Do You Have A Leesance for Your Minky?
With my poor performance in school weighing me down I stood little chance of getting my driver's license by sixteen. Just another thing to hold over my head, though that strategy really never worked. Then suddenly the problem was solved when Mom and Pop decided to send me to military school. They figured that I would need a license to visit friends whenever I came back for the Holidays. So some small good thing was going to come from getting sent off. Whoopee!
I went to Driver's Ed classes at the local high school that summer. Weird side note: We had just moved from Vienna, where I had gone to two years of public high school, to Alexandria, my holding cell before shipping off to SMA. The local high school was called Robert E. Lee. And it was an exact carbon copy of Madison High, my previous school, right down to the room numbers. I would walk into the building from my new, unfamiliar world and into one eerily reminiscent of my old life, then back out onto the surface of Mars for all I knew.
The driving classes were boring but necessary. Truth to tell, my Mom had been letting me drive her car for a while before I even took the classes. Not alone, but with her white-knuckled next to me.
So I get my license in early August and three days later Mom lets me take a few friends for a spin in her car (1970 Ford Torino wagon) and I promptly get into my first accident. Funny how you can't pass somebody while somebody is passing you. Yeah. The other guy bounced off me a few times but I'm proud to say I kept it on the road. He was a big ol' redneck who threatened my family until Dad put the cops on him. So I didn't drive the car again until my first time back from school.
Car One
My Dad had a lot of problems with cars. Well, the cars weren't the problem. He just drove them badly. After owning two VW bugs and a really cool Mustang, (and trashing them all), he got a Ford Maverick. Once I started driving it became "my" car. I didn't own it. I still had to ask to use it, but it was the one I got to drive. Robin's egg blue with a straight 6 under the hood. Real chick magnet. Some notable events in our sordid history:*I crashed it into my girlfriend's car one day when we were crossing a divided highway. She stopped in the center and I didn't see until it was too late.
*I got at least two speeding tickets and a couple of other moving violations. Driving was just so much fun!
*When I came home for Christmas break I was so incredibly happy to be home. I wheeled the Mav up to 7-11 and got my stuff. As I backed out of the lot I cut the wheel and promptly raked my right front bumper down the driver side of the car parked next to me. I stopped, surveying the damage to the other car. Oh, shit...I looked around - no witnesses. My eyes darted to the store - just a guy in there pushing a filthy mop, not looking at me at all. Shift into drive, pedal to the metal and I am out of there.
I drove over to my buddy Scott's place, dreading the potential damage to my car and how I would explain it to my Dad. When I got there I walked cautiously around the front and peered at my car. Nothing. Not even a scratch. Weeks later Dad saw a tiny bit of paint had flecked off at the site and went ballistic, believing somebody had hit and run the car "recently", and since I hadn't driven it in that time I was off the hook. Fate is feakin' funny. Made up for the times I got hammered for shit I didn't do.
I worked at a local warehouse and we got stoned during the day every day. On the way home one night I decided to impress some girls I worked with by racing up beside them and giving them a sexy wave. They laughed, but in a second those smiles became looks of terror. I hadn't noticed the bend in the road coming right at me! I slammed on the brakes, went over the curb, missed a telephone pole by inches, skidded back onto and across the road and bounced off the opposite curb. The undercarriage was boned. I tired to tell Dad that the accelerator had stuck but that was bullshit. The car was shot and needed a lot of repair work. I wasgoing off to school anyway, so who cared?
Car Two
After military school I went to college, and while I was there the parents decided the old Mav now belonged to my sister. Nice. When I came back from ODU with my tail between my legs I was carless. Dad let me use his car from time to time but that was a desperation move only. No matter what I did he always knew when we had messed with the car. I even emptied the ashtray and he asked me why the single butt he left in there was missing. Entrapment! Arrgghh!
So I went ahead and wrecked his car. Drove it into a ditch. Two days later I was in the Navy Federal Credit Union signing loan papers to buy my own car. Dad had picked out another Maverick, owned by a friend down the street. I bought it, moved out of the house and almost immediately sold it at a loss to buy my most favoritest car.
Car Three
A buddy of mine at Shakey's Pizza had this car he wanted to sell. It belonged to his grandfather who had just passed away. It was a 1964 Ford Custom 500, and the old man had driven it to town and out in the fields. The rear bumper was all rusted out, it smelled like mildew. I loved it.A few months later I drove "Old Bessie" to California. She got me back and forth to work, supervised my dates, escorted me and my new wife home from the wedding and brought my firstborn son home from the hospital.
The gas gauge stopped working at one point but I just guessed the mileage I'd get with each tank and it mostly worked. I only ran out of gas a few times. When I finally had to leave her behind to go to Hawaii it broke my heart. I never got a ticket and had no accidents the whole five years I had her.
Hawaii Cars
When we got to Oahu there was a car waiting for me. It was a 1982 Datsun B210. Blue. Boring. Fortunately some nice guy I used to work with decided to steal it and trash it, so that was all for that piece o' crap. The insurance settlement got me my third Maverick, a 1970 this time, red with no heater. Hawaii model.
We also had the use of a cool 1965 Lincoln Continental. I loved tooling around in that big ol' car, letting the warm tropical breezes waft over me.So after the move back to California and my divorce, the red Mav was my mate, my space capsule, my red badge of geekdom. Tough to impress any gal who went out with me when I couldn't even turn the heat on to keep us from freezing on a date. And such a sexy ride! After my exile in SoCal I got back to the SF Bay Area and moved from job to job, dragging the Mav behind me. Got tired of a car with no personality and decided on a switch to something...different. Enter Alexander, my red 1980 Toyota 4x4 pickup. Now that was a man's vehicle.
Jan and I had just started dating and this was my "newly single guy" truck. 2-seater. Just a guy and his girl out for a rugged day on the mountain. Cast iron rear bumper, so I could back into anything with impunity. Fear me, little passenger cars! Make way for the King of the Highway! This was my attitude, right up until my girlfriend became my wife and along came a new brood of kids. No room for all those people in the truck, but it had served me well. We used it as a moving van and Jan had learned to drive a stick on him. The name Alexander came from my boy Peter. The only car I ever gave a male name to. We traded him in for:
The Buckaroomobile! (1994 Mitsubishi Expo)
Yeah, it is a minivan of sorts, more like a station wagon that started to turn into a van and stopped halfway. We loved it. Smooth driving and lots of room. We drove it to CA to Cincinnati, up to Seattle, down to Phoenix. We brought Zack home from the hospital. Just a few months after we got it I was washing the car when I noticed some interesting scratches on the hood. Upon closer examination I saw the name "Casey" etched into the paint. There were other designs as well, and they remain to this day. Over the years the Buckaroomobile has been Jan's commute car, the family travel car, my business vehicle and is currently in the hands of its rightful owner, Casey. It has 226,500 miles on it, all put there by the Newbegin family.Since then I've owned a Kia Sephia and a Chrysler PT Cruiser. I have the occasional fender-bender, about one every two to three years, same with minor moving violations, never really my fault, oh no.
I put about 120 miles per day on my car, whatever it is, and the toughest part each day is dealing with my fellow drivers. Speed, following too closeley and dangerous lane changes threaten my safety and sanity each time I hit the road. And it doesn't help that I'm a recovering Type A driver. I want to run these twits into a ditch half the time, but I don't think that would please the Buddha, so I breathe deep and get home alive.
Another good case for gun control, let me tell you.
