My cars don’t have names any more

The last coupla cars I’ve owned haven’t had enough personality for me to learn what their names were.  I miss that.  I had a string of vehicles that named themselves, more or less, ever since I began to drive.

The first one was a 1962 GMC Model 1000 pickup1 with a 305 cubic inch (5 liter) V-6 engine, painted a disquieting shade of green that had faded over the years into something even uglier.  My father had strengthened the suspension from the factory half ton to one ton so it could carry a camper without straining too much.  The only problem with that was that the heavier suspension made the truck very light in the back end and apt to skid.  Because of its snaky handling, color, distinctive exhaust stack noise (GMC V-6 truck engines sounded like no other; I can still tell one coming from blocks away) and huge appetite for gasoline, it became the Great Green Beast.

The Beast and I ran around together many thousand miles on most of the back roads in Comanche County as I worked on the cemetery census project.  I groused about the skidding until my father took the crane (well, yes . . . we had a ten-ton Air Force surplus crane parked in the side yard—come to think of it, we had a lot of military surplus vehicles parked at our place, one time and another) and dropped a couple of tombstone bases, weighing about a quarter of a ton together, into the Beast’s bed, and the extra weight made her handle a lot better.  (We had tombstone parts handy because Dad had bought a derelict marbleyard a few years before.)

The Beast had her problems, many of them having to do with her enormous thirst for gas.  The best mileage I ever got out of her was six miles to the gallon in town and eight on the highway.  (Supposedly other people got as much as twelve to the gallon from GMC 305s.)  This was expensive enough, even with regular at 54¢ a gallon, that I finally installed a dual-fuel propane/gasoline system.  Propane cost about 35¢ a gallon then, which made it barely possible for me to keep her running on an after-school-job paycheck.

I left the Beast at home when I moved to Austin.  I was going to be an Impoverished Student, which didn’t include feeding a large and expensive vehicle, not to mention the problems of trying to park a large vehicle anyplace around the Universally Excess at Austin—or downtown, for that matter.  (After my father ran her into the ground some years later, the way he tended to do vehicles, she sat under a tree in the back pasture at Windy Hill forever.  We finally sold her in the estate sale in 2001.)

The next time I had significant motor-powered wheels was four years later, when I bought a 1973 Honda CB450 K6 motorcycle.  It had previously belonged to a kid, whom I suppose had mistreated her somehow and soured her disposition, because she was a crank and difficult machine, which only responded to a certain amount of horsing her around.  Her bad temper and the color of her fuel tank led pretty quickly to her name:  the Black Bitch.

The Bitch and I had a stormy relationship.  Although she was slightly too small and too light for a true touring machine, I took her on a bunch of medium-length road trips.  Her engine, a medium-rev upright twin, was good for making me feel like I was trapped inside a vibro-massage unit after half an hour or so of riding, and her exhaust was just plain loud.  That was the way the factory made her, that was they way they made her mufflers, such as they were, and she was gonna let the world know about it.

I managed to drop her seriously once when I was coming back from Nacogdoches and missed a curve on a farm-to-market road.  I wound up riding her down into the bar ditch and nearly kept her upright, but a little gully at the bottom caught the front tire wrong and she threw me.  I spent the next half hour picking grassburs out of myself and my clothes, but since I was wearing helmet, long sleeves, jeans, and gloves, I didn’t lose any skin.  The Bitch was completely unfazed.  She started again on the first kick.

The other wreck I had with her was a lot more frightening.  A Little Old Lady™ in an enormous Cadillac turned left directly in front of me as I was running down Guadalupe at WAAAAY over the speed limit.  I fought her down to under 30 before I hit, but I center-punched that Cadillac’s rear quarter panel, got pitched up on the trunk lid, and rolled off into the street.  And I got up and walked away.  It was nothing but dumb luck, because if I’d hit three inches farther forward I would probably have broken my neck on the rear doorpost.

The Bitch didn’t fare nearly so well.  Her front fork and downpost were folded all the way back to the frame down tubes, and the gas tank was caved in beyond hope, seams started and leaking.  Oh, she eventually ran again.  She spent a couple of weeks in the shop, and came back with a straightened frame and new fuel tank, teal with gold striping.  The wreck broke her spirit, though—that, or I started being more cautious in my riding.  I never had major trouble with her again until her motor finally died, I said “fuck it,” and sold her for parts.  We never liked each other very much, but she was all I had and the other way about.

While the Bitch and I were still together, I took up with a new set of wheels.  My father gave me a 1963 Ford E-100 Econoline van that he’d bought surplus from the air force.  The spartan interior, painted AF blue all over, absorbed All the Sunlight There Was and made it just about unbearably hot inside.  Before I got it, it had been the first rescue/recovery wagon that the Comanche VFD ever had so Dad, who was the rescue/recovery squad head, painted it an emergency-vehicle yellow and white.  (This is how it looked about 1972, shortly after it was repainted; the picture is taken in front of the house where I grew up.)  It was horribly, terribly underpowered with a 144 cubic inch (2.4 liter) straight-six engine that could push it along, full throttle and a following wind, at maybe 65 on a good day.

The van turned out to be another car I could love to hate.  She was nose-heavy and slab-sided, blew all over the road in the least wind, the engine drank gas despite its small size, overheated within five minutes of starting and stayed that way, on the peg, for as long as I drove, and she was almost as bad to skid as the Beast had been, for just about the same reason—a vehicle meant to carry cargo was running empty.  Only the foolish or the desperate would drive her, which he how she acquired her name.

(A digression, but a necessary one:  in the last days of World War II, the Japanese military came up with a whole raft of ideas for suicide planes to try to stop the Allied forces.  One of the workable designs they came up with was the Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka (Cherry Blossom), a powered rocket-plane that the Allies code-named “Baka,” or “fool,” on the premise that only a fool would ever get into one.)

As I mentioned, only the foolish or the desperate drove this van, and her alliterative name came almost at once:  Kamikaze Kate, the Barton Springs Baka Bomb.  I ran her for a couple of years, but finally got just too tired of her perennial problems, and about that time my mother handed me down her previous car, so I dumped Kate on an unsuspecting used-car dealer for two or three hundred bucks.  I continued to see her around town occasionally for few years after that, but I think she must be dead—I’ve not heard of any Kate sightings in a long time.

The car that Mother gave me was the last named car I’ve owned so far.  She was a 1973 Ford Galaxie 500, with a slightly cross-eyed look to her because both front turn signals had been bent inward in fender-benders.  Her size, wide turning radius and slow-response handling were so reminiscent of a warship that I named her the Battlewagon.

The Battlewagon was my car; L would only drive her in the direst situations.  The driver’s seat fabric and padding was completely worn through, which made the seat so low that L had to look through the steering wheel to see out, like a Little Old Lady™.  She hated it.  The car’s nose was really long and the trunk corners sloped a bit, so she couldn’t see where the corners were.  This made it hard for her to keep from running into other cars, pedestrians, curbs, small furry animals . . . .  She hated it.  The Battlewagon, with a 400 cubic inch (6.5 liter) engine, got only twelve miles to the gallon in town.  We both hated that.

All hate aside, we ran her through several cross-country journeys, two engines, three transmissions, and 178,000 miles before we finally traded her in.  The last I heard of her, she was in a convoy of cars going to Mexico for resale there.  For all I know, she may be running down there still, probably on her fourth engine and sixth or seventh transmission.

The two cars we’ve had since then, a 1985 Subaru DL wagon and a 1995 Mercury Tracer wagon, simply haven’t shown enough personality to earn names.  I hope that, when we finally get around to trading in the Mercury, we can find a car that has a personality, but as faceless as cars are these days, I’m not holding my breath.

1 The picture this link takes you to is about the right year, right body style, but the wrong color.

President Fred plays the saxophone only during the mating season.  Fnord.