this has been hiding in my drafts for a while, but here goes
It was 1985. I was working for a big evil military-industial company. I had never driven a stick, but I had fallen in love with Volkswagen Rabbit GTI. White tie. The one with the cool trim strips and sunroof. Mine stripes were red, even.
Oh, this was the first car that I wanted, that I could actually buy. My buddy, Larry, also a lab rat*1 at said big evil military-industrial company. His dad owned Furst Autos in Magna Utah, a exotic and rare car dealership. I don’t know how they got Janie, but I was taken after Larry took me for a spin in it.
So I plunked down my cash, and climbed into my new purchase, to drive the short distance near Pioneer Hospital. It was a slushy December night, the rain and snow mixing to cause a general haze the made by a thousands speckles of light refracting from the sloppy wet snowflakes and plopping giant raindrops.
I managed to get the car from Magna to 3500 South, keeping fingers and toes crossed that I didn’t have to stop, because the first time had been a disaster. I had turned on 5600 West and stalled out in rush hour traffic. Back in 1985, it wasn’t much to be honest, but my stopping and stalling and starting way south with annoyed cars behind me, made me see red.
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the concept of a manual transmission. I had been riding motorcyles since I was twelve. I got the car rolling pretty good down, hoping for green lights. I was only semi-lucky on that front and I didn’t stall out, though I never got it out of third gear.
That car became my super-power at age twenty-one. I would drive it into the ground by 1987, but in between, the car was driven hard, at all times, and as I grew comfortable, ripping through the gears on every stop light.
This will always be muy all time favorite car. The early days of what would become a street racing mainstay, the hot hatchback2, whiney engines and all. I traded mine for a more sensible Subaru, after the steering rack cracked on my Rabbit3.
Today, I don’t really drive at all, so my memories are fond and probably rose-colored. Even if I did, I doubt I would be barreling around the streets. That stuff is best left in the past. For moment, though, my car dreams sort of came true. The kind of fun that leads to your all time favorite car.
- We we were called lab rats, a bunch of twenty-somethings in an industrial chemistry lab, helping to invent, well, machines and processes, to produce materials to make military equipment. You can imagine how that went. Hijinks with things like nitrogen and dry ice were a nightly occurence for we select few, chose to watch over the labs on the bight shift. ↩︎
- I am sure the equivalent of my Rabbit, the current GTI is much faster, but all little sporty cars, are like driving a go cart, with that relative speed. I would later have a Honda Civic hatch, based on the rally rides of the early-eighties. It was a fun little car, with a screeching turbo. My boys called it the funny car. It was primer grey and the hatch had a habit of popping open when driving down the road. It also had a really bad habit of overheating. The kind of experiences that lead to tall tales of passes, pull outs, and puttering to inopportune stops ↩︎
- I jumped my Rabbit at least three times, so I am sure that didn’t help. ↩︎
Remain Lost 