My First Car

The is an image of a '69 Dodge Dart. My first car was the same model and year as the one in the image. Only mine was yellow, not shiny, and usually dirty.

I bought the car for $600, $300 of which my dad gave me. I was 17 and most of my friends already had cars. There was my bud Japhy's '77 Chevelle. For some reason everyone in school called it the Love Mochine. I spent a whole bunch of time in the passenger seat of that car.

My car had 4 doors, a slant-6 engine, and full time power steering. The power steering was ridiculous. You could spin the wheel and let go and it would keep spinning until you turned all the way around or crashed (depending on how fast you were going.) The radio, AM/FM, had those fat black preset buttons. The speedometer stretched from one end of the dash to the other. It wasn't cool by any standards but it sort of had character and it was mine.

The first time I took it on a road trip (Ft. Myers), Japhy, and bothers Perry and Kenny Shaw were with me. We were cruising south on US 41 (cue The Boys Are Back In Town by Thin Lizzy here) when I glanced at the dash. What I thought was the fuel gauge was pegged to the right. "Man, this car gets great mileage", I said. "That's the heat gauge dude!" Japhy said. We were overheating and limped back home without ever reaching our destination.

Another time Japhy and I were hauling ass up my road in the car. We were coming to the stop sign at the start of the street where it intersects a fairly busy road. On the other side of the road there was a significant drop off into some palmettos. I went to stop and my foot went to the floor. I had zero brakes! At first I tried to jam it in park. Needless to say this did not work at all. At the last second I swerved to the right at about 25 mph. The car bounced to a stop between a telephone pole and the pole's guy wire, with about a foot on either side to spare. We laughed our asses off.

I wish I could say I had alot of good times in that car. I don't think I ever even touched a girl in it. Truth is I still spent most of my high school nights out in the Love Mochine. Eventually the car had problems that I couldn't or wasn't interested in fixing. (I had my eye on a sweet '77 Celica.) It sat neglected on the side of the road across for my parents house for several months. The last time I saw it, it was on the back of a flatbed wrecker on its way to the dump.