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!

Auto Biography VIII

“The Bumblebee’s Camaro”

1990. Ter was starting her first fulltime government job and I was working graveyards at the radio station for $6.00 an hour. Blue Silver was our primary mode of transport, but with my odd hours and Ter now working 9 to 5, one vehicle was going to be challenged. We were living out of town and, as my younger older brother once described it, the bus service to and from consisted of “Three buses a week and all on Monday morning.”

It was time for Ter to buy herself a car.

She had admired the 1980s Chev Camaro for as long as I had known her. When she pictured herself owning a car, that was the one. She fancied the Berlinetta model, but has never been that stubborn about compromise. She came home one day all pumped about seeing a 1987 Camaro parked by the roadside with a “for sale” sign in its window and wanted me to go with her to see it.

You’re supposed to dream about the car of your dreams; that’s why it’s called the car of your dreams. You’re not supposed to own one from the get-go. That was my belief, anyway. Our family vehicles had always been previously-owned, functional for the purpose, and apparently expensive to maintain. We have no mechanics in the family, so whenever something went wrong with the car, it was a costly pain in the posterior for my parents. I grew up expecting the same fate to befall me, so despite my passion for the art of automotive design, Thunder had been chosen for practicality over aesthetics. Silver had been far less realistic given my financial situation, but she was a classic Mustang, end of argument.

Ter grew up in the big city. Neither parent drove, so there had been no family car. She learned to drive in 1985, taking her road test in my Dodge and sharing Silver until it became evident that a second vehicle might be in order. Her auto experience so differed from mine that it never occurred to her that she should start small with something practical, like a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic. She had no idea that you work your way up to a sportscar. Naturally, I didn’t tell her any of this; I figured she would look at the car, decide it was too expensive, too big, too far beyond her reach, and let it go.

She didn’t. She bought it.

In her purest state, Ter is a bumblebee with absolutely no concept that her aerodynamics make flight impossible. If she wants something badly enough, she simply makes it happen. I have seen her will in action countless times over the years and, good or bad, it remains one of the world’s unsung wonders. One of my favourite stories is of her dad sitting out with one of his cronies when she drove her snappy new prize into the parking lot at their apartment building. Dad’s pal said to him, “Is that her boyfriend’s car?”

Dad proudly replied, “No, it’s my daughter’s.”

He knew.

Auto Biography VII

"Judging a Character by His Wheels"

humble pie 2000

A horrifying development in my current short story. One of the sexiest characters I have ever written is driving a plastic Mustang. How can that be? Where did I go wrong? No one is perfect, but a plastic Mustang??? Kill me now.

I was barreling happily along, watching the story unfold as I typed. Feeling pretty good about it, too, as I attempt to apply some advice that Nicole posted over at The Paper Teapot a couple of weeks ago: “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.—John Steinbeck.” She followed up with a bunch of his quotes which I will address anon, given that I loved every one of them, but at this point I was merely forging ahead with no end in sight.

I get through the first scene: the morning after with Cristal and her mystery lover. Then the second scene, still that morning. Then the third, where they must part and she realizes that he drove her home in her car the previous night. It made sense to me, so I went with it. Then the fourth and fifth scenes poured out and in the sixth scene, she spies him in the rearview mirror driving a … something. I couldn’t see what it was. I know it’s not the black Jeep; that belongs in another story. I was getting hung up on the details, though, and that directly countered Steinbeck’s advice, so I typed in “(his car)” and kept going.

Then I walked into the village, paying particular attention to the vehicles around me in hope that one would strike a chord. And, much to my chagrin, one did.

Since I am such a car fiend, I try to populate my stories with vehicles I myself would like to drive. I am also a Mustang snob. My wee sister, who drives a 2006, is constantly subjected to my scorn on the purity of the breed and how Ford totally missed when they tried to recreate the classic body style using modern technology—kind of like George Lucas continually reworking (and re-releasing) Star Wars because CDI is so much better now than what he had to work with in the 1970s. Because you can doesn’t always mean you should. (Good advice, Ru; maybe you should take it when you think of revamping some of your old writing!) So imagine my surprise when a shiny black convertible cruised along my sightline and it was no stretch to picture Cristal’s lover behind the wheel. Then I recognized the make and model, and my hair buzzed out like I’d been Tasered. Augh! A black plastic Mustang! Oh, noooooooo! Say it isn’t so! What does that say about the character? He’s supposed to be a hero, a real Joe Cool, a worthy recipient of my protagonist’s heart. Well, I’ll tell you … in truth I fear he’s a bit of a bad boy and Cristal might be in for some trouble with him, in which case the fake Pony is probably a righteous choice for him.

I want to warn Cristal that he may be bad news, but I’m just the scribe. She is trying to convince herself that she should feel something for him, given how intimate she has already been with him, so I have no idea how this is going to end. Well, I hope. I’ll have to keep writing and see …

Auto Biography V

“Blue Silver”

       “Only you would spend more money to buy a car that’s older than the one youʼre giving up.”

“But, Dad, it’s a ’66 Mustang!”

 

I mean, really. I was 26 years old, I was working fulltime. Thunder was packing it in ... and it was a ’66 Mustang!

My brother-in-law co-signed for me and the deed was done. I got behind the wheel to take her off the lot and the salesman said to me, “Don’t let your boyfriend drive.”

Who needs a boyfriend? I thought, gleefully. I have a ’66 Mustang! A creampuff V6 automatic with 66,000 miles on the odometer (this was in 1987), that came to me by way of a divorce where the wife tried to kill her ex-husband by selling his baby.

She was absolutely ripe for the name “Blue Silver”, taken from Duran Duran’s song The Chauffer, which features the phrase “sing blue silver”.

When I was laid off from my fulltime government job, Silver took me up and down Vancouver Island in search of radio work, then over the Malahat and back during the summer when I landed a weekend shift at the Duncan station. Finally, I nailed the graveyard shift at an AM station in Victoria. For a year, Blue Silver stood out all night on Douglas Street and was only towed once—I am convinced because she was a classic Mustang and the tow asshole couldn’t stand that she wasn’t his.

My wee sister cheekily called her a “character vehicle” – with good reason.

The carburetor iced up in winter. At 6:00 every morning after my on-air shift, I had to run the engine curbside until the temperature needle reached halfway up the dial or she would stall at a traffic light; if the traffic lights were with us, we could cruise 12 blocks without stopping and charge up Hwy 17 to home just as Ter was getting up to go to work.

The driver’s door clunked each time it was opened. I lubed the hinges with vegetable oil, to no avail.

Our happiest speed was 70 miles per hour, when I could lift my foot from the gas and the far rear wheel would squeal like a delirious hamster galloping for its life.

I got my first and only speeding ticket in that car, peeling off the highway and racing through a residential area on a mission to collect Duran Duran concert tickets from the mall outlet. The cop gave me points and I think there was a fine, but I was in a hurry to get where I was going so didn’t pay that much attention.

The AM radio was usually tuned to a classic rock station in Vancouver that featured “Beatle breaks” every weekday at 11:00 a.m. Classic tunes seemed more fitting with Silver’s style, but there were other, more current, musical moments to be had. Ter chauffeured me home from the dentist after I had survived some horrifying procedure and couldnʼt sit up let alone handle the wheel – Bruce Springsteenʼs new song was released on that day and I swear to this one that it’s called “Burger in the Skyˮ. I was on the road at Thanksgiving when DD’s new single, I Don’t Want Your Love, premiered and I damn near drove off the road at how good the song was. And once my Christmas present stereo was installed, I sang Make Love Like a Man with Def Leppard when their “Adrenalize” album was released in 1992.

Good times.

Alas, the car of my dreams fell into my lap at the wrong time in my life. A year after I got the graveyard gig, the station went automated from midnight to 6:00 a.m., so there went my radio career. I wound up on social assistance and Silver wound up on the street when Ter bought her first car in 1990. Newer and therefore more reliable, the Camaro got the driveway and Silver was housed elsewhere, changing locations whenever the vandals found her. A front tire was stabbed. A Halloween pumpkin pitched overnight struck and dented her rear quarter. Keys were dug along her near side. And one day, when the continually-clunking driver’s door opened, a god-awful POING! preceded the spring shooting skyward from between the hinges. That door swung free forever after, so turning your back on it guaranteed a shove in the butt.

And then the steering began to go.

I couldn’t afford to keep Silver safe from vandals or safe to drive. My dad – he who had advised me to “get off the moon” when I surprised him with my proud purchase – generously put up the cash to get the work done, but the end was nigh.

Ter and I moved to a costlier flat downtown. Keeping Silver was now completely impractical. I was only working half-time. I had nowhere to park her, no money to maintain her, and once in town, nowhere to drive her. Five years after I bought her, she was sold to a unit supervisor with the BC Ambulance Service for half of what I paid. I handed over the keys, got into Ter’s Camaro, and dared not look back.

In hindsight, I adored my Pony, but I didnʼt fully appreciate the jewel in my possession. If I had, I would have made one decision differently with an eye to keeping her … but even then, success was no given. Character vehicles are expensive when you have a full time paycheque to spend on them. It happened as it was meant to, but the single nameable regret in my life is letting Blue Silver go.

For my birthday that year, Ter gifted me with an 8X10 photo of my parents and me taken in happier times with the Mustang as a prop. I opened the package, burst into tears and cried, “I love this picture! Silver is in it!”

 

 

Mum, Dad, Ru and Blue Silver 1990