On cars with names that begin with M...

Well, here be my inaugural blog. I apologize for the delay if I have implied that there would be something up here sooner; I’m bad that way. Problem is, after a day of good solid manual labor, I plop my big ol’ butt down here to check my email and whatnot, and before I can get up a good head of steam on the old blogger train, I’m asleep or way too drunk to make any sense. Not that I make sense awake or sober, but at least the chances that I’ll be cogent are a little greater.

In any event, I am a motorhead of the rawest variety. I get this from my father, who also was a motorhead despite the best ministrations of my grandfather, who just didn’t get it. My dad was and is one of those types where you ask him his blood type and he says "Penzoil." My father has two sons. It was a safe bet that one of them would follow in his footsteps, and that person is me, though unlike him I have never raced professionally nor earned my living by my mechanical skills, meager though they may be.

So I’m a motorhead too. Where I differ from my father (among other things) is that I name all my cars. Yeah, I’m that type of motorhead. Don’t ask me why; you either get it or you don’t. I’ve always anthropomorphized the hell out of any vehicle I own, to the extent that I talk to them, give them oil changes or baths as gifts, try to be easy with the wrenches so I’m not hurting them (unless I’m pissed, and then I’m deliberately rough so I cause them as much physical discomfort as possible. To quote a quote from Kevin, y’all wouldn’t last 10 minutes in my head), and applaud them when they perform well or feel bad when I’ve done something less than nice to them. I felt guilty, for instance, when I totaled my Acura Integra, not because it was a nice little car (it was) but because I felt it deserved better. My father, who is unlike me also in that he experiences none of this emotional baggage, responded with "Son, you are fucked up."

Anyway, I name all my cars. They’re all female and for some reason, they’ve all had names that begin with the letter M. I don’t know why this is, for it certainly wasn’t contrived; it just worked out that way. Here, then, is a list of all the cars I have owned, and their names.



My first car was a 1978 MGB. It was, as the picture implies, a little convertible of British heritage. It belonged to my brother, who has none of the guilt ascribed by me to things done or not done to cars, and so he beat the absolute shit out of this thing at every opportunity. And, you must understand, by this I mean more than the average high-school burnouts in the parking lot. My brother had a mastery for torturing vehicles, and I have to say that the B held up well, even after an entire year during which, on the return trip from dropping our car-pooler off at his house, our route home took us down Summit Hill, renowned for the fact that there was major air to be had for anyone psycho enough to hit the crest at greater than forty miles an hour. My brother never once took this hill at less than seventy, and if you asked me to bet if a person could have stood at the crest of that hill and my brother’s car would have cleared that person, I’d have bet yes.

I inherited it after my folks got my brother a well-used but still serviceable Honda Accord for graduation. They had the B repainted and let me tool around in it. I had it for two weeks, then parked it on a hill and forgot to leave it in gear (the parking brake didn’t work). It rolled down the hill and hit the only tree within 50 yards.

Oh well; it was never that reliable in the first place. MGBs are British, and like all British cars of 70’s vintage, had Lucas electronics. You’ve heard all the Lucas jokes, right? Why do Brits drink their beer warm? ’Cause Lucas makes their refrigerators. Heard of the Lucas three-position headlight switch? Yeah—off, dim, and flicker. Hey, I just had a Lucas pacemaker installed in my chest, and I feel gr—

Anyway, the MGB had a badge on the trunk that said MG. It looked like this:
If you were really drunk, and squinted a bit, you might think that said "Midge," so that’s what we called it.



This is what we replaced the B with. It was a 1983 Chevrolet Cavalier station wagon. It looks good in the pictures, but it really was a piece of shit. It was such a bare-bones stripper that it didn’t even have a cigarette lighter. But the seats folded down, and that was cool. I never lost my virginity in this, but I watched two friends (on two separate occasions) lose theirs. Yes, I’m a shameless voyeur, but I don’t go around peeping in windows; I was just the designated driver.

My friends called it the Cadaver; I called it Maggie. Its one redeeming feature was that it was a manual. Of all my circle of friends, I was the only one who knew how to drive stick, so I taught all my friends in this. I only had to replace the clutch twice. It got T-boned in the parking lot of the Toys-R-Us where I worked.



Then I got this. This was a 1987 Mazda B2200 pickup truck, and she was a sweetie. I called her Myrtle—a fitting moniker, I felt, for a slow little rice-grinding pickup truck whose color exactly matched that of poo. What you see in the photo is what I did with it a lot—practiced my drifting technique in snow-covered parking lots. For this you need a rear-drive vehicle with a hand-operated parking brake (not required, but helpful) and preferably a manual transmission. Myrtle had all of these, and she excelled at power oversteer. I would go out on winter nights after a big snowstorm before the plows came out and just hang my ass out around every corner. I once lost it when well sideways at way over 60 miles an hour around a long right-hand sweeper and ended up in some poor guy’s front yard with the high beams blazing in through his front window into the room where he was watching TV. He got up and waved. I waved back. I managed to get out of there before the cops came. I still can’t figure out how he didn’t get my plates.



I sold Myrtle at over 200,000 miles when the top of the engine started making some funny noises. She was puking oil out of the rear of the engine and needed a clutch, and was really rusty to boot, so I let her go for $500 and got this. This was Matilda, a 1988 Acura Integra. A nice little car and reasonably fast. I got sideswiped by a truck about a year after I got it and the whole driver’s side was pretty well fucked. Both doors on that side still worked, though, so when the insurance company wrote it off as a total loss, I collected the money and kept driving the thing, though from then on it was known as the Blue Banana, because a) it was blue and b) it was bent. My friends hated to ride in the back, because the rear fender was pushed in over the wheel on that side and the tire would rub when I hit bigger bumps. "I always feel like such a fatass when I ride in your car," was my friend Bob’s way of putting it.

One night, at about 3:00 in the morning, I was heading back to DeKalb on the tollway. It was a crisp November night and the highway was deserted. I had been thinking about all my friends who wold brag about how fast they got from here to there because they got their car up to 120 or 130. I’d always wanted to try that, and so I put my foot to the floor and held it there. "Just so that I can say that I tried it," I told myself as the speedometer climbed. By this time, Matilda had well over 200,000 miles and was running on borrowed time. I got her up to 101 mph. That’s what the cop said when he pulled me over. That ticket cost me a shitload of money and my insurance went through the roof. My dad told me he was proud of me.



Matilda was pretty well shot, but I wanted no further temptation, so I got this. This was Little Mama (it kinda begins with M), a 1988 GMC Safari. I owned this fucking thing for two years and I was never happier to get rid of a vehicle than when I sold it. I never believed in curses until I met Little Mama, and she was truly a cursed thing, to the extent that she was even in the papers, and people are in jail. I firmly believe that they would be walking around free today (which would definitely NOT be good, as they were true criminals) if not for this incarnate of Satan on wheels. I could write for days and still not paint the true picture, but I won’t do so now. Hey, if you really want all the gory details, ask and I’ll be happy to throw down, but for now we'll let the thing sleep.



With rapture I got rid of Little Mama (giving the thing a good solid kick in the ass as she went) and got this, a 1991 Honda Accord wagon, to this day the best car I ever owned. Not the coolest, but definitely the best. She was gunmetal gray (a color cops notice a lot less than red or yellow) and was a 5-speed. How cool was that? When I got it, it ran fine but would only idle on 3 cylinders, making a neat little putt-putt sound that my mother said sounded just like a car in a Mr. Magoo cartoon. The name stuck, and I kept Magoo for a while until a lot of expensive things broke at around the same time. I fixed them all at great expense, and then noticed a clunking sound coming from the transmission. I sold her with full disclosure to a guy on eBay.

At this point, you may have noticed that all my cars have been used. Many of them were well-used when they came into my life, and really, on average they last about two years, with the exception of Myrtle, who gave me five great ass-hanging years. When Magoo left, I made a deal with my dad, who was riding an old 1977 Yamaha and had to push it home one out of every three rides. My folks had been pretty vocal up to this point that my cars were always pieces of shit and they were getting pretty sick of picking me up every time one broke down. I told my dad that I would get a new car if he got a new bike. We shook on the deal, and he came home the next day on a new Honda Nighthawk. I went out and got this.



This was Mariah, a 2001 PT Cruiser. Now, I am a guy, and PT’s have always been nancy-mobiles in my opinion. But after Magoo, I liked the idea of a hatchback with four doors, that was also a four-cylinder and a 5-speed, a combination that lends itself well to decent gas mileage. I told my folks that I would buy something new, by which I meant no more than two years old. Mariah had 29,000 miles and was loaded to the gills with stuff I’d never had before in a car and never expected to have on a teacher’s salary—-CD player, leather interior, alloy wheels, a freaking sunroof! But, on top of what I made as a teacher, I was working pretty steadily with a pretty good band, and they were paying me union rate for every gig, so I was pretty confident I could make the monthlies.

Right around this time I scraped up an extra $300 and got another pickup truck. They’re handy to have around, and for $300, my God! You’d pay that just renting one once from Menards or U-Haul. And don’t kid yourselves—everyone has need of a pickup from time to time. I have noticed that I have a lot more friends when I own a pickup than when I don’t, and I was feeling lonely, so I got Mimi—a 1984 Ford F-150. Quite possibly, this thing was the biggest piece of shit I will ever own—the body was two different colors and the taillights were held in with duct-tape. For all that, however, she was a sweetheart and was damn near indestructible, save for a penchant for eating starters. I had her for two years and put six starters in her. But, she was also a manual, so if a starter crapped out on me, I could get away with push-starting for a little while.



Having a big ol’ beater around that you can haul stuff with is a blessing beyond the capability of words to describe, so after Mimi failed three emissions tests in a row and my license was being threatened with suspension, I sold her for $300 and bought this thing, a 1973 Ford Gran Torino station wagon. Now, she is not the best car I have ever owned, but she is definitely the coolest. She’s big and ugly and green, and so her name is Maud. Around these parts, however, she’s known as the Dragon, because she’s big and green and ugly and smokes. Also, she sucks gas down like a bastard, so she sleeps a lot. Also, she has red eyes in the front, though in the picture they’re still orange.



Eventually the band money dried up and making the payments on Mariah became a struggle. I sold the PT (I was glad to see her go, really, because I felt like a failure after bouncing check after check) and was wondering what to do next when I was blessed with a gift from a good friend. That gift came in the form of a 1993 Chevrolet Lumina. She was left out behind a house in Big Rock and hadn’t run in around two years. My friend Kevin said it was mine for the taking. I rented a trailer from U-Haul and went out to Big Rock and dragged the Lumina home with my dad’s Jeep. I threw a new fuel pump in her and off she went. She was big, pretty fast and really comfortable. Also, she was free. Thanks, Kevin. Kevin told me that he had named her either Margaret or Meredith. I liked Margaret.



I drove Margaret around for almost a year before gas prices went through the roof this spring. Margaret was a V-6 with an automatic and got about 20 miles to the gallon, so I sold her and used the money, along with some from my savings account, to buy this thing, a 1992 Honda Civic with the uncanny ability to squeeze almost 50 miles out of a gallon of gas. She’s small and wimpy and is constantly in danger of getting flattened by Hummers and Lincoln Navigators, so I named this one Mouse.