relationship has blossomed from childhood’s I hate her to adulthood’s you the only cousin I got left with some sense, so we gotta be best friends, we already know more about each other than we’d prefer to, but I don’t need her knowing me like that.
Where is the speaker? I ask the lady, and she points to the top left-hand corner of the smash room’s wall—there’s a little wooden punnet square housing the same kind of speaker I use in my shower at home. I take my phone out of the lining of my pants because they ain’t got no pockets. I panic a lil as I scroll because I don’t got time to think of the perfect song, but make a pointless childish joke anyways. Breeze makes a joke too, but her voice deeper than mine, so it sounds grown-up, but I think we both be deadass.
I love y’all’s energy, the lady says. I think she can tell.
By the time Doja Cat’s second chorus comes in, I look towards Breeze, whose eyes stay in the dungeons, and hold my left hand up and out like I’m getting ready to direct a left turn at the light. The windshield wipers are flapping as fast as they can go.
Do you HEAR this?! I wonder aloud, pointing at the stereo instead.
We’ve heard this.
Hundreds of times. Just like we’ve been in a car on backstreets hundreds of times. But I have to make sure what I’m experiencing ain’t a solitary moment. It feels like somebody is hugging me tight, all biceps.
Ok calm down, my cousin tells me in that same voice, her nails tapping against the screen—texting.
My favorite line from the song, hands down, is this one:
You held me so down
so down I never grew
up.
I’m not completely sure if Doja is saying “oh” or “up” at the end of that, but “up” just catapults the lyrics, so that’s what I sing. “Up” is ascension, “up” just feels right, “up” explains why I’m bent over at the waist letting all the blood rush to my neck because my seatbelt locks and keeps it all away from my head as she sings about being stuck in the middle. I kinda whisper it . . . Oh my God . . . and mush the perimeter of my face inward with my fingers. It’s so . . . I get louder, my nose and mouth buried in my palms . . . GOOD. I throw back my neck, shaking
my head like a metronome, tryna hold whatever weird sound is waiting to be let out of my clenched teeth. I imagine myself leveling up.
Super Saiyan.
Kinetic Kendra.
Water Warrior.
Rain Recluse. If I was in my car, I’d let down every window, rain and all. If I wasn’t this high, I’d let the seat back as far as it could go and lay, but I think my body will break, simply fall apart, if I make any more quick movements.
We definitely hit the walls a few times
and the bang bounces off so loud I think the world is ending
Breeze steps back and tells me to pick what I wanna hit first in the smash room because even though she’s the oldest, it’s my day. I hit whatever is in the middle of the room because I like confrontation, but the impact ain’t strong enough, so nothing really breaks until I apply everything I learned from softball. I bring the aluminum bat over my head with both hands gripped on top of one another and aim it straight back down over all the junk at my feet.
Boom, the monitor cracks.
I crash it down again.
And again.
And one more time before she starts giving me words of affirmation, ok den sis, advising me to let shit go. The pointless-but-loud anthems I choose to play ain’t working, so I take a few breaks tryna find the mood. Gunna? Nah. Dolph? Nope. Not knowing stresses me out. You know a nigga going to therapy when they start talking bout boundaries every five seconds. At one point she yells out let that colorism go! and I bust out laughing midswing because she’s a child and it’s all so stupid but it’s not.
I move on to the plates, pick up the hammer, smash them with ease and start to understand the hope of ease. I catch Breeze in my peripheral and she is fucking that room up. I don’t even think she thought about the music once, and I’m both jealous and proud to see the application of her hard work in real time. I go back over to the monitor and destroy it fully, not wanting to let my team down.
I need her to collab with Kendrick, I say to no one in particular because Breeze is only halfway listening, always. But I’ve felt this way since the moment I first heard “Rules” . . . or like Smino . . . I add, and look out the window. I see nothing because this nigga is going ninety in a residential area. The entire landscape is fuzzy. I see nothing because the rain is still replacing the clear. I’m thinking again, about how much I hate group work mostly. But, imagine. Kendrick, Doja, and Smino are all artists who approach songs with different personalities—they have so many styles—but mostly they each have this unique ability to exist and dominate in and out of any pocket. They individually create fantastic lives for themselves that are so distant from expectation, and that is my definition of stimulating. Bro, imagine. Imagine if I was that fearless each time I have to start from scratch. Imagine if they came together. I need it. If not music, I at least need them to venture off into voice acting.
I wonder who they manager is we need to talk—I think this to myself.
When it’s two minutes left on the clock, we share the printer, hitting it with so much force that finally the tape disassembles out the middle and the speaker falls to the ground. Our endurance is trash, but once it’s over, I think we both realize we could have always kept going. I feel no pain in my knees, back, or brain, even when I realize all I had to do was put “Caught Out There” by Kelis on a loop, the opportunity now beyond me.
There’s a loop playing in the background on “Streets” that I can’t identify. The chords—I don’t know what they are exactly—but I think they’re from a keyboard. A church organ even. Maybe it’s an electric guitar, but I feel it on the bottom of my feet and sometimes in my shoulder blades. I once tweeted this is a song you can cry to, dance to, smoke to, drink to, write to, drive to,
and we speeding. And we living. And I think about how Breeze’s license plate number is her name, and I wonder if she ever wishes to change it now that it’s known. But I don’t ask because she’ll blame it on how I’m scaling the earth. So we sing instead.
Like you
I feel the urge to place my fingers under her chin but I don’t do that either.
Like you
All she gone say is Dawg, what the fuck is wrong with you and it’d be too awkward to say I love you
Like you
So I put them under my own chin and try not to get dizzy.
Oh, I found it hard to find someone
Not because I fear her foot on the pedal or our family’s tendency to cuss at cars in our way
Like you
But I feel my mind ramping back up
Like you
And even though everything is dangerous, I’m never worried
about what could happen to us when we are here.
Kendra Allen was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She’s the author of award-winning essay collection When You Learn the Alphabet as well as The Collection Plate, poems forthcoming from Ecco summer 2021. Her other work can be found on or in Repeller, Southwest Review, Frontier, The Rumpus, and more. Sometimes she tweets @KendraCanYou.
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