Toyota FJ Cruiser

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

This car was an unwieldy inheritance. It wasn’t needed, wasn’t wanted, and wasn’t even paid off. The FJ Cruiser had been the prized possession and long-standing project of my uncle Andrzej: an elevator repairman who lived in Passaic, New Jersey, until he died suddenly of an air embolism. It was a freak accident: a minuscule air bubble traveled from his IV to his lungs while he was lying in the hospital with a stomach ulcer. This uncommonly gentle man died a uniquely terrifying death: gasping for air that filled his lungs but couldn’t reach his bloodstream. A nurse found him crumpled on the bathroom floor, purple in the face, eyes wide open.

This car had been his desideratum incarnate. Before he even purchased it, he got a scale model the size of a kitten, with functional doors, windows, headlights. Boyishly he showed it to us, his teenage nephews, when he came over to our house. Once he bought the car he drove it mostly shirtless, wearing sunglasses, drinking Red Bull. He affixed the metal company sticker of his employer—Standard Elevator—to a spot on the central console. Long after he died, the pleasant, neutral scent of his body odor remained in the car, despite my brother’s attempts to dispel it with various kinds of air fresheners. I always thought this smell matched the car’s aesthetic: a campy machismo, cartoonishly buff, dense without being hefty or overbearing. This was a car that knew what a silly shape it cut on the highway—and liked it. Driving it, you would wave to other drivers of other FJ Cruisers, some of whom would even wave back.

In truth, the Toyota FJ Cruiser is an astonishing vehicle: it drives like a tank. It can surmount boulders and ford rivers, at least theoretically. It seats four. The rear doors are suicide doors with handles hidden on the inside jambs, allowing the whole vehicle to unfold like a beetle opening all its wings. This one was silver, but the roof was white, and this really looked quite slick. A little hatch, which we discovered only after many years, opened the trunk window. But when reversing, you couldn’t see much of anything. Visibility is poor from the driver’s seat of any FJ, but drive it enough and you get a feel for its broad, solid shape. Because its windshield is so narrow and so wide, it has three windshield wipers, and many times have I observed them, mesmerized, as they did their synchronized dance. The gear differential rumbles in your hand when you shift to four-wheel drive, which the manual recommends doing for at least one day per month. Together with my brother we learned these and other facts about the car, which sat in my parents’ driveway in New Jersey for three years until my brother took it with him to college in Massachusetts.

Shortly after his death, the task of cleaning out my uncle’s apartment fell to me, my brother, and my mother. He had been her brother. Packing up the belongings of this forty-something-year-old eccentric bachelor, which included a massive sombrero, camouflage pants, torn jean shorts, and various trinkets which we placed gingerly into boxes we would never open again, I realized how death redoubles and multiplies in every object a person owned, the significance of which turns enigmatic. His miniature FJ Cruiser was placed in a box along with everything else and entombed in my parents’ basement. I have not been able to locate this scale model again, though not for lack of trying.

But I did manage to borrow the full-size FJ Cruiser from my brother, six years later, when I moved to California for grad school, taking it along with two friends across the country. In Nebraska we drove along an astonishingly straight highway, in FJ cruise control at ninety miles an hour, gusts of wind tearing every other cigarette from our hands and out the windows. We blasted Guided By Voices and screamed jokes at each other. This boxy car was completely un-aerodynamic: wind buffeted your face, messing up your hair, and the hefty engine walloped you with its revving. It was in-your-face in every way. In Nevada, driving north from Las Vegas, we decided to camp in the desert. Cognizant of the vehicle’s capabilities, we simply pulled off the highway and drove for ten minutes over rocky terrain. We parked, set up our tent in the headlights’ beam, and, turning them off, looked at the fullest night sky we had ever seen. We smoked a doobie. Suddenly my friend Santiago pointed to a strange blade of light appearing over a ridge. Had we inadvertently driven onto a missile range? Were we about to fucking die, right now? Too late to scramble, we panicked, pacing around the car idiotically. When we looked at the ridge again we saw that this blade of light was no armament: it was the moon. The eyelash of a very thin, crescent moon was rising over the horizon. A few weeks after I arrived in Berkeley, my brother and father and sister flew out and drove the car back to New Jersey, then my brother took it back with him to college.

In the end he held onto the car for ten years. He would drive it from Massachusetts to New Jersey once a month to visit our parents, and eventually he paid it off. Toyota stopped selling FJ Cruisers in 2014, and shortly thereafter they became a collector’s item. Famously, cars depreciate in value the moment you drive them off the lot, but this one actually became more valuable over time. A curio from another era, our uncle’s ideal automobile became the apple of the local mechanic’s eye. He’d seen the vehicle across oil changes, tire rotations, and transmission issues. From his auto body shop in Pequannock, New Jersey, he called my brother to make offers, and then increasingly desperate entreaties, all of which my brother declined. Instead he traded in the FJ Cruiser to Toyota itself, and against its value, which was assessed as far lower than what I saw as the car’s true worth, he bought himself a slate-gray RAV4. The financing scheme seemed fair to him, my brother said, and, besides, his new car wouldn’t stand out as much.

Thom Sliwowski is a writer living in Berlin. His essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sidecar, and the Public Domain Review.