Via Fark, I stumbled across a post in Spike titled 10 Signs Your Car Is A Beater.  After a while I realized I was laughing because I’d owned some of those cars myself.

10. Your Trunk Looks Like a Pep Boys Exploded

My first car was a new car.  Looking back on it, I was unreasonably lucky in that regard.  Most kids on my side of the railroad tracks, fresh out of high school, were lucky to get hand me downs or well worn junkers.  I got a brand new 1973 Ford Pinto.  I had to make the payments myself, but Mom willingly co-signed the loan.  I guess I’d proven by that time that I could be responsible about money.  The drive it off the lot price was $1997.48.  It had a 1600cc overhead valve four with a tiny one barrel carb and a four-speed manual transmission.  I got the most bare bones one they had on the lot: it didn’t have a radio, it didn’t even have a cigarette lighter above the ash tray…only a metal plug where one would have gone.  I later found that the wiring for the lighter was there anyway when I added one so I could power things off it.

Ford and GM and AMC had just decided to get into the sub-compact car market, and the big selling point of the Pinto back then, was it’s basic simplicity.  In the sexist climate of the times, one of their ads was of a group of airline stewardesses standing around a Pinto with its hood up, holding various tools, demonstrating that even stewardesses could do the maintenance on one.  The great thing about that car for me was that even a kid fresh out of high school could work on one.  That was important, because I had absolutely no money to pay anyone to work on it. 

Over the years I learned to do the maintenance on it myself, even to the point of replacing brakes, clutches, water pumps and exhaust pipes and mufflers, even the radiator at one point.  That bought me a familiarity with automobile basics, and over time an appreciation for good mechanical design, which the Pinto had in some regards, and didn’t in others.  It also got me started on assembling a good tool collection. 

I made a decision early on, influenced by the Uber geek crowd I’d already fallen into at that age, to only buy the very best tools.  Since I was in no position to be buying expensive tool sets, I simply bought one of what I needed, when I needed it.  I could skimp on food and clothes if I had to, but if I needed a tool for something I would buy the very best Sears Craftsman or Snap-On.  The thinking was that a tool was something you didn’t just buy, but invested in because they made you self sufficient.  It’s a strategy I pursued the rest of my life.  When I moved into Casa del Garrett back in 2001, I came well equipped with tools (and spare parts…I’m a pack rat after all…) for doing all sorts of Harry Homeowner tasks around the house, many of which, particularly the hand tools, had been bought back in my teens and twenties.

I kept that Pinto for an entire decade, pampering it as best I could.  Back then you were doing good if you got over 50k out of a standard American made car.  They only made them back then with five digits on the odometer, which tells you right there what they expected the life span of one of their cars would be.  I got 135k out of that Pinto.  But age took its toll and the car began to fall completely apart in ways I simply could not cope with and I had to give it up. 

3. Starting Your Car Requires the Hood to be Open

That was the Pinto toward the end of its life.  The little one barrel carburetor had some sort of vapor lock going on inside of it.  During the hot summer months I had to open the hood unscrew the air filter lid and stick a paper clip, I swear, into a hole near where the float lived.  I’d hear a slight swoosh of pressure being released.  Then the car would start.  If I didn’t do that…forget it.

There were other problems.  The plastic in the dashboard and the steering wheel was severely cracked, as well as the vinyl in the driver’s seat.  I patched the driver seat with duct tape, I thing I reckoned I could get away with since I lived on the white trash side of the tracks anyway.  One of the windshield wiper arms was prone to popping off, as was the rear view mirror occasionally.  The gear shifter would come off the trans like a gecko’s tail in my hands while I was shifting if I wasn’t careful.  I’d added an oil cooler, a nice stereo cassette deck, a set of gauges including a Heathkit electronic tachometer, and an electric rear window defogger, and I’d religiously changed the engine oil every 2000 miles.  I pampered that engine and it never failed me, but by 135k everything around it was pretty much falling apart.  If mom and I had a house I’d have kept at it, but we lived in an apartment and while I could get away with the occasional oil change landlords tend to frown on tenants doing clutch work in the parking lot.

I had no money for a new one, and since I didn’t have steady work then I couldn’t ask mom to co-sign a loan for another one.  I couldn’t promise her I’d be able to keep up the payments.  A friend stepped forward and offered me his mom’s old Chrysler Newport.  It was a tank.  It had a 450 cubic inch V8 under the hood and bench seats front and rear.  It was so big the dashboard had two ashtrays, one on the driver side, and one on the passenger side.  Having driven a Pinto for ten years, I felt tiny and lost inside that thing.  I named it The Blue Wale.

Oh…and it had a pretty big hole in the floor in front of the driver’s seat.  I kept it covered with a floor mat.

I did my best to take care of it, including replacing the motor mounts after one broke loose.  But a reckless driver in a Mercury Capri hit me head-on and totaled what was left of it.  I was really grateful for that massive hood in front of me when I saw that Capri careening toward me.  It slammed my Newport backward three feet and pretty much creamed the front-end, but I walked out without a scratch.  Getting my face slammed into the all metal dashboard of a Rambler American one day when I was seven years old, had taught me the value of seatbelts long before I’d even heard of such things.

I entered a period of carlessness.  I was utterly dependent on public transportation to get around any further then my own two feet could take me…which wasn’t a trivial distance since I have always loved to walk.  But don’t ever ask me to depend on public transportation again.  At least not in America.  New York City and Portland Oregon exempted.

The last junker I ever owned was another 1974 model.  It was fall of 1991, and I’d just gotten my first good job as a software developer.  Problem was I had to commute to Baltimore from Rockville.  I tried taking the metro to Union Station in Washington, and the MARC rail to Baltimore, and the Baltimore Light Rail to Timonium.  Once.  It was three hours each way.  So I needed a car.  Another friend stepped forward and arranged for me to buy the car owned by the mother of another one of his friends. 

Common attributes include a gaping hole where a stereo might’ve once been, a stench which demands that the windows never get rolled up, and interior which constantly sheds various bits of material on anyone unfortunate enough to be within its confines. A thief looks at your car and says “man, sucks to be that guy” and moves on. Criminals pity you. That’s where you’re at right now.

It was a white 1974 Ford LTD panel wagon.  She’d used it to service her gumball machine business in West Virginia.  It had 240k miles on it, and was powered by a 400 cubic inch V8 with a collapsed hydraulic lifter in it somewhere.  I could make the tap, tap, tapping of the lifter go away for a few hundred miles after a fresh oil change, but it always came back and fixing the lifter would have meant serious engine work I was unwilling to put into it.  The interior roof cloth was delaminating and sagging to the point where it had started to block the view out the back window.  So I cut it all down.  The foam lining then began to flake off and I’d get out of the car with my hair full of it.  Big as the Newport was, the LTD wagon was immense.  I named it The Great White…as in great white whale.

After driving it for a year and a half to and from Baltimore I was at the place where I could finally believe that this earning a living as a computer programmer thing wasn’t a fluke and I moved into my first apartment of my very own.  I was thirty-eight years old.  Having that station wagon was a big plus during that move.  But shortly after I’d settled in, I wandered into a car dealer to see, just out of curiosity, if I could talk myself into a new car too.  That evening I drove home in a brand new 1993 Geo Prism and felt like I’d hit the big time.  I named it Aya.  The dealer took my LTD in for a hundred bucks trade-in and I felt grateful they hadn’t made me pay them to take it.

Aya was the size of my first new car, the Pinto.  But technologically it was light years away.  It had the same size engine but it was an overhead cam fuel injected little goer.  I could do 85 in it no sweat.  The Pinto labored at 60.  I did the Rocky Mountains in Aya and it just hummed along.  The Pinto gasped for breath in those mountains.  I owned Aya for twelve years, put just a tad over 200k on it, and the main reason I sold it was I was ready then to step up a bit.

Two junkers, and one Ford Pinto that became a junker simply because Ford hadn’t built it to last even if you took care of it.  But they encouraged me to buy good tools and learn how to take care of a car.  They taught me to keep emergency stuff in the trunk, jumper cables, flares, this and that for quick repairs, and not to panic if the car broke down and left me stranded somewhere miles from anything.  In retrospect for all that I am grateful.

After the Prism came a brand-new 2005 Honda Accord which I named Beauty because it was just so lovely to look at. Beauty had all the options…it was the first car I’d ever bought with a shopping list bigger then "whatever I can afford that rolls off the lot under its own power".  It had leather seats, fake wood trim, satellite radio, a power driver seat, seat warmers.  Seat warmers!  The rear seats folded down so I could transport large items.  I had to unbolt the back seat to do that in the Prism.  And after the Accord came a brand-new 2008 Mercedes-Benz C300.

A Mercedes-Benz…  I stood there just staring at it after I got it home, thinking of all the places we would go, and I named it Traveler.  I’d dreamed of owning a Mercedes since I was a teenager, when an uncle had driven down for a visit in his new 220D.  By the time I was thirty-five I figured it would always be just a dream.  But I never thought I’d ever have a house of my own either.

Almost eighteen years passed from the first time I laid eyes on The Great White to the first time I sat down in Traveler.  It wasn’t that long.  It was twenty between the time I bought the Pinto and when I was able once more to afford another new car, the Prism.  I was eighteen years old when I bought the Pinto.  Thirty-eight when I bought the Prism.  The time between them were some of the worst years of my life.  For eight of them I had no car at all.  When I finally did get a car again, the insurance companies wouldn’t touch me because I hadn’t owned a car for so long.  I had to get state funded insurance, at drunk driver rates even though my license was spotless.

I can sit here and close my eyes and with very little effort remember, vividly, struggling under the Pinto with the transmission, trying to get it threaded back through the clutch pack after replacing the clutch because yet another new clutch they’d sold me turned out to be a crappy rebuilt clutch instead which had failed after only a few miles.  I can recall sitting in the Newport with the hood open and the engine idling, tapping the gas pedal ever so slightly, and seeing the engine try to jump out of the car because one of the motor mounts had just broken off.  I can recall driving to Baltimore on a sunny February morning up I-95 listening to the loud tap, tap, tapping of the collapsed lifter and wondering if I had enough money that week for another six quarts of fresh oil or should I just let it rattle.

If it seems sometimes here like I never stop gushing over the Mercedes, there is a reason for it.

[Edited a tad…and then some more…]