I paid $200 for my first car. It was the summer before I went off to college and I was damned if my mommy and daddy were going to drop me off at school like I was starting kindergarten. My summer job paid for a rusty 1972 Chevy Vega that barely ran, but the more pressing problem was its color.
It was baby s*** yellow.
The whole idea of buying a car was that when I cruised up to my dormitory, arm dangling out the window, holding a cigarette I didn’t dare to actually smoke, all the sophisticated college women would mistake me for the new Big Man on Campus.
That wouldn’t happen if I were driving a car that looked like the diarrhea of a man dying of typhoid on an ashram in India.
But the $200 had wiped me out. There was nothing left to have the car painted. Then inspiration struck. Paint is paint, right? My parents had a couple gallons of exterior latex paint in their shed. Robin’s egg blue. Perfect! The color of, let’s say, John Travolta’s eyes (it was the late 70’s).
I grabbed a paintbrush and got busy.
A week later, I loaded up all my stuff and headed south toward Western Illinois University on Illinois 71 (I didn’t dare push the Vega hard enough to drive on an interstate). It rattled and smoked, but I was moving!
I hadn’t done a lot of highway driving and wondered if it was normal for oncoming drivers to drift into my lane a little bit as they approached. It took me a while to figure out what was happening.
From a distance, my Chevy looked fine: just an old beat up, light blue Vega rolling down the highway. But as oncoming drivers got closer, they began to stare.
My car had brush strokes.
And in places, you could glimpse an ugly, putrescent yellow between the strokes. The latex paint had started to run out and I didn’t have any money to buy more, so I’d had to stretch it.
My Vega coughed and died as I pulled into the parking lot of my dormitory. It never started again. I sold it for 50 bucks to a fraternity that planned to use it for a sledgehammer party. For a buck, you could take a swing at the car. The money paid for the beer.
But I added a condition to the sale: at the sledgehammer party, the car’s previous owner would have the honor of the first swing. As I stood on the lawn of that frat house with the sledgehammer in my hands, all their envious eyes upon me, I felt for an all-too-brief moment genuinely, authentically cool.
Big Man on Campus. 😎