My First Car: The Gold Rocket Ship
In 1986, my uncle handed me the keys to a gold 1969 Camaro with a 327 under the hood and a snow white top that gleamed like a televangelist’s dentures. Seventy-two thousand miles. Mint condition for the time. To any car guy, this was the Holy Grail, Excalibur, and the Lost Ark rolled into one. To me, it was just how I got to school.
The problem was—I’m not a car guy. Never have been. My stereo was a portable cassette player. If someone asked about the engine, I’d glaze over like a stoned parking attendant forced to explain the mathematics of a black hole. All I could really offer was confirmation of the color and current mileage, delivered with a shrug heavy with fake wisdom, as though I’d spent the last decade working oil rigs in Siberia instead of binging “Three’s Company” episodes and blasting Slayer cassettes in central Massachusetts. It was camouflage for the fact that I didn’t know jack shit.
Still, it looked cool. The kind of cool that made neighbors peek out from behind their curtains like they were watching a UFO hover above the cul-de-sac. Kids shouted “Camaro!” in the street like extras in a Spielberg movie. But I never washed it. I prayed for rain like a desperate farmer in a Dust Bowl.
The real terror came at stoplights. Gearheads would pull up next to me, revving their engines, giving the universal drag-race gesture—finger stabbing toward the horizon like Patton ordering a charge. I always shook my head. Except once.
Midnight. Empty streets. Hormones chewing holes in my brain. The light turned green and I floored it. The Camaro launched like a Saturn V, twitching and bouncing off every bump like a meth-addled pogo stick. The speedometer flew past 100, inching toward 120. And then, like the genius I was, I realized my house was about a hundred yards away. I had basically agreed to a one-mile drag race that ended in my own driveway.
Instead of blowing past like a badass, I hit the brakes and screamed down the hill toward home. Tires howled. Smoke poured. The other guy flew through the red light at the intersection just beyond my house, probably laughing his ass off, thinking: What kind of sledge-headed moron drag races to his own house? Meanwhile I killed my lights, yanked the wheel, and slithered into my driveway, heart hammering like John Bonham’s kick drum.
That was the last time I raced anyone. But not the last time I pegged it at 120; there were many late-night drives from the Cape, pushing that spaceship to its outer limits—just another teenage asshole hopped up on Powerage and stupidity.
By the time I left for college, the Camaro was gone. Freshmen weren’t allowed cars, so my father sold it to a cousin. My next ride? A used Buick Skylark. Solid. Dependable. A car so boring it practically came with its own orthopedic shoes. Nobody ever challenged me to a drag in that thing. But then again, nobody challenges you to a duel when you show up wielding a butter knife.
I’m still not a car guy, but I do drive a Mustang now, and on late-night runs home from Los Angeles, I sometimes let that dumb eighteen-year-old kid take the wheel for old time’s sake—white-knuckled, grinning, convinced the Camaro is still under him and the CHP will never catch him.