Cars (Part I)

Finally, my parents felt bad about me always having to drive with a paper sack on my head to hide my embarrassment, and they bought me a new car (by new I mean one from the same decade). It was a powder-puff baby blue VW Rabbit. It wasn’t real sporty, but at least I could start going back to the Sonic and not have to worry about people flagging me down telling me about someone having a heart attack. The only thing that the Rabbit was missing was a tape player. Fortunately, I had a buddy that had one and was willing to install it along with a set of speakers. Life was beginning to look up. That afternoon, he returned my car and the smooth sounds of AC/DC were blasting. However, his installing technique was a little odd. First, the tape player was mounted underneath the glove box. Sure it was a little inconvenient but I could make it work. The biggest problem was the speaker system. I don’t know if one speaker in fact makes up a system, but there it was. I guess I am “old school,” I just assumed that the speaker would be mounted in either the dash or the door, wrong. The speaker was actually from an old stereo system and the big bulky box of sound was just lying in the passenger floorboard.  A little unorthodox, but what the heck, I had my tunes.

The VW carried Tammie and me to our first prom. This wasn’t an easy task since she had a dress that resembled something from Gone With the Wind. I had to stuff her into the car and continuously ask her to make sure she wasn’t putting a slipper through my “speaker system.” So here we were crammed into the tiny VW. Tammie was constantly trying to push her huge skirt, at least the part that wasn’t hanging out of the door, down out of the windshield so I could see. This really didn’t bother me since I was too busy trying to reach over and adjust my treble and bass settings on my “under the glove box” tape-player to ever notice the road. The part of her space in the car that wasn’t filled with dress was packed with hair. Ah, the eighties.

The VW carried us on many more dates up until the day, or maybe it was the year, that I forgot to check the transmission fluid in her. My Dad was always a stickler for maintaining the proper fluid levels in all of his cars. However, I never saw the importance of it until my transmission exploded. Tammie and I, along with her brother and another date decided to go to Six Flags. Being somewhat slow-witted, I volunteered to drive. With Six Flags in sight, the VW lurched and began making some noises that closely resembled the sound of someone’s nails on the chalkboard. I had to keep putting the gear shift into neutral, while redlining the engine, and then slamming it into drive for the car to even move. Being a responsible seventeen year old kid, I managed to get the wreck into the parking lot, and forget about it for the rest of the day. Hey, I reasoned, don’t worry about it until late at night when the park closes and you start to travel the hundred miles back home.

I did realize the folly of my thought process about an hour before we left. I started thinking about the ride home and the thorough lecture about fluid levels that would soon follow. At this point I began to unstrap all safety devices from the roller coasters I was riding and even tried to stand up on a few in hopes of getting hurt. My parents would be so pleased that I survived a horrific coaster accident, along with the possibility of a huge lawsuit to ever get upset about something as silly as a blown transmission. Well it didn’t work out quite like I had hoped. You know the safety reminders they always tell you about the necessity to keep all arms and legs inside the coaster at all times. It is a fallacy. Nothing happens. I am living proof. Since my coaster mishap didn’t pan out there was nothing left but to head to the parking lot and start the long drive home.