Girl Gets Car

Buying a new car has made me nostalgic about the cars I’ve owned over the years. I know cars are machines—metal and rubber, nuts and bolts, and yet I form such an emotional attachment to them. Each one has taken me on journeys and taught me lessons. Each one has a special place in my memories.

It was 1976 and I was going to be a senior in college at Louisiana State University, when I moved out of the dorms and into an off-campus apartment. There was a bus that shuttled back and forth between Tigerland and campus, but I needed a car, mostly to get to the grocery store.

My family had moved to Fairfax, Virginia and I went there during Christmas break and summer. My summer jobs didn’t pay much, so at the end of summer, Dad bought me a light blue ‘71 Volkswagen Squareback—a little station wagon. I named him Joey, as in Joy wagon.  He even had a little smile in the front where the trunk was.

      I was delighted, but worried. I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift and I would have to drive more than a thousand miles back to Baton Rouge.

Learning to drive an automatic had not come naturally to me. Now I had to learn a different kind of driving, in a week. Dad was confident that I’d learn how to shift. I wasn’t, but I didn’t have a choice.

My brother Bob was my teacher and he was excellent—patient and with a sense of humor.  He took me up to the elementary school and had me practice letting the clutch out slowly without much gas, just to feel when first gear would catch. I stalled Joey. I made him lurch. I ground gears putting him into reverse. Eventually I drove laps around and around an island in the parking lot while Bob coached me.

In explaining downshifting, Bob forgot to tell me to let the clutch out slowly for that also, so it was a good thing we had our seatbelts on or our heads would’ve hit the dashboard. We laughed, but it made an impression. I didn’t make that mistake again.

It didn’t take long before he had me practice stopping and starting on hills, feeling just how far to let the clutch out without stalling the car, and setting the emergency brake in case. Dad was right. I did learn how to drive a stick in time to drive my “new” car back to school. My boyfriend flew up north to help me drive down to Louisiana.

Fairfax, Virginia to Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Dad also gave me a Chevron credit card, but I still took the bus back and forth to campus. He called me in disbelief because my gas bill was often less than $20 a month. I kept a $10 bill in my glove compartment. If money got tight (which was the norm back then), I knew I could fill Joey’s tank with $10.

Joey saved my life once in a very dangerous situation. My boyfriend’s family lived in New Orleans. One Friday night after work, I drove from Baton Rouge to New Orleans for the weekend. On a long dark stretch of I-10, there was a causeway that spanned a bayou.

 
Joey started pulling to one side.  I was pretty sure I had a flat tire (left,rear), but it was a long causeway and it doesn't get much darker than a Louisiana swamp. I slowed down and continued on. At the end of the elevated causeway on dry land, the stupid boyfriend had told me to take a shortcut to his house.

The shortcut was through one of New Orleans' housing projects. I pulled up to a red stop light and could hear that I had a flat, but I wasn’t about to get out of the car in that neighborhood. That’s when a group of black men came up to Joey and started pounding on my hood and peering through the window yelling at me. Maybe they were just trying to tell me I had a flat. I wasn’t sticking around to find out. The light was still red, but Joey and I peeled out of there!

Instead of showing some concern for me and apologizing for telling me to drive through the projects when I got to his house, stupid boyfriend yelled at me for driving on the rim and being a chicken. The rim wasn’t damaged. Stupid boyfriend wasn’t my boyfriend much longer.

I liked bragging to guys that my car didn’t have a carburetor. It had fuel injectors in its suitcase engine. They usually didn’t believe me until I opened the engine up in the back of the car.

Other than the fuel injectors, Joey was a very basic, no-frills car. The engine didn't have a radiator. It was air cooled. Someone stole the VW emblem off the hood not long after I got him.

He leaked oil. He leaked in the rain. The floor was rusted out so that there were holes that you could see the road through. It was sort of like driving Fred Flintstone’s prehistoric car.

At one point Joey’s horn started randomly honking, so I waved to people as if they were my friends to head off any road rage.  I figured out how to pop the center cover of the steering wheel off with a screwdriver and bend the wire in there so that it wouldn’t touch metal—that’s what made the horn beep.

One night John and I went to a disco and parallel parked perpendicular to a row of cars. While we were dancing, someone else was backing into Joey leaving a huge dent in the driver's door. Somehow (without the help of Google) I figured out how to pop the dent out by sticking a plumber's plunger on the dent and pulling. Lesson learned. To this day I won't park behind a row of cars like that.

 Joey was a two door car, but you could fold the back seats down. That sure came in handy because I loaded Joey up with all my stuff to move to five different apartments including Married Students Housing after John and I got married.

Joey was my transportation after graduation to my first grownup job as an advertising copywriter. I carpooled with Marian one of the artists.

John changed Joey’s oil in the apartment parking lot after backing it up onto the curb so he could lie down under the car. I got my first ticket in that car. You couldn’t downshift into first gear in Joey unless you stopped. If I was in a rush, I’d just put the clutch in leaving it in second and brake pretty hard, but not completely stop. The ticket was for making a rolling “California stop” at a stop sign.

In 1981 we moved to Hawaii so John could get his PhD at the University of Hawaii. It was summer when we drove 1800 miles from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles and then shipped Joey over the Pacific Ocean. There wasn’t any GPS back then. Our navigation system consisted of relying on AAA maps with Trip Tiks which were close-up maps showing construction held together with a spiral binding like a skinnier stenographer’s notebook. 

We didn’t pre-book any motels. We just looked for Vacancy signs at hotels/motels when we stopped for the night.

It was an eventful trip. Our first stop was San Antonio. Our high rise hotel was across the street from the Alamo. The only view we remember of The Alamo was from the curb we sat on with our suitcases when the hotel caught on fire. John had just started a shower when I heard firetrucks wailing. I called the front desk. They assured me there was no cause for alarm.

One of my grandfathers was a fire chief.  When I looked out the window and saw the firemen laying hoses, I knew this was serious. I told John to get out of the shower. We had to evacuate. Someone set off the fire alarms. We grabbed our bags, directed people away from the elevators and to the stairs, and then rushed down six flights. Luckily it was a small fire so after the firefighters put it out we went back to our room.

Our route: Baton Rouge to Los Angeles with stops in San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, and then Los Angeles. 

The next leg of the trip was to El Paso. It was a long, flat 500 miles of I-10 rolling across parched land. Joey only had a radio, no tape player, but we had made mixed cassette tapes of our favorite songs and had a small battery powered tape player that we listened to because it was impossible to get radio stations out there.

       Joey also didn’t have air conditioning so we opened all the windows and pointed the triangular vent windows at our faces, but it just felt like we were in a convection oven. When it’s close to 100 degrees it’s still scorching even if it’s a dry heat. Despite the hot dry air blowing on us, we kept smelling gas and Joey just didn’t feel right.

When we pulled into El Paso we checked into our hotel room and then looked through the yellow pages for a VW dealer. They discovered the reason for the persistent gas smell. Two of the fuel injectors were broken and spraying gasoline all over the engine. The only reason we didn’t catch on fire out there in the middle of nowhere (way before cell phones) was because so much gas was spraying they said it kept putting the fire out. Luck was on our side twice. They were able to replace the fuel injectors right away. We were on a tight schedule. We had to get Joey on the ship to Hawaii in time, and we also had plane tickets to Hawaii.

The next day we headed for Phoenix. All the cross country road trips I’d made with my military family, had taught me a thing or two, and I took that Girl Scout motto, “Be Prepared” seriously. In addition to our suitcases, I’d packed a box with a gallon jug of water and some food. It was a good thing. An 18-wheeler had jack knifed on I-10. The police diverted us onto a two-lane highway somewhere in New Mexico, but that also backed up. We were stuck for hours.

The only way we found out what was going on was from truckers’ CB radios. Everyone was out of their cars sharing stories. Most people had no supplies. We gave some water and peanut butter and crackers to a family with a baby. John, ever the biologist, found the dried up skeletal remains of a goat and added a skull hood ornament to Joey. I was keeping a watchful eye out for snakes.

By the time we got to Phoenix, (remember that song?)  it was stormy and there were flash flood warnings. We were travel weary and ready for the last leg to LA. We slept well that night but woke up in a panic. Who knew Phoenix wasn’t on daylight savings time? We sure didn’t. We’d lost an hour!

Santa Ana winds pushed us along the way as we came into Los Angeles.  Joey’s steering wheel always started shaking like crazy whenever you drove more than 55 mph, so dealing with LA’s freeways was extra scary.  We made it to my Uncle Stan and Auntie Diane’s house in West Covina and they graciously let us stay the night.

We packed some tools into Joey’s front trunk, and drove him to the docks in Long Beach near the Queen Mary for the ocean part of his journey--shipped in a container to Honolulu.

I can’t remember how long it took for him to get to Hawaii—maybe a week? What I do remember is that when we got him, the tools we’d packed in the trunk were gone.

In Hawaii, Joey continued his service as a mini moving van. He transported our belongings through three moves near the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. And, he got more and more unreliable. When we drove over the Pali (part of the Koolau mountain range on Oahu) we’d downshift into third gear and encourage him with our best imitations of Scotty from Star Trek, “Aye Captain, I’m giving her all she’s got!” with Joey floored.

I became an expert at jump starting him, no small feat while dressed for work in heels. If he was acting up, I tried to park facing downhill so that I wouldn’t have to ask someone to push me, or worse yet, have to push myself and then hop in to pop the clutch.

I rarely drove on the H-1 freeway because I was always worried about stalling. More than once, John and one of his buddies, Ed had to come to my rescue on their mo-peds. One of our tax refund checks came just in time to pay for Joey’s engine to be rebuilt at Frenchies Shell station in Kakaako, a garage specializing in VW’s.

Joey chugged along for a few more years, but we finally decided it was time for a new car. We could afford it. Joey’s shortcomings: not being reliable, no power, no air conditioning greatly influenced our choice of the next car we bought.

As 1986 came to an end, we put a “For Sale” sign on him. It was hard to sign the title over to his new owner, but I patted Joey’s side and said good-bye.

Laura Keolanui Stark still loves a good road trip. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.