Auto Biography XIII

“Classical Gas”

Blue Thunder didn’t have a standard issue gas cap. The cap was locked, the little door meant to conceal it having disappeared during the decade before the car fell into my hands. A previous owner must have replaced the original cap, securing the contents of the tank from theft by siphoning. Fuel was an outrageous $0.42 cents a litre in those days. “Regular” fuel was leaded, and unleaded was the pricier option. Thunder, like the majority of vehicles at the time, ran on regular.

I was twenty-three years old, and the era of full service gas stations was on the decline. Most outlets had the option of full or self-serve, and if you pumped your own, the price was a little lower. I once overfilled Thunder’s tank, spewing gasoline over my shoes and the car’s rear quarter, but that didn’t spook me out of the self-serve lane. I was a fully independent female and perfectly capable of fuelling up by myself.

Blue Silver came with the Ford factory gas cap. You can identify an early Mustang’s model year by the front grille and the gas cap which, in 1966, was solid chrome and so big that it required both hands to unscrew. Fortunately, Silver’s previous owner had seen fit to secure it in place with a coil of cabled wire that made it impossible to leave the cap on the trunk after refuelling, but my arthritic hands often had some difficulty twisting it back into place once the tank was full.

One evening I pulled into the station, unscrewed the cap, pumped in five bucks’ worth of regular, replaced the cap and went on my way—Christmas shopping, I think, because there was no other reason to drive alone into town after dark. It was a half-hour drive, part highway and part city street, until I got parked. Stepping from the car, I was hailed by a young guy who had driven in behind me and wanted me to know that my gas cap was hanging by its idiot string. He’d followed me from the highway and tailed me to the mall, staring, no doubt, into the gaping maw of the open tank the whole time.

There’s nothing like the automotive equivalent of walking up the street with your skirt caught in your pantyhose to scare an independent female out of pumping her own gas.

After that, I paid a little extra to have an attendant fill Silver’s tank for me. After she was sold and Ter took over driving duty with both Camaros, I had so few occasions on which to address the fuelling issue that I haven’t pumped a drop into the Tiguan and he’s almost six years old!