The Sunday Memory Drawer - My First Car

Having now my eighth straight Toyota vehicle, I thought this was an opportunity to remember the first one. The picture above, while not my car, comes close to what it was. A 1980 Toyota Corolla. Shitty Brown.

I was done using Dad's car, a 1971 Buick LaSabre which used up as much gas as you would get from a steady diet of sausage and peppers. Besides, it was uncool to drive and also not advantageous when chauffeuring friends who lived on narrow streets. I remember picking up a friend, the erstwhile fellow blogger Djinn from the Bronx, on her razor thin street in the Bronx. I seemed to scrape another car as I carefully steered the barge down Giles Place. I asked her to check for damage.

"You were most fortuitous. No damage whatsoever."

Her eyesight was obviously no better than my driving. When we picked up the next friend, he extolled. "What the hell happened to your car???" Yep, I was done with the LaSabre.

So, I had a little money saved. The first sell job would need to be on Dad himself. I got the usual compassionate response.

"What the hell do you want to do that for?"

Thanks, Dad. As always. Nevertheless, I was primed and armed with lots of back-up information, thanks to my friend, the Bibster, who had already trailblazed the purchase of a similar car at Toyota City in Mamaroneck. Back in those days, you usually didn't drive off with the new vehicle. You had to wait for the next shipment to come in. And my car would take a little longer, as I requested a stick shift.

Not that I had ever driven a stick shift before. But, the price for a non-automatic transmission was about five hundred bucks less and every saved dollar counted on my budget.

Why I selected this crappy brown color is beyond me. But, this car was apparently so in demand that it took three months to show up. Finally, just before the July 4th weekend, I got the call. My car was in. Now I had only one more person to clear this news with.

Grandma.

If there was going to be a strange car in her driveway, she needed to know before she had it towed. Of course, the biggest surprise came when I was leaving to pick it up. I remember the scene as if it was yesterday. She was sitting in her "TV chair." With a wad of bills in her hand.

"Here, this pays for your car and you can take me shopping every once in a while."

I looked at the money. Five hundred dollars. Probably the cost of her car in her mind. Back in 1942. I didn't have the heart to tell her that the Corolla was going to cost fifty-five hundred dollars more.

Despite having taken stick shift lessons from Tony Maurino's Auto School, I couldn't get the new car home on my own. Nope, Dad had to do it, while I manuevered the SS Buick back to Mount Vernon. And, for the rest of the holiday weekend, I struggled to get the new vehicle out of the driveway. I was lost. I had no feel for the car and how the gears meshed. Finally, my dad returned me to the place where he had taken me for driving lessons several years before.

Woodlawn Cemetery.

"You can't kill anybody here. They're already dead."

Up and down the hills of the Bronx graveyard, I learned how to drive my Corolla. And I did so for the next ten years. As the vinyl seats ripped. As the roof rusted. As the antenna struggled to pick up FM radio.

But it was the car that I drove home from Game 7 of the Mets' victorious 1986 World Series. And, for that alone, I loved that Corolla.

Dinner last night: Chicken Marsala at Cafe Montana.