My first car was a Pontiac 6000 STE. It was an '89, which was the year all-wheel drive became standard, and boasted 135 hp with its "upgraded" engine. It was maroon, with gold trim.
I got to use the car because my mom was fed up with my asking for rides (even though she usually said no and I mooched off of friends -- or friends' parents -- instead). But I think I'd have been shit out of luck if that old Pontiac hadn't been a bit...wonky. It used to stall out for no apparent reason -- sometimes at highway speed, sometimes just idling, sometimes while decelerating. It would always start right up again, but then -- often, but not always!, and not in any kind of a predictable pattern -- kill when shifted into Drive. There were days when it refused to budge, only to be towed to a mechanic who could find nothing wrong with it. My mom hated that car. It seemed to perversely enjoy stranding her. There's a photo somewhere of my grandpa teaching me to replace the serpentine belt. He's standing over me, directing, while I bury my arms up to the shoulders in the engine block, twisting that belt into place. There's grease all over both of us.
I got along with it pretty well. It died on me a few times, and frustrated all my attempts at tricking or coaxing it into Drive: revving the engine, holding in Neutral, gliding slowly and gently into Drive, cursing profusely and pounding on various interior surfaces, but for the most part, it was reliable, and put up with more abuse than it probably deserved. For example, there was that one time that I decided to test its top speed on a gravel country-ish road...we hit 97mph and I really thought the steering wheel might come off in my hands. And there was that time in college (that Pontiac was my parents' high school graduation gift to me) when we were trying to navigate through an ice storm, and we slid through three or so red lights, because there simply was no stopping. Oh, and the New Year's Eve when I was gallavanting with some friends -- before any celebration started -- and I fishtailed around a corner into a snowbank and landed with three wheels in the air.
I got in some trouble, too, but it wasn't the car's fault so much as my own. Once I got grounded for taking my boyfriend, from whom I was grounded (were my parents the only ones to ground from specific people?) to the mall -- we only got busted because it stalled out in the middle of a busy intersection and I was afraid to let the cops push us out of the way. Dad told me that car couldn't be towed, because it had all-wheel drive! And there was the morning my parents woke me up to ask what had happened to my fender. I played naive and said I must've been sideswiped while parked, but my father took me aside afterward and told me, gravely, that he'd picked the bark out of my fender before Ma saw it. Trees don't hit people, he told me, people hit trees.
Once, in college, there was a domestic in my backyard/parking lot. The loser neighbor, Louis, punched through the passenger window of the car his girlfriend had locked him out of, and then stormed off. Since the cops wouldn't do it, I took it upon myself to offer her a ride home -- she was hella strung out on something. As we were preparing to back out of the long, tree-lined, frozen driveway, Louis came after us swinging a 2x4. The rear defrost hadn't dissipated the four inches of ice (okay, I exaggerate, but only slightly) on my windows, so as I squealed out in reverse, I took off the side mirror on a dumpster. I had planned to duct-tape it back on, but my father refused to let me as he claimed it would ruin the paint. Damn car only had a couple of flecks of paint left as it was.
It also had its muffler wired up with a coat hanger. I didn't pull that one myself; it was the mechanic who took pity on my broke ass and agreed that it didn't need replacing so much as it just needed help hanging on. A lady came into the Italian restaurant where I worked one day and reported a car in the parking lot with an umbrella hanging out the window. Yup, mine. The driver's side window would go down, but sometimes refused to go up and instead shut off the ignition. I put the umbrella up in a mostly-futile attempt to keep out the thunderstorm while I worked me shift. It was better in the winter, because the snow could be brushed off the seat before climbing in.
I pick'n'pulled a used radiator for it after it started blowing some serious steam one day -- on the freeway interchange, during rush hour. I pulled over right away and tried to get out of traffic, but the rubberneckers made a scene of it anyway, of course. Turns out I just had a leaky seal in the radiator hose, but my mechanic, a middle-aged ginger whose primary interests were his Harley and his mutt but who liked me because I'd sit and bullshit with him while he worked, assured me I was right to stop traffic. ;) I told him the story of the time my little cousin, who'd just gotten her permit, asked to drive us home from the movies and I put her off on a gut feeling. On the way home, the accelerator stuck at 45 on a red light, and I had to cut the engine to bring it to a stop. My poor cousin had her hand on the door handle, ready to abandon ship, with eyes like flying saucers in her cute little 15 year-old face. I took the opportunity to explain about never putting a moving car into park, unless you want to leave your transmission in the road...although I think my warning that the belt might break and "it might sound like the engine has exploded, but don't worry, it won't!" probably didn't help the anxiety. Of course we had to recite the lesson when we got her safely home. I'm always impressed at parents' ability to brush off the danger kids get into with their thankfulness that everything turned out okay.
What finally did in that old Pontiac, ironically, was merely a flat tire. My mom's old car gave up the goat my senior year of college, and she commandeered mine for her commute to work. Actually, I willingly loaned it to her, but didn't expect that I'd never get it back. In a typical conversation of that era of our relationship, my parents insisted that a person could not purchase just one tire for a car, and since it was unlikely to survive a full new set, it was time to cut our losses. I protested, vehemently, that waiting for the bus in sub-zero winter was not preferable to paying to replace the tire -- and I 'd already replaced just one! They totally let me, I swear! No, no, it cannot be done. A person cannot buy just one tire -- the tire people won't even sell them singly. Despite all my whining and cajoling, they scheduled the donation. I thought about driving it on the rim to the tire store, but that seemed unlikely to succeed in the dead of winter, so I gave up. Ma knows I'm a soft heart, though, so she took pictures of the instrument panel from the driver's seat and sent them to me. I loved that car.
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