Mi Carruchas: Numero Dos

After I sold the Impala, I didn’t drive again for three years. In the interim, I’d gone to Germany and back, hitchhiked from Albuquerque to Midland, Ontario. From there went to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and re-enlisted and wound up back at Ft. Lewis, Washington.

Labor Day weekend of 1980, my buddy, John M. went AWOL. His girlfriend, Gayle, came by the barracks looking for him. I told her the news and she said, “Oh. Know where I can get some acid?” She had a car, a 1972 Dodge Charger, that had belonged to an old lady. It actually had seatcovers made of that vinyl shit people used to put on their sofas. The car was in mint condition (of course it was only eight years old. She drove us to a party were she thought we might be able to score.

The search was a bust and we wound up at a little bar across the highway from the base gate. We drank there until a little after midnight and then left. I didn’t really feel like going back so I asked if she wanted to drive around. She said she needed gas, so I filled her tank.

“Jesus,” she said when she saw how much I’d put in, “Where to you want to go?”

I thought for half a drunken second and replied, “California?”

My next memory was my pants around my ankles in a truck stop in Oregon, followed by breakfast. Later, in southern Oregon, she said she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and that I should drive. What could I say? I’d just scored with this chick. I wasn’t about to screw it up by saying, “Yeah, I’m 22 but I don’t drive.” So I drove. 4:00 a.m., still half-drunk, tired, and not really knowing what I was doing.

But, drive I did. Gayle asleep on my lap. I drove until my eyes were crossing and I almost got us hit. When we woke up, we traded off, though when we got to the SF Bay Bridge, I was back behind the wheel. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven in San Francisco, (or Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver) but it’s pretty damn hilly. What saved me was the fact the car was an automatic, so it didn’t roll back on the hills.

Gayle was sick while we were there, and I wound up doing the rest of the driving on the trip. My point is that this was how I really learned to drive. Trial by fire and all that, eh whot. I drove through Oakland at night, got lost in the country. Drove up the 101, the Pacific Coast Highway, all the way to Oregon, and then up to Tacoma.

Gayle and I got married less than three months later, and the car sort of became mine.

It had some issues. The first was that the driver’s side door didn’t always stay shut. Second was that, one night when I was driving, I was playing around and slipped the car into reverse at about 30mph—effectively eliminating that no-backwards-rolling-when-in-gear safety mechanism. And finally, it had a tendency for the electrical system to totally drain and the car to die, for no reason—generally when it was raining.

I got a call at work one day. Gayle had been driving the car down a winding road. The engine died, the car slid side-ways, the driver’s side door flew open, Gayle fell out, the car launched over an embankment and rolled a hundred yards down. The tow truck driver said it was about the only spot on that entire forested hill where the car could go down without hitting anything.

It was a cool car before I got my mitts on it. I don’t remember what happened to it. I think I sold it to a guy in my unit who fixed it up for a few hundred bucks and it ran like a champ.

Next up on Cars We’ve Owned: The 1970 Chevy S-15 Panel Truck.