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A monthly column of verse, musings and observations by Billy Jones.
I was fourteen years old when I bought my first car. The year was 1969. Just like most teenage boys I thought my sixteenth birthday would never come so I went to my mother and asked, "Momma, when do you think I'll be able to get a car?" "Billy," my mother replied, "you'll get a car when you earn enough money to buy a car and not a minute before." That was all the motivation I needed. One block from our home in front of a house that now belongs to my younger brother, Donny, was parked a 1962 Fiat 600 Suicide Coupe with a "For Sale $25.00" sign on the windshield. The man who owned it said it wouldn't run because he had mistakenly adjusted the rocker arms too tightly. He said he could easily fix it if I wanted to wait a few days until his next day-off or I could buy it "as-is" and adjust them myself. I didn't know what rocker arms were but he made it sound pretty easy so I gave him fifteen bucks and talked my brother, Bobby, into coughing up the other ten as a loan. The money had come from a summer of mowing lawns and selling greeting cards along with my daily routes delivering papers for the Greensboro Daily News and Greensboro Record which have since been combined to form the Greensboro News And Record Minutes later, Bobby rode and I drove the car home. Well, the fact of the matter is, we coasted the car down the hill until it stopped right in front of our house. Minutes later- after hearing half the boys in the neighborhood laughing and shouting- my mother looked out to see them pushing my newly acquired Fiat up the driveway and across the back yard with me seated proudly at the wheel. She really didn't know what to say. My dad was certain I'd been hoodwinked and while Momma thought I should go ask the man for my money back, Daddy said, "No, he bought a piece of junk and he'll just have to learn to live with himself." I asked several men who were said to be knowledgeable about cars if they would help me fix the car and a couple of them even paused to glance under the hood (It was in the back) but even after having me turn over the engine and listen to it backfire, they all pronounced my green Fiat 600 with the suicide doors to be DOA. Finally, I got Robbie Flores' dad- who happened to be a fork-lift mechanic- to point out the valve cover under which the rocker arms could be found. He told me to loosen each one until a match book could be pulled in-between the rocker arm and the push rod beneath it and if it wouldn't start after that then it was something far-worse than overly tightened rockers. Using an adjustable wrench-- no one I knew owned any metric tools-- and a flat screw-driver, I adjusted all eight rockers and decided to give it a spin. Seconds later the homemade exhaust headers built of threaded pipe and a tin can roared to life bringing everyone out of their houses to see. In front of several other men from around the neighborhood, Daddy proudly proclaimed his young son to be a genius saying, "I knew Billy could fix anything if he just gave it some thought." I was just happy to show everyone that I hadn't been taken for a ride as most of the neighborhood including my family had been quick to point out. Of course, while the seller had told the truth about the engine, he had failed to inform me that my beloved Fiat 600 had no brakes. Minutes later, on my inaugural lap around Mother's backyard and just as I shifted into third gear, I would discover that very fact just seconds before skidding through a flower bed and crashing into one of her beloved pine trees. Ouch! New rule: no driving faster than second gear in the back yard. The various men from all over the neighborhood all looked at the green Fiat with the crumpled front bumper, bashed out headlight, and crushed fender that prevented the right front wheel from rolling and again pronounced it DOA. "I guess we'll have to call the junk man," my daddy said, "car's not worth fixing." I was crushed worse than the car. Days passed before I finally figured out that with the aid of my three younger brothers, Bobby, Donny, and Ronny, and an assortment of hammers, pry bars, and 2x4s, that I would be able to pound and pry the crumpled parts far enough away from the wheel and tire to drive my Fiat around the back yard. I decided it would be best if I topped-off the master cylinder and bled the brakes before making a second lap around the yard. Two years and thousands of laps later (and an occasional trip around the block when my parents were out of the house) I turned sixteen, bought a 1956 Ford F-100 Pick-up with a supercharged 312 Mercury V/8 engine, and sold my Fiat to Hank Thompson (who had just turned fourteen) for $25.00-- the same price I paid for it - so that Hank could go wreck it in his mother's backyard that very same day. Hank sold the now twice wrecked 600 for 25 bucks to some guy who said he was going to build a dune buggy out of it. I wonder if he ever did. The Fiat 600 D was what was known as a
Micro car. Smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, it seated 4 little
people and went almost forever on a gallon of gas. It's the kind
of car I wish I could buy today-- light, simple, easy to work
on, and cheap on gasoline. The Micro car most notable in the
United States was the Austin-Healey powered, Nash Metropolitan.
but in Europe millions of people drove Micro cars as evidenced
by the hundreds of Micro cars in the Bruce Weiner Micro Car Museum Billy Jones is a poet, author and aspiring entrepreneur who writes BloggingPoet.com and is a managing partner of Blogsboro.com, an enterprise dedicated to highlighting creativity online. For more from Billy visit his columns: December, then, before |
Cheshire Cat
Songs
of
Do
you remember your first car? Of course you do- no one could ever
forget their first car-I just needed a lead-in to this story.
