BURGER SCOOT

Back in college, my dad, tired of having to repair my sporty, candy-green Volkswagen Sirocco lemon, turned it in for a shit-brown two-door Plymouth box on wheels. The car looked like my mom’s Dodge Dart, a car she was embarrassed to be seen driving, but her car looked like a Bentley compared to my turd on wheels. Plymouth’s version of the Dodge Dart was the Valiant, but this car was so ugly the manufacturers were too ashamed to state a model name on the body or even the owner’s manual.

So, it was fitting that the license plate for this car from Generic Motors was, and I shit you not: 1DIP###. Everywhere I went, whether it was the Sac State campus where I attended classes, the Tower Theatre where I worked, and everywhere in between, people ignored the vehicle’s Soviet-issued ugliness but had to make cracks about the license plate like: “I noticed your plate; does that make you a dipshit?” Or “If that’s a personalized plate, does that make you the ‘1’ and only ‘DIP’?”