My first car

The first car I ever owned was a wreck that a friend of a friend sold to me for $50 after I returned from Zimbabwe. It was an old yellow Toyota Corolla, and the people who owned it had given it a name and were very emotionally attached to it. They only sold it to me because they thought I was a good person and would take care of it.

Me, I didn't have such an emotional attachment to it, but I did love all of its beat up glory. Mostly because it was intimidating - people got out of my way and ceded to me, because they knew I had nothing to lose if we collided. How did it pass inspection do you ask? Well, there are certain garages which don't really care that if you stomped hard you could put your foot through the passenger floor. Especially at that time in Rhode Island. Given the outside and the inside (which was to some extent my doing) I did give it the name Oscar.

I had many adventures because of that car. Mostly because of when it would break down. One trip to NJ I was bringing some university students with me home for the holiday and I broke down in Connecticut. It was late enough at night that though I could get the car to a gas station but it wouldn't be worked on. It just so happened that one of the people in the car had a friend who lived very close to the highway. So that friend picked two of us up. I remember sleeping on the floor of some dorm room and feeling incredibly lucky, and also so grateful that the passenger was easy going enough to not get upset at me because my car broke down.

Also, my carpenter-guitar-playing-high-school-dropout boyfriend (not putting him down, just what he was) and I and two friends went to see some heavy metal band in the middle of RI. My boyfriend smoked in the car and kept his stash in the glove compartment. And drank. And so did I. And for some reason I decided that he should be the one to drive us all back home. Well, you have a beat up old car and four people coming from a concert with a long-haired dude driving the car, and you go a mile over the speed limit and the cops will pull you over. I opened the glove compartment to get the registration, and oops, there it was. 'Everyone, hands on the ceiling!!' They had my boyfriend walk the line, he failed, he said the stash was his, and they took him off to jail. And my friend drove us home. And I worried all night about my boyfriend so I didn't sleep - got to talk to him the next day and he's happy as a clam because he got a good night's sleep and the cops were nice. PIMFA...

When I bought a new used car to drive across the country, I had to get rid of this old one. My boyfriend could have really used the car, and I should have just given it to him. Instead, I sold it for $100 to someone who likely didn't have the love for it the previous owners had. Poor thing...