Author’s Note: Life on Wheels is an ongoing series of memoir entries centered on the many cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles and other vehicles I have owned over the years — some 50+ and counting. Names and places may have been changed for obvious reasons. Hop in and buckle up — I drive fast!
It’s hard to say exactly how it was that I became a “car guy.” I did not grow up around my biological father, but he is by any measure a major car guy, and maybe some of that juju came down through our shared DNA. My stepfather was also a car guy, but he preferred us kids to stay out of the garage when he was wrenching on his old rides, so we never bonded like that. Honestly, I really feel like it happened all at once, on a specific summer afternoon in 1984 when I was walking around the old hometown with my buddy Ray, who was then and remains today one of the most boss-level car guys I know. As we sauntered around our lazy burg, he pointed out one old car or truck after another, immediately identifying the year, make and model of each on sight and rattling off interesting trivia tidbits the whole way. By the time we got back to my grandma’s house, I was positively infected.
The next spring, when I was 16, my grandmother bought me my first car, a slightly-used 1980 Chevy Citation, which at the time was just beginning to earn its place in history as a legendarily terrible automobile. I have written at length about that disappointing car elsewhere and won’t go on about it here; suffice it to say it was a shining example of why this period in the American automotive industry is known as the “Malaise Era.”
I had in fact had plenty of fun driving the Citation, which despite its many drawbacks had been equipped with a rather beefy V6 engine, making it a sleeper hooligan vehicle. It might have looked like a beige-over-brown pile of weasel shit, but it was actually as fast as the base model Camaro of the era, and I gave it the ol’ Duke Boys treatment with some regularity. But I didn’t love it. It had no character at all; it was like driving the lobby of a Best Western down the street, all oatmeal colored velour and taupe molded plastic. I even dressed it up with some accessories from the J.C. Whitney catalog — a “CITATION” tinted sunstrip across the top of the windshield, some Chevrolet bowtie logo scratch guards around the keyholes on the doors, etc. — but there was just no polishing this turd.
I had already become smitten with a ’66 Oldsmobile F85 convertible that sat for months on the lot at the local scuzzy pawn shop, but it eventually sold and I would drive the Citation by the empty spot where it had been and heave a little sigh. It was just a fleeting crush, but you know how it is when you are a teenager — these feelings hit hard, and fast, and deep.
But I didn’t know what true love was until one evening in the late spring of 1986, when I happened to be cruising down the main drag on the south end of town like countless other times. SHAZAM! Without warning I was struck by a flash of lightning that shot straight to the core of my heart. Parked there at White’s Used Cars, a dilapidated little dirt car lot that looked just about ready to collapse into the earth, was a weird-looking little old station wagon, a bit dumpy and saggy, but with a kind of boxy, funky charm I couldn’t begin to deny. I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to look.
As I parked, I looked over to the outhouse-sized ramshackle shack that comprised the lot’s office, but it was closed for the evening, so I walked on over and helped myself to a close-up gander at the little wagon. It was old — the paper taped in its window indicated it was a 1963 model — and small for its time, about the size of a Ford Falcon, but perhaps a foot shorter in the wheelbase. There was one visible rust hole the size of an A&W Papa Burger in the driver’s side rocker panel. One of the long narrow back window glasses looked about ready to fall into the car, as its old rubber weatherstripping had dried up and hardened and shrunk. The backrests of the front bench seat were wrecked, and flopped backward into the rear seat area; I would later find out the seat’s upright support frame had actually broken clean in two deep inside. One would have to put a bucket or something behind the driver’s side in order to prop up the seat enough to sit upright and drive the thing. The horn button was missing, but the rest of the rather spare dashboard controls were in order — lights, heater, radio, turn signal stalk and column gear selector, not much more. The old vinyl-upholstered door panels were absolutely ruined, cracked and warped with humidity damage, especially on the lower halves. I popped the hood and was surprised to see the big old-fashioned “L-head” straight-six engine, its spark plugs sticking straight out of the top of the head like a Model T Ford. It looked positively archaic. There was no air cleaner at all on top of the teeny little carburetor. Across the wide trapezoidal grille were stamped the letters R-A-M-B-L-E-R.
I had to make it mine.
In my closet at home was a coffee can stuffed with dollar bills and coins I had saved up selling homemade bumper stickers at school, and the next day I took it down to White’s Used Cars and spoke to Old Man White who ran the place. The asking price on the Rambler was $125, and I just had enough to cover it with the tax. I dumped the can out on his cluttered desk and he chuckled as I piled up the change and counted it out. We did the paperwork and I went out to look at my new prize possession.
Now I knew my grandmother was not going to approve of this impulse purchase, so I had already planned to take the car over to Ray’s house and park it there until I softened her up. But when I got inside the Rambler and prepared to start it for the first time, I noticed something peculiar. I had not bothered to start the engine before I paid for the car, and in my youthful exuberance most likely barely even asked the guy if it ran — so it’s probably not much of a shock to hear in addition that I didn’t notice the third pedal on the floorboard, either.
“Wait a minute,” I said in confusion, looking down at my feet. “What’s that pedal for?”
The old man had followed me out to the car and here he chuckled again. “Why, that’s the clutch, son,” he said.
“But the shifter’s up here?” I was doing the math in my head and it wasn’t working out.
“Yes, it’s a column shift,” Mr. White explained. “What they call a three-on-the-tree.”
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch.” I probably didn’t say it out loud, but I sure thought it. I asked if I could use his phone.
Ray didn’t answer at his house but my friend Shawn picked up at his, and he agreed to come give me a hand. Shawn’s daily driver was a Chevy S-10 pickup with a manual transmission, which I knew because a year before, I had gone with him and Candi Tate to see The Firm at the Kansas Coliseum in Wichita, all three of us crammed into the little mini-truck’s cab, and on the way back he had asked me to shift for him so he didn’t have to move his right arm and disturb the sleeping Candi. He drove right over to the car lot and within minutes, the Rambler was safely ensconced over at Ray’s house.
Ray lived in Sleeth Addition, which might have been our town’s “wrong side of the tracks” — but it was conveniently located far away from the prying eyes of my grandmother. In the days that followed I spent much time down there goofing around with my new toy, and Ray even taught me how to drive stick in it on the old tired brick streets of Sleeth. I was pleased to find that this wasn’t nearly as difficult as I had somehow imagined it to be, even with the rather ungainly column-shift configuration. Soon I had it down pat. We started tinkering on some of the car’s issues too, me relying heavily on Ray’s vastly superior mechanical knowledge, and occasionally his grandpa’s as well.
Ray and I paid a visit to my former stepdad’s folks, who lived on a rather bizarre property out along the river beyond the edge of town, littered with scores of old cars to pick apart for salvage. I gave I think maybe $10 for the front folding split-bench seat out of a ’64 Dodge Dart, which we removed from the old junked Mopar ourselves. We had to drill some new holes in the floorboard of the Rambler to make it work, but it was a beautiful fit, and the backrests even did a cool trick, folding inward at an angle to allow back seat passengers ingress/egress without the front passengers having to completely get out of their seats. I took out the ratty old door panels and cut new ones from a discarded sheet of drab-but-sturdy plywood wall paneling. I cobbled together a makeshift air cleaner out of a small metal coffee can with a paper coffee filter stretched over the top and secured with a rubber band. (Eventually I would swap up to a proper aftermarket air cleaner, a tiny little chrome jobber scaled to sit atop the diminutive carb.) I made a new horn button and added under the hood four additional horns, yoinked from various other discarded cars, to the sole factory unit — now when I honked it was with authority. (I would go on to scare my Uncle Jeb out of his skin giving a polite toot on the horn as I drove by his house one afternoon; he later told me he thought a train had come off the tracks.) And I replaced the missing center of the hood ornament with a round metal peace sign medallion to cap it all off.
There was a hole in the gas tank and gasoline dripped out all over the ground wherever the Rambler was parked. I took to putting in only a little fuel at a time, but habitually ran out on the road. One time we tried to tow the little car back over to Ray’s with a rope tied around the front bumper and managed to put a kink in it that was there for the rest of the time I owned it. I put some epoxy sealant over the leaky spot in the tank and it mostly worked, though it continued to weep fuel slowly.
The rusty hole in the rocker panel I filled with Bondo, and while considering how to best try to match the existing paint, I had a whole new idea: Let’s forget the factory colors and give this American the truly All-American paint job it deserves! We drove out to K-Mart, where the house brand spray paint cost a dollar a can, and bought our supplies. I splurged and bought a whole box of twelve cans — red, white and blue. It must have been Memorial Day Weekend or something, because one of the area rock radio stations aired a “Beatles A to Z Weekend” — playing every single Beatles song ever released in alphabetical order. Powered by junk food and soda pop, Ray and I kept the radio cranked and stayed up around the clock for the better part of two straight days, making stencils, carefully masking off sections of the car and spraying paint in his mom’s hot, sticky, stuffy garage until we were finished, the Fab Four singing hits and deep cuts alike the whole time.
Having finally broken the news to my grandma, I started parking the car at the house next door to ours, where lived a friendly old neighbor lady who no longer owned a vehicle of her own. She was very generous, in fact, in letting me use her garage as a place to wrench on it. The neighbor just north of her gave me an old ’70s console stereo and I dragged it over to the garage and then we had tunes, even! I remember being out there blasting the radio the very first time I heard the Rainmakers, a regional band that would come to mean a lot to me later on. I changed the oil, installed new spark plugs and ignition wires, and upgraded the stereo to a cassette deck (with an old Kansas-made Kustom guitar amplifier cabinet in the back for speakers, sparkly blue tuck-and-roll and all). With a little elbow grease, the old rig eventually got knocked into good enough shape that I started driving it on the street regularly.
I was at this time still in the throes of my dicey relationship with Marya, my first serious girlfriend. She was mean, spiteful and cruel — both physically and mentally — and she took perverse pleasure in diminishing me in a plethora of ways. I was legitimately terrified she would do something to sabotage my new objet d’amour, but to my immense relief, it seemed she legitimately liked the Rambler and even dubbed it “Flossie.” We took it out camping a couple times locally, along the Walnut River and then another time out at Cowley County State Lake. At that second spot I remember it being a chilly fall night, and we fell asleep in the back of the Rambler, the back seat folded down to make a nice bed area big enough for both of us. Just as dawn broke over the horizon to the east, my deep and luxuriant sleep was very rudely and abruptly interrupted when Marya punched me right in the middle of my face — hard. I saw stars, and as I opened my eyes, Marya was staring straight at me, unblinking, a grim smirk on her face. She looked like a scientist watching a lab rat to see how it would react to a negative stimulus.
“What the hell was that for!?” I sputtered in pain, reflexively drawing my hands up to cover my face in anticipation of another blow.
“I’m sorry,” she said icily. “I must have done that in my sleep.”
Her visage, blank but tinged with malice, told me otherwise.
The campout was over. We packed up and I drove Marya to her house out close to the Oklahoma line, then headed back to my own home in town alone.
“Did you see that shit?” I asked the Rambler. “Who punches a person in their sleep?”
The car of course gave no answer, but cocooned within it I felt a sense of comfort and perhaps solidarity. This little car and me — we were on the same team. Where the Chevy Citation had seemed like a simple device, this rig had a personality. And it seemed to like me as much as I liked it.
Some time later Marya and I drove up to Wichita in the Rambler for a date. We went to Steak and Ale and I spent the most money on dinner that I ever had in my life — it was like forty bucks for the two of us, and I tipped on top of that. (Hey, that’s like $110 now, and I was just a teenager!) There was a rowdy table in there crammed full of drunken professional soccer players from the Wichita Wings, and they boisterously sang a couple risqué songs that I found more hilarious than Marya did. As we were just leaving the restaurant and heading back to our hometown, there was a pop! under the hood and suddenly the Rambler’s engine revved out of control and I couldn’t stop it. I pulled into a hotel parking lot and opened the hood. I quickly noted that the throttle return spring, which brings the engine back to idle speed when you take your foot off the accelerator, had not just broken but disappeared altogether. It was late enough in the evening that there were no auto parts stores open, and I didn’t know what to do.
Just then I remembered that my former high school “gifted” counselor and his wife happened to have moved to an apartment not too far away. I limped the Rambler down Rock Road, managed to find their apartment door, and was relieved to find them home. They didn’t have any loose springs lying around, as I might have expected — but when I asked if they had a rubber band, they managed to produce several of different thicknesses and lengths. I thanked them profusely, and out in the parking lot, I managed to replace the missing throttle return spring with one of the bands. The car drove funny all the way home, as the elasticity of the rubber kind of bounced the throttle on deceleration, but it worked. I felt like a genius!
I grew more comfortable behind the wheel of the old wagon, and over time came more and more to feel like we were partners, like I was a cowboy in the Old West, and the Rambler my trusty steed. The little machine continued to prove itself to be dependable and extremely tough, too. It sat high enough off the ground that I could drive it virtually anywhere, and the old straight-six engine put out an impressive amount of torque — not enough to win one any races, mind you, but plenty to get one unstuck should one venture somewhere potentially sticky. Over rocks, through muddy pastures, up inclines that made me think twice, down roads of brick and gravel and washboard ruts in the dirt, it took in easy stride everything I threw at it. I could see how the marque had been named Motor Trend’s 1963 Cars of the Year. I started thinking of mine as bulletproof.
Until it broke.
Part of the clutch — or maybe the shifter — mechanism in these cars is a flexible joint with a matrix of rubberized industrial fabrics sandwiched between steel ends. Mine disintegrated, rendering the car inoperable, and though scarcely two decades had passed since the Rambler had rolled off the line in Kenosha, the part was no longer available. To make matters more complicated, this happened just as I was getting ready to move away to Wichita for college, and I had neither the time nor money to mess around with it. I parked the Rambler in my grandma’s back yard and headed up to the big city, where I would have no vehicle at all.
Within a few weeks I got a student loan refund check, and I picked up a cheap little old Yahama 400 Special motorcycle to get around on. I really loved riding this bike — but when the weather got cold, I was missing having an enclosed rig with a heater. I traded the bike for a 1980 Chevy Caprice that more or less immediately threw a rod, and was once again left without wheels altogether.
A friend drove me down to visit my grandma, who offered to have her mechanic, a gentle country boy whose kids I had gone to school with, take a look at the Rambler. In the end he took the old broken component apart and fabricated the middle part out of a piece cut from an old truck tire, then reassembled it and installed it on the car. If anything it actually worked better than before. When I returned to town to pick the car up, Ray came over to my gran’s house and we took the Rambler’s leaky old gas tank off so he could braze that weepy hole shut for good. We did it right there in the cool grass of the back yard I had grown up playing in, shaded by the old pecan tree I used to climb.
Finally, in the late spring of 1989, I drove the again-revived Rambler to Wichita, where it resumed duties as my daily driver. Reunited, and it felt so good!
At the time I was working the door at the Y-Not, a popular college bar, and one night I left the Rambler parked just across the way in the parking lot in front of Drago’s Pizza, where I was forever getting a slice and a can of soda. When I returned to my car, I found that somebody had jumped on the hood, caving the metal in — and kicked a fucking hole in the middle of my windshield! Adding insult to injury, whatever foul shitheel had perpetrated this had even gone so far as to pry the peace sign off of my hood ornament. Nobody owned up to seeing anything, and I assumed it could have been any of the knuckledragging frat boys who frequented the corner’s bars. I had no idea if it was personal, but it sure hurt my feelings.
And though I could not have known it then, this brazen act of unprovoked hostility would mark the beginning of a very dark summer.
It was not long after this that I took my first trip on LSD, which was unfortunately hijacked when I had to drive my friend Bob — also on his first acid trip — to the hospital for treatment after he was knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly in the head and torso by some drunken redneck in cowboy boots. I had never in my life felt more like a sitting duck, driving this ridiculous star-spangled car down a completely empty Central Avenue at 2:30 a.m., wired to the gills on acid for the very first time. But the Rambler really was a trusty old horse, and despite my state, got us exactly where we needed to be without a hitch.
Another time I drank so much at the Y-Not that I got alcohol poisoning and was sick for three days — yet I gave another guy a lift home that night, as he was much drunker than me, and then drove myself home. Again, the little Rambler seemed to know just where it was going. I had spent so much time and effort bringing it back from the precipice of the scrapyard, and now it was returning the favor by taking care of me in my most vulnerable moments. It felt like love.
(Obligatory note from modern-day America: I would never do this shit today. I was a dumb kid fucking around and got away with way more than I should have. I now have friends whose family members have been killed by drunk drivers and I understand all too well the toll this sort of thoughtless foolishness can take. So please don’t @ me, I already know.)
Circumstances soon dictated that I would have to move back home with my grandma, but I still spent the weekends in Wichita, crashing at my friends Steve and Karl’s apartment and working shifts at the Y-Not. I drove that old Rambler back and forth between towns like a yo-yo and it served me flawlessly, even with the hole in the windshield glass, which I had covered with clear packing tape to stop the wind whistling in. The Iittle car was by now my trusted confidant, and I caught myself talking to it like an old friend on many of those jaunts. It never answered back, but it didn’t have to; the steady clattering of its valvetrain was music to my ears, and my heart overflowed with its sweet purring song.
Even with the fuel tank fixed, I was still mired in poverty, and managed to run the car out of gas several times just because I hadn’t put enough in it to make the trip. This would invariably be prefaced by the sinister hum of the electric fuel pump, which started as a low drone and then rose to a hornet’s nest clatter as it ran dry. Once I pushed the car a quarter of a mile down a busy highway shoulder just so I could get it off the main road and prevent the police from noticing my expired tag. I recall it now vividly, plodding alongside the driver’s door of the slow-moving car in the heat of a Kansas summer, my calves and back and arms aching from the strain, the smells of volatilizing spray paint and horsehair seat stuffing and soft asphalt an industrial melange in my sinuses, the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me cassette playing on auto-reverse in the tape deck, distracting me as best it could from my Sisyphean lot.
For just a few months there, the little Rambler was my ticket to adventure and excitement and freedom, and people responded to the sight of it with genuine delight. I was driving it the first time I ever went to the legendary Burke’s Steakhouse on the far south side, at the behest of Sid Garrison, the preppy kid who introduced me to so much of the Wichita scene. On that occasion it was probably at least 2:00 in the morning and chilly enough to run the “Weather Eye” heater system in the car. The hot air poured out from under the dash into the footwells of the front seat and Sid remarked, “Weather Eye? More like the Desert Wind!” When we got to Burke’s I fell immediately in love with the place; I thoroughly enjoyed the first of many late-night meals I would eat at that notorious establishment, a den of billiards hustlers, prostitutes and Sunday bootleggers, cloaked in the facade of a friendly honky-tonkin’ mom-n-pop diner. No less than Papa Burke himself got an eyeball of the Rambler that night and chortled and said, “Well, ain’t that a humdinger?”
But then I was also driving the Rambler the first time I laid eyes on Hank, the unstable parolee who would just hours later murder my close friend Steve, and the next morning I drove the Rambler to the hospital where Steve lay dying with one bullet hole through his torso and another through his head. When I came out into the parking lot many hours later, I looked at my little wagon and saw a hearse.
August 1989 found me reeling, inconsolable and shell-shocked in the wake of Steve’s killing. I would not recover substantially for some months, and scrambling for any available placidity, I smoked as much pot as I could get my hands on — which in that particular summer was not very much at all. Acid was going around, and when some friends from my old hometown told me they wanted to come up for a visit on a Saturday, I planned a little lysergic get-together. I was relieved to have company and hoped a like-minded tête-à-tête-à-tête under the influence might be therapeutic.
A group of three or four showed up around Saturday noon and I told them to make themselves comfortable while I ran to get the “party favors.” A girl who lived in my building, Sissy, had told me we could get some LSD from her mother, who lived down south in the shadow of the John Mack Bridge, and I scooped her up and we drove over there together in the Rambler. She guided me to her mom’s place, where I picked up a bunch of acid — I don’t even remember how many hits now, maybe a dozen? — and we got right back in the car and headed toward downtown.
WHOOP! The staccato yelp of a police warning siren went off right behind us and I looked up to see the red and blue lights of a Kansas State Trooper sedan flashing in the rearview. Fuck. I pulled over. The color drained from Sissy’s face, and I told her softly just to play it cool and we’d be fine. I heard the footsteps of the trooper approaching and put on my straightest face.
The cop asked for my license and registration, and informed me I was being pulled over due to the large hole in the center of my windshield, which counted as a safety violation under the law. While he took my papers back to his car to radio me in, I seized the opportunity to get all that LSD out of my pocket. I quickly slipped the folded cigarette cellophane containing the blotter acid inside an empty cassette case in the glovebox under the guise of futzing with other papers in there, then waited patiently for the cop to return.
Imagine my surprise when the state trooper told me that I had a bench warrant out for an old fix-it ticket on my Yamaha motorcycle, and he was going to have to arrest me! I had actually fixed the problem on that bike — a broken turn signal — but apparently never had the ticket signed off by a cop, so it didn’t count. And now I was being arrested over it! The trooper wouldn’t let me start the car, but in order to prevent it from being towed to an impound yard, was kind enough to use his push bar to push me up out of the street and into the empty parking lot of an adjacent transmission shop.
The next thing I knew, I was being handcuffed really tightly behind my back and stuffed into the front passenger seat of the state trooper’s cruiser. He was nice enough, too, to give Sissy a ride back to our building, where I asked her to stop by my apartment and inform my out-of-town friends what was happening. I figured I would be booked and released pretty quickly.
I was not. Once taken down to the old county jail facility, I had my pockets emptied, my fingerprints taken, my mugshot made and my arrest officially entered into the public record. (I have since tried to find a copy of this mugshot because I remember what I looked like at the time and I know it must be hilarious, but it appears to no longer exist in any known database.) I was allowed to keep my cigarettes and told to take a seat in one of the molded plastic bowling alley chairs set up in a little holding area across the room from the booking desk. There was a big ashtray and a small television playing mostly static, plastic plaques engraved with the names of local bail bondsmen, and not much else. I was the only prisoner.
Hours passed and I couldn’t stop thinking about my houseguests. Were they still at my place? Maybe they went home? What could they possibly be thinking? Would they be mad that I had taken their money but didn’t have their LSD in hand when I got back? Nah, surely they’d understand the situation… Wouldn’t they?
I was finally released, and I walked the six or seven long city blocks from the jail back to my apartment, and it must have been 5:00 in the afternoon by the time I walked in the front door. My friends were all still there, their faces furled in loss and concern turning to joy and delight upon sight of me, a truly beautiful moment for me after such an afternoon. A round of greetings went up, and then my old school chum Mason — a brilliant and rather antiauthoritarian rogue — asked what happened to all the acid. Sissy had not seen me ditch the drugs in the glovebox of the car, and she had told my friends that I had been arrested with it in my pocket.
“I took it all,” I replied stonily. The assembled posse gasped in unison, but the slow grin I allowed to break across my face revealed my put-on.
“I was gonna say,” said Mason, “you better give me a transfusion, stat!”
I was home safe, it was true, but the car — and our LSD — was still across town.
“You wanna go down there and get the car and just drive it back real quick up the alleys and backroads?” Mason suggested. “Hell, I’ll drive it back over here so you don’t have to risk it.”
On any other day of my life, I would have taken him up on this — and things would have gone much differently. But I felt I had already put upon my guests enough for one day, and I was more than ready to dig in for the evening and forget the outside world.
“Nah,” I said, “I think it’s best if we just leave it where it is for now. That place won’t be open until Monday anyway, and I can call down there and explain the situation and let them know I plan to come get it. I just need someone to drive me down there now to get the acid out of the glovebox.”
Mason’s girlfriend Sandy did just that. When we got there I leaned into the Rambler and fished out the parcel I was after, rolled up the windows and patted the old car gently on the fender as I walked away.
“I’ll be back to get you soon,” I said out loud. “Don’t worry.”
I got into Sandy’s car, and as she turned into traffic and sped down the street, I turned and caught one last glimpse of my star spangled American beauty in the hot late afternoon sun.
The Monday morning following, I got out the Yellow Pages and looked up the number of the transmission shop where I had left the Rambler parked. A friendly fellow on the phone told me it was no problem, but I really should come get it as soon as possible. I told him I would have it out of there by the end of Tuesday. I got hold of a friend with a small truck, and in the middle of the day Tuesday we went down to get my car. Our plan was to just rope-tow it back to my place until I could figure out what to do about replacing the windshield, which I just knew would be expensive, if I could find one at all.
But when we arrived, the Rambler was not in the spot where I left it. In fact it was nowhere to be seen at all. My heart jackhammered in my chest as I scanned the horizon looking for any sign of it. Nada. Inside I talked to the same man I had spoken to on the phone, and he told me he assumed I had come and got it. Another staffer overheard our conversation and chimed in that the landlord of the building — not anyone on the shop staff — had called to have it towed off. He gave me the name of the tow company he had seen written on the truck that hauled it away, and when I got back to my apartment, I called them.
My car had been impounded scarcely two hours before, and the fee to redeem it was $40. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together at the moment, so I asked how long I had to come up with the fee.
“Well if you don’t come redeem it today, it’ll be $50 tomorrow, and $60 the day after that…”
And that’s how I lost my Rambler. Just like that. I didn’t have $40 that day, nor any possible way I could think of to get it. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have $50 the next day or $60 the next or $110 a week later either. I never saw my beloved car again, except in sullen grey dreams that still come to me on blue moons even now. I would go on to own dozens more cars, trucks, vans, campers and motorcycles, but that Rambler will forever remain closer to my heart than any of them.
To this day I have only very rarely seen in person a similar example of a Rambler from the same era, in any condition. The one time I was ever close to one after that was nearly 20 years later, when my friend Barb, who had expressed interest in buying a fun vintage car, asked me about a ’62 American coupe that was for sale locally. We took it for a test drive together and as I rode along with her in the passenger seat, my senses were positively overpowered by the whine of the driveline, the soft-serve feel of the tall fat tires along the asphalt, the intoxicating balm that is Old Car Smell. It all came back to me at once and I found myself swamped beneath a tidal wave of nostalgia, and loss, and guilt. How could I have let my trusty little Rambler, the car who had always had my back when I needed it most, get away from me so easily? Where had it gone? Why was I such a fuckup?
I felt hot silent tears slide down my nose and splash onto my shirt. It was too much to bear.
Barb didn’t buy the car, and has in the years since repeatedly stated her regret for failing to snatch it up.
I’m not one to say, “I told you so.”
But I told her so.
