Ode to the Omni

Recently, I was having a conversation when the venerable Dodge Omni was mentioned. Omni, Prince of Sedans! That brought back memories.

Though the first car I drove was not an Omni (it was an accursed minivan), the Omni is the car I will remember most fondly. It was my dad's car, and by the time I started driving it, it had well over 150,000 miles on it.

Not that you'd know, since the odometer only measured miles in the tens of thousands.

It had a manual transmission, four doors, and an old-school steel frame that held its small body to the road like glue. Though it lacked airbags and a side mirror, it more than made up for that in unquantifiable amounts of moxie. The summers may have been a little hot, since the Omni did not deem me fit for use of an air conditioner, and the winters were a bit cold (what with its erratically functioning heater), but I loved that car. I knew every rust spot and broken door handle on that vehicle. I knew just where to bang the dashboard to make the instrument lights come on, and I knew when to hit the gas at stop signs so the engine wouldn't die.

One day, while I was out dumpster diving with a friend, we happened upon a huge box full of stickers for various ski and snowboarding equipment. The ones that have always stuck with me the most were the ones for a company called Mambosok, perhaps because my friend decided to take it upon himself to apply as many as he could to to the exterior of the car while it was still in motion. Fortunately, the parental units decided it was a change for the better, and allowed us to plaster the entire box of stickers onto the car.

As an aside, I don't think I've ever actually seen a Mambosok product. If the company would like to send me some stuff for all those years of free advertising, I wouldn't complain.

The sticker phenomenon rapidly snowballed from there. Another friend obtained a box of super-reflective "telephone pole" stickers, which gave us numbers (666) and letters (BAD LAD, RAD CAR) to play with. Sometimes I would come back to the car from work and notice that strangers had applied their own personal decals to the vehicle. A Jerry Garcia bear here, a favorite band sticker there.

Then came the two crowning jewels of the Omni's increasingly bizarre collection of accessories. First, two ENORMOUS stickers thrown out by some vitamin store, which had still frames of runners running. They came in strips, about 15 feet long and 2 feet tall. We applied two of them (one male, one female) to the top of the car. Now my car, the Omni, had racing stripes.

Then, to top it all off, we bungee corded a whole 10-point buck deer skull to the front bumper. Perfection.



The Omni seemed to endear itself to strangers. If I left the windows rolled down and it rained, a good Samaritan would roll them up. People would see me entering or exiting the vehicle and cheer for me. "Awesome car, man!"

One day, the really cute cashier at Chick-Fil-A that would always flirt with me found out that I was the guy with the Omni. "So... I saw you driving that sticker car." she said. "Yes, that's my car," I responded, swelling with pride. She wrinkled her nose. "I don't know how I feel about that."

Ah, well. You can't win 'em all.

My favorite group to show off the Omni to were the Taco Bell Ricers. For those of you that might be unaware, "Ricer" is a term for a rich teenager who makes unecessary modifications to his Honda Civic to make it look faster. You know the type - pointlessly large spoiler, five-point seatbelts, neon lights on the undercarriage. Apparently, all the best places they could think of to show off their phat rides were Taco Bell parking lots.

So, there they were, all examining the engines of the other cars like baboons determining which of them has the bluest bulbous butt cheeks, fighting over the opportunity to mate with the choicest of bejeweled lycra-clad she-ricers. We'd roll up in the Omni, ancient radio blasting NPR, the fur on deer skull waving like grain on the prairie. We'd go in, grab our tacos, and, like a practiced pit crew - we'd push-start the car, wave to the ricers, and be on our way.

See, we had better places to be than Taco Bell.

I did have a great plan to affix a temporary cardboard-and-duct tape spoiler to the car, but it proved to be unstable even at very low speed. Plus, I was worried the duct tape would take stickers off.

Over time, the Omni even began to appeal to my scientific sensibilities, as I got the opportunity to observe the various types of stickers responding to brutal weathering that they were not necessarily designed to endure. One band's sticker (Breaking Point, I think - warning, loud music) turned from bright red to bright yellow in almost a week. The racing stripes yellowed and became brittle. Some stickers faded completely.

The Mambosok decals, however, were never even fazed. Those were some tough stickers. The only way they'd ever come off the car was if the paint came with them, which it occasionally did.

Unfortunately, the Omni, like all things, eventually succumbed to entropy. It started innocently enough, when I noticed that the car was mysteriously absorbing oil. It wasn't like it was burning it - there was no blue exhaust, and it wasn't just a leak, since there was never a pool of it underneath the car. Refill the oil twice a month, I can handle that.

Next, the door handles began snapping off. The front passenger door was soon the only one that could be opened from outside the vehicle. And let me tell you, climbing over the passenger seat and gearshift was a royal pain - it was simpler just to leave the window cracked and reach in.

Then, some bastard stole the deer skull. And this wasn't an idle theft, as it probably took him about 20 minutes out in the mall parking lot to saw through the bungee cord and snip through all the wires and zip ties holding that thing on. I'd really like to know what would motivate a theft like that. What the hell do you do with a deer skull? It wasn't like he could risk putting it on his car, I'd just re-steal it. I like to think it was the ricers, claiming a trophy from their nemesis, the Cheap Car Everyone Loved.

Soon thereafter, the engine died. I was driving along, and the temperature meter suddenly pegged. It got a new engine from the junkyard, and had been running quite well when the transmission kicked. This one was a perfect Murphy's Law situation. From my brother's account (I wasn't in the car at the time) it went something like this:

Dad: Hey, we just passed 200,000 miles!
Brother: I hope nothing goes wrong!
Transmission (Breaking): Grrrrrrrnch!

But we couldn't let go, and the transmission was replaced too. My brother was now the primary driver of the Omni, and he witnessed the car's final moments when it devoured its third and final engine.

The venerable Omni now rests in pieces at wherever cars go when you donate them to NPR. He always loved NPR - we figure it's what he would have wanted.

That, and the parents wouldn't let us build a raft and float it into the reservoir on fire, Valhalla-style.

So thank you, dearest Omni, for nearly 300,000 miles of dedicated service. I will always remember you fondly.