my first car

I was thinking of my first car the other day. There are some incredibly stupid stories there...
I learned to drive from my sister, who taught me to drive her mustang when I was 7. I'd sit on the console and run the gas and steering wheel. When I was 12 or 13 she taught me to drive a standard in her firebird. Oddly enough, I ended up teaching my oldest sister (9 years older) how to drive a standard before I could even drive. I grew up with Dukes of Hazard as driving influences.

I was in 8th grade the first time I stole my moms car. There were a few occasions between 8th and 10th grade that i did that, always when they were away. As with any driving story I might tell, I can say that I am very lucky to be alive. I'm also very lucky that I never damaged my moms car, unlike my friend who totaled BOTH parents cars once. But maybe I can get him to tell that story another time.

So anyway, I was a fairly experienced driver when I got my license. I worked a lot and had my own money, so I was able to get whatever car I wanted instead of the tamer, mellower car my mom wanted me to get. My friend worked at a garage/gas station, and the mechanic there had a project car he needed to part with. It was a 1973 Ford Maverick. This was a mechanics project car: 302, high rise manifold, big four barrel carb, headers, 4 speed hurst shifter, and eagle gts all around. It was flat black primer color, and had leather seats and mag wheels. It was about the coolest car I could imagine as a testerone addled, imbecile of a 16 year old. I bought it for $800 and had it registered the first day I was able to drive legally.

So this car, which was probably somewhere around 300 h.p. with manual steering, was a fucking beast. I wish that I cold have made it last longer than it did...

One of the first dumb things I did with it was also one of the most insane driving things I have done in my life. This was like the first week I had the car. I was at a party in the next town over, so I wasn't that familiar with the streets in that neighborhood. We were leaving the party, and my friend pulled out ahead of me in his moms ancient ford fiesta. given the vintage of that car, he was going really, really slow, and I, in my new fast car was tailgating him excessively, revving the engine, etc. I wanted to show off my new wheels and leave him in the dust sooo bad. After a minute he swerves out of the way to the right, so I stomp on the gas...only to be slammed practically out of my seat as we hit a traffic island. Not just a typical traffic island, this thing was a giant mound of grass with sloping sides, a perfect jump. After we slammed down on the other side and came to a stop we got out and went back to look. there were tire tracks going about halfway across the island, ending where we left the earth for a second or two. We totally jumped this fucking traffic mound, Dukes of Hazard style. My friend that swerved out of the way said he looked over and saw us several feet above the island. That was the beginning of the end for that poor car.

Share your stupidity

Just a note to anyone that reads this: please, share your stupid stories with me. I think something can be learned from this. I have no clue what that is yet, but its fun to tell some of these stories and laugh at how friggin' dumb I was as a teenager.

Another thing that was in the news somewhat recently that reminded me of a dumb thing I did was this. I did pretty much the same thing, except rather than falling asleep I was just being a dumb ass.
I had just got my first car, which as I said previously was quite fast and entirely inappropriate for a dumb ass new driver such as myself. I was at a party with some friends and when it was time to leave we all piled into our cars. I was eager to peel out and prove just how dumb I was, but just as I was about let off the clutch and smoke out the neighborhood, my friend pulled out in front of me. He was driving his Mom's crappy old Ford Fiesta, and he was going really slowly. I was stuck behind him for what felt like hours when it was really just 30 seconds probably, but all of a sudden he swerved out of the way to the right. I thought he was finally getting out of the way to let me pass so I floored it. He was actually moving around the giant grass mound island in the middle of the road, which I completely forgot about. As soon as I nailed the gas I was slamming into the island, and the next thing I know we were crashing down on the far side, completely shaken and discombobulated. My friend rolled up beside us laughing, "Holy shit dude, you were like 3 feet in the air!". We got out and looked, and there were two tire tracks going up the the beginning side of the mound, and then they stopped...and restarted on the far side of the island. We had gone completely airborne and cleared almost the whole thing. That was real beginning of the end of that poor car.

A note going forward: The things that get discussed here happened a long time ago, and anything depicted here would likely be beyond the statute of limitations (what exactly is the s.o.l. for vandalism and senseless destruction?), and if it weren't, then everything depicted here is probably just fiction.

One of the themes I wanted to discuss was senseless destruction. I know that I am far from the only teenager that destroyed things for amusement. I'm not entirely sure what that was all about, really. Pent up subconscious anger? Some sort of expression of disrespect for the world? Destruction as art? Boredom? I'm not sure but I hope that eventually someone might read this and shed some light on these tendencies. What I'm really interested in though is the idea that a person can transform from literally being exactly like Beavis and Butthead, to something approaching Ward Cleaver or Father Knows Best. That is a complete 180, but I know that many have made this transition.

Today's story is about a walk through the woods on a beautiful day. In the suburb I grew up in, there were quite a bit of woods, that at some point in the 70's and 80's had a few different subdivisions built. My friend lived in one, and I lived in a different one, and between our neighborhoods there was a few thousand acres of woods. This was the early 80's, so if you weren't inside watching MTV or talking on the phone (pretty much the only reason to go indoors), then you were probably playing in the woods. We lived kind of far from anything cool to do (the mall was too far to bike to), and in the woods we kind of ruled the place. No parents or adults or cops, just the kids and we could pretty much do anything we wanted to out there. Come to think of it, the birth of my deviance took place in the woods. More on that later I guess.
Like any self-respecting 13 year old at the time, my friend and I both had wrist-rockets. For anyone that doesn't know, a wrist-rocket is a bad ass aluminum framed sling shot, that was completely illegal in the state I grew up in, and had to be purchased in the next state over. The ideal ammo is heavy ball bearings, about 3/8" diameter I think. The plastic handle of the thing holds about 100 or so of them. And of course rocks work ok in a pinch.
So anyway, my friend and I are out in the woods, its a beautiful late afternoon, the woods are quiet, and as we walk along the old single width trail we come to a huge scar in the woods, a new, harsh, ugly cut into the earth, with roots of freshly ripped out trees still sticking out of the ground. What the fuck is this? So we start following the new "road", and its soon obvious that we stumbled on to the leading edge of a much larger development. There were roads everywhere. We were walking around in the earliest stages of what would become a new neighborhood of about 200 homes. This neighborhood development would go on to be the scene of much mischief, all through high school. But on this particular day we walked and walked, marveling at how freaking big the scope of it was and what a drag it was that "our" woods were essentially being cut in half by the march of progress (and the pursuit of the yuppie dream, a 4 bedroom home, of a size just a little bigger than everything else in town). After surveying the whole thing, we eventually came upon the culprits that had wreaked such havoc on our woods. All of the road building equipment was just sitting there, all parked close to one another, with no operators around, or security guards in sight. We were about a mile into some fairly dense woods, and nobody was around but us...and our wrist-rockets. Over the course of about 20 minutes, we smashed every window of every machine out there. Every single one. None were spared. It was an absolute glass bath. And then as it got dark, we went home, and that was it.

I often reflect on all of the stupid things I have done when I was younger, and in sharing these stories with friends I have realized that many people have done some really dumb things-and yet today they are normal, productive members of society. I'm kind of fascinated by this duality, or maturation, or whatever it is, and this is something I hope to come back to at some point. But I also thought it might be fun to have a repository of the dumb things we do as kids. I only hope that I can capture the humor that I feel when we tell these stories.

I've had this domain for a couple of years now and have been wanting to write about this stuff and not made the time, but I read something today that made me want to finally start writing here. I read somewhere today that a company was doing "testing" involving smashing a shopping carts into a wall, and they apparently set a record by doing so at up to 70 mph. If only I had known there was a record to shoot for...When I first got my license I was a bit insane, and found my way into all kinds of trouble. My first car was a 73 Ford Maverick, that I bought from a mechanic at the station down the street from my house for $800. It was primer black and had a souped up engine (a 302 with 4bbl carb, high rise manifold, Hurst shifter, mag wheel and eagle GT tires). It was really too much car for a 16 year old, but I couldn't be talked out of it and I bought it with my own money.

One of the things my friends and I would do for fun was to smash shopping carts. There was a large shopping plaza with a supermarket at the back of it, and there was a huge, mostly empty lot to the side of and behind the supermarket. It was perfect place for doing dumb things in your car and not getting caught (in the days long before there were security cameras everywhere, obviously). I would cruise the rear parking lot, looking for that helpless shopping cart that had strayed from the pack and drive up to it slowly, giving it a few gentle nudges to get it into the proper alignment, then I would inch up to it, gently let the clutch out and floor it, blowing through 3 gears, getting the cart up to about 60 mph and just at the last second I would hit my brakes and turn away, sending the carriage smashing into the back wall of the supermarket. At that speed, the carts would seemingly explode into hundreds of pieces. Needless to say, we could only do 1 or two at a time before we'd flee to avoid arrest.