The '76

  

My ’76 Trans-Am already had some years on her in 1994. The paint job, interior and tires were all pretty distressed by a score of blisteringly humid Long Island summers and snowy winters. She had faded some, but adorned on her hood; the last vestiges of a faded decal: 

The legendary Firebird; a treasure rare and difficult to possess. 

 

I swapped out the bologna skin tires with a set of Camaro rims and Z80’s, dropped in front and rear speakers and a 2x12 sub in the trunk; Hendrix, Stravinsky, Beasties and all points in between thundered in her wake. This was the street monster dubbed ‘The Rockford”

 

The first time my wife Valerie let me drive her home; this was her chariot. I cautioned her about the power amp and subwoofer and she rolled her eyes and said something that I cannot repeat here but she had raised the gauntlet. Then I proceed to electrify her with 600 watts of ‘Dem Bones’ by Alice in Chains. She was happy, I wasn’t playing the Heavy D tour-de-force “now that we found love (what are we gonna’ do [with it]) from those speakers, and so was I. 

Stones, Zeppelin, Chris Cornell, we were musically compatible; also her parents did not approve of me or the car, mostly me, at least at the time.

 

The ‘76 roared like a dragon, she ate gas like that dragon would eat a petting zoo if they were on the Atkins diet.  She was my companion as she journeyed with me across the Stephen King inspired landscape that is Suffolk Co. Long Island when I worked for Hampton Magazine as a layout artist. She prowled the streets while millionaires and posures sipped pomegranate mimosas al ‘fresco, the soft purr of her 8 cylinder 5.7 liter power plant strutted boldly among the gluten free valium pasturing antelope. Alerted all too late they would lift their gaze nervously above their hand painted Champaign flutes;

The lioness approaches. 

Despite her brute force she graced me with some of my most loved memories. The wet nose of my dog pressed against the window, tail thumping excitedly on cracked vinyl seats as we drove to Welwyn preserve to walked the shore of the Long Island sound, the wind and salt air stirring in us both. When my best friend passed from this world I could not bring myself to wipe away the marks that nose made on the passenger window. In the bitter winter that followed I would roll down the windows which he loved and drive in the dead of night in stinging cold, and miss him profoundly. 

 

I drove her until her until she fell apart, literally fell apart. The day before I was to move to Ann Arbor MI my brother-in-law put her up on a garage lift and showed me where paper thin sheets of rust were the only things holding the frame together. He would not allow me risking a 600 mile journey that would likely end with me scattered across a Pennsylvania valley. Instead I made the trip in a late 80’s Hyundai Excel, a car made that was made for and made by elementary school teachers. I have no memories of this car with a sewing machine for an engine except for "The Great Ohio Ice Storm Breakdown" which rendered me and Louie stranded somewhere on the Ohio Turnpike for many, many hours and that same cars magnum opus “Bob Nelson's Mystery Oyster Mishap”.

Alas, these are tales for another time.

 

‘Hold on to sixteen as long as you can, changes come around real soon make us women and men” 

– Fredrick Douglas