What's The Nastiest Mess You've Ever Cleaned Out Of A Car?
Photo: Photo by Rolf Vennenbernd/picture alliance via Getty Images) (Getty Images)
Cars; some of us treat our autos like second homes and that’s not always a good thing. Playing a game of “hey, what’s that smell?” is at least a little easier inside a car. There’s only so many places grossness could hiding, but what lurks under car seats and inside of the center console could shake Marie Kondo to her very soul.
Once I lent my precious Saturn Ion to a very, very immature person. I was young and just figuring out that people sometimes suck, and sometimes those people are your friends. I took the bus to work anyway, so I let her use my car to cart around her kid and get to her job in the suburbs.
It was a bad idea. After a few weeks I had to twist her arm to reclaim my own car after she brought home a guy she didn’t know and he stole it to buy drugs (a very shitty person.) She was not happy and when she returned it, it was covered in dry bird shit. Somehow, scraping crusty bird bombs off my car in the middle of summer was not the worse part.
Somewhere along the line, and it must have been very early into borrowing my car, she’d spilled some left over Thai carryout into the floor mat and front passenger seat and just let it soak in. Coconut milk, spices and animal fats had congealed into a shimmering green puddle in every crevice of the passenger seat by the time I got my car back. I could toss the floor mat, but the seat was another matter. The smell was indescribable, but just imagine what sun-baked weeks old curry can do. I used a flat-head screwdriver to dig the crusty, gooey bits out and then blasted it with a steam cleaner, but that seat was never the same again. I threw a trashy tiger-stripped cover over it (cause if you’re gonna go trashy, go all the way) and drove that car with the windows down well into November. This was years ago, and in that time, I have never regretted not speaking to her ever again.
So what about you? Let’s here your nasty horror stories.
