Zander Drives Cars

A worse-for-ware Zander stepped off a Metro North train in Poughkeepsie, bottle of Aleve in pocket and running on about four hours of sleep and a Cherry Coke. At the other end of the station, as promised, was a $143,000, Sepia “Blue” (purple) BMW M5. This is not a review of that car.

Some people reading this have been following me for a few years now. This site started as a passion project with high hopes of press cars, big views, and ad revenue. Instead, I got pre-owned crossovers, an American Airlines 737, and $19.66 in the WordPress bank account. As high school ended and I left car-friendly suburbia for Manhattan, I had to shift my focus on what I was going to do on here, I mean, I can’t drive cars in a city. You’d think I would have given that whole debacle more thought. It’s like sending a vegan to Arkansas. What are we doing here? Right, shifting focus. And by shifting my focus, I meant putting this site aside while I hoped that my bad jokes and half-baked opinions would take me somewhere. I came back for auto shows and the occasional “where the hell have I been?” but, aside from that, crickets.

This summer, for the first time, I was hired to do paid work. Impressive, right? Yes, ya boi was writing evergreen content for a large automotive website, getting paid an amount, and cranking out listicles and buyers guides left and right to an audience of people pretty ambivalent to my existence. I say this like my job is past tense, I’m still doing it, but, you know, it makes all of this sound more elusive and interesting. Should I complain? Probably not. I mean, I will, but I have to look at the world around me rather than looking at just me and me only. Full-time positions become contract become freelance become AI. As much as I would have loved to come in guns blazing with my magnum opus article about crossovers, I’ll take what I can get. Plus, I’m no Hunter S. Thompson, so the literary magazines are out of my grasp, no matter how hard I try to fake it.

It’s funny, because I had a lot of close calls with employment since I started all of this as a junior in high school. I once spent an hour on the phone with the head of communications for a large rally-based company out in Washington, who wanted me to run their social media, only for them to find out I was in high school. Then, there was the time I got offered another social media job for another large website that, because I was still in high school, I couldn’t take. That sucks, right? Hell, we didn’t even touch on the time I was going to get a Silverado press truck as a high schooler that only went away when comms found out that, once again, I was in high school. You guys want to know why I never advertised my age or school on my social media? If they don’t ask, they don’t have to know. Sorry, Sean.

Bam! It’s now September 12th, and we rejoin the first paragraph. I’ve started classes, been on my first press trip, and was recently brought on to do social media for Motor1 – yes, I now shitpost professionally. By the grace of god, I convinced someone at BMW to give me that $140,000 M5 for the weekend with a promise to put it on the car account (yes, that still exists) and to not crash it. Or park it in Manhattan. The Bronx is fair game, though. I try my hardest not to act like a child in situations where I’m surrounded by people who’ve been doing my job professionally for as long as I’ve been alive. Any conversation with Jack Baruth or Jon Schley will instantaneously fall into some level of “this industry sucks, but good for you because you’re 21.” A BMW M5 press car is important, but in the grand scheme of things, in a field where everyone has been to Stuttgart and gets jebaited by Ford’s press website, this is a drop in the bucket. This whole job is filled with shared experiences and one-upmanship that sometimes I want to smash my head into a wall.

But I do not care. I am 21, and I am driving down the Long Island Expressway in a car that’s a significant multiple of my yearly salary, on my way to socialize with WASPY Trumpies and eat pinky-up food in The Hamptons.

I am still, for all intents and purposes, a child. I will, for the time being, be the youngest person at any company I work for, the youngest on the press trip, and the youngest person with access to the press fleet. But, I do, to a small degree, feel like I made it? I mean, shit, I worked for what is coming on four years for zero pay just to hope that I’d get taken seriously. And now that I have a work email, a ten-person fanbase that gets excited when I publish work, and access to 700-horsepower cars, it’s kind of all coming together. Again, it’s relative. That M5 has been out for almost two years now, I still have under 1,000 Instagram followers, and my Slack messages mostly go unread. But, man, as I stand next to a $60m McLaren F1 with a Tito’s-soda-lime in hand, looking back at that ugly fucking M5, and waiting for a falafel that fills me with political guilt, I do not give a shit.

Oh, and the new M5 has bad seats.