The Car, The Storyteller

I could be this guy if my head weren't so damn square.

The Hoons o’ the Verse are incredible in that most everyone brings serious cred to the table:  turning wrenches on classics and race cars; building and restoring from naught but scratch and sweat; toiling within in the industry (or impersonating en saunter toward the open bar); mastering the Elements of Style that make a most contemptible econo-rental blind all snarkers with its majestic lack of merit.   And then there’s me: bringing nothing more than my own misguided Charlie Brown perspective, because the best parts of my formative years were spent in the back seat of a ’79 2-door Ford Granada.   The crappy North American one, not the cult-classic Euro version.   Yeah, that’s surely telling you something, and it’s surely not good.  In my defense, the backseat armrest was an awesome jump-ramp for HotWheels, and their superior Matchbox and Yatming cousins.

So let me elaborate on how I overcame this.  Said Granada self-grenaded at the neglect of my family and 13 salty Chicago winters of the halcyon, pre-Gorebal warming era.   My dad’s retort was a comical dance of maraca-based technicolor, and what began as a reasonably elegant white and red car eventually became a Peter Max-meets-Carrot Top macaroni art tragedy.    With industrial fish-scale epoxy paint.   And the aural signature of a wounded Cessna.   By which you could calibrate a watch via the time elapsed from first hearing it a half-mile away to when it pulled in front of the house and backfired on cue.   Needless to say, I adored that car.   Even if its disco “Opera Twindow” obscured passing vistas with a prison bar, it was my window to the madcap world and its mechanical inhabitants – and the people who looked after them (or not, as the case may be).

That fascination still holds today to bear this singular truth: regardless of its purpose, the merits of its design, its present condition, or station in life:  A car always has a story to tell, about people as much as itself.  Always.   Here are a few of mine.

The Granada-bomb told the story of a dad too busily disinterested to use what he learned from my Grampa’s Philips 66.   It told the story of three kids raised in a single-income blue-collar Chicago life in the Malaise Era.  It told the metaphoric fable of seeing past the rusty edges and Krylon leisure suit, emphysemic power plant and exhausted leaf springs, to the still-beating heart of a stubborn soldier within.   So I was mortified as the harbinger of betrayal: clutching a greasy forty dollars imparting blood in my fist as the rollback hauled it off before I could make it my own.  That “Make it my own” only meant “Give it one last run via team-style demo derby” didn’t matter:  it deserved at least that much if not better.  Yeah, I’m not right in the head… you know that if you’ve seen my fleeting contributions here.

145HP doth indeed a terror barge make.

The Granada’s companion-come-replacement was a 1990 Aerostar, aka “The Aerobarge” when I was brandishing my permit at the tiller.  Minivans ain’t sexy, they say, but the Aerostar is a dazzling afterthought of chop-wedge box (“Aero“?  Really?) plunked on a RWD pickup frame.  Verily I say to you, there’s nothing like Gravity High Center to keep you honest as you divine a cloverleaf speed limit’s margin of safety; those signs with trucks tipping over on a sharp curve never fail to make me giggle: Been there, Done that (got the stain to prove it).  I hooned that beast like it was indestructible, and it mostly was… save for genetic rocker cancer manifesting after a few years (handy tip: the contents of a stray Heinz packet tear thru clearcoat and metal like Everclear through synapse).  Dad quipped he should have me “fix it” with “whatever paint is in the garage”; he didn’t realize that I and a bored friend remembered the GraBomba full well – and therefore thought he was serious.  An hour and the remnants of a 5-gallon roofing tar bucket later, The Aerobarge was adorned with a snazzy two-tone paint scheme.   Amazingly it not only held up well, but was copied by another Aerostar later on!  Yes my friends, you have to love the Midwestern style of self-effacing humor.  We’re a special kind of stupid.

However questionable, barging that van brought consummate joy and somewhere in Chicagoland is a Porsche 944 that can attest to its (my?) prowess in, uh, competitive mail hauling on the Stevenson Expressway.   So too my wife will attest its uncanny ability to hold a line as I hotcarved a back road all the way from Nashville to her family’s farm in Bufu KY at 2 am in darkness and fog.  Three years later we retraced that drive in daylight; rolling miles of sheer 40-foot dropoffs gave me a rare sense of ulp, and a belated understanding of the terror in her face that night.   Heh heh, oooops.   But hey, Viva Gruppe B in spirit if not in vehicle!

Great as the Aerobarge was, I really needed a ride of my own.   The failings and foibles of the  search have been previously documented here at the ‘Verse, but I eventually landed another dream of the time: an ’88 Thunderbird.  History doesn’t treat these cars favorably, but they looked great in their day and still do now.  Beauty as siren: Twilight Blue Metallic, smooth as silk, a full catalog of 80’s electro-gimmicks still functional in 1997.   How fittingly ironic for the strife of searching across hundreds of miles and dozens suburbs to conclude with a purchase from a sleazeball corner 10 blocks from my house.   Love at first drive; as the smitten mark, I didn’t even think to check which motor lurked within.  Nor would I have known what the proudly cast “3.8” on the intake really meant.   Yeah… as a lifelong student of the School of Hard Knocks, sometimes you learn the hard way.   Yet I was determined not to let it become another Granada.   Is it the feat of a brave or a stupid soul, to purchase a decade-old Late Malaisemobile with 72K miles and double its clock in just over 2 years?  Honestly – does it even matter?

Too busy driving to ever take a better picture. Don't make the same mistake!

No.  Because that was the car that became my lab, my steed, my escape, my best friend when I didn’t seem to have anyone else.  Before it was insured I took a screwdriver and ripped the interior apart just for whatever.   When the insurance did come through, a crash course in maintenance and limits – both mine and mechanical – soon followed.   It didn’t matter what the issue was:  tires, brakes, A/C, window regulator, ball joints, tires again, alternator, UV joints, brakes again, interior bits, heater core #1, parking brake, radiator, dash cluster, kickdown cable, EGR valve, solenoid, tensioner pully, fuel pump, starter, rust, heater core #2,  solenoid again, IAC valve, transmission, falling trees… that car (and the tree) challenged me with deistic might.   I answered those calls – most fixed by me, some left to others – and it never let me down; not once across 22 states and 70,000 miles for work, courtship and leisure, en route to scoring 6 speeding tickets in 5 states.   Oh now don’t get me wrong, because tantrums were indeed pitched… like tires blowing on two separate occasions but only *after* the immediate conclusion of 300-mile drives.   The radiator imploded with a floorpan-shuddering kaPLOW in Indianapolis en route to Chicago, but not so critically that I had to stop for good:  numerous emergency pit stops made Indiana’s tearful parts newly wild and adventurous.    The starter failed the first time when I pulled into a job site in Hannibal, MO… right across the street from a Ford dealer.    Heater core blew the second time just as we were leaving for Chicago on a Christmas morning, but only a few miles into the trip before we were vested.   And many others but the point is, it trusted me: communicating needs and displeasure, but always getting me where I needed to be first.

In fact, the only person it ever did strand was none other than my dad, after we exchanged vehicles one weekend so my siblings could pack large and spend some time at my new place in Kentucky.   It must have been karma: the Granada’s FoMoGhost paying him back by smiting the ’88 comatose at the lone neighborhood drive-thru ATM.   On a payday.   With an angry horde in line.   My uncle had to come to the rescue and push it back to our house with his Saturn… truly a spectacle I wish I could have seen.   In the end I discovered a shady mechanic had sabotaged the car; I had to replace the alternator (again!) to fix it.   That in itself is another amusing and infuriating story, but alas, one for another time.

You’ll note I didn’t mention that infamous 3.8 in the (partial) laundry list above: it doled out 148K before registering the car for its current career as a backyard monument.   Most of its brethren were lucky to get just half that far without contending with my shoes-o-concrete, so maybe my devil’s-got-credit care and feeding did some good after all.

The Blue Goose saved my life more than once, and I won’t dare part with it.   That car infused a love and a can-do, what’s-the-worst-that-can-happen, this-isn’t-it attitude within me.  There’s nothing I won’t attempt anymore, given time and tools.   Someday, hopefully, maybe, it will live again so the story doesn’t have to end.  If it doesn’t, well… it was a fantastic ride, and it’s still here among friends.  Besides, before he passed my Grampa awarded me his Bronze Star just for keeping the blasted thing running for so long.  No more betrayal, then.

Hmm, three cars in, and several more to go:  my ’97 T-Bird, some Freestyle hoonage, and of course the oft-mentioned Angstmobile; say nothing of the LeMon in gestational form.   My reputation for rambling precludes me though, so I’ll shut up for now.   I didn’t even get into the in-laws’ farm with the barn full of derelicts and field full of history… oy vey.

If this sounds like pointless shaded nostalgia, it’s not.   It’s the very reason we design, build, own, beg, borrow, lease, steal, pine, rent, and forever dream to drive.   Because man cannot abide stationary, and the call of wanderlust forever reigns romantic hearts.   And for what to roam, if not experience?  Next time you’re ransacking the pick-n-pull or sneering a roadside derelict, pay respect:  From line on paper to assembly plant to winding road to final crusher, that car has a story and was part of many more.   Some books are finished and others never written, but the automobile is 3D picture: manifest character and vessel.    What will yours divulge?

You know, even transient rentals and motor-pool cars have tales to tell, and offer opportunities to forge more.   Such as the Crown Vic and the incident(s) that spawned this picture… I’ll leave you to imagine that one.   Just be kind.   Oh, and please don’t call the number.  Heh.

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