On "Top Gear" they will usually have a celebrity guest who will drive their Reasonably Priced Car as fast as possible to get ranked with other celebrities for driving skill. Prior to the driving adventure, the celebrity will usually be asked about his or her history with cars. They will usually tell Clarkson of their coolest cars and sometimes bashfully their rubbish cars. I am not even close to a celebrity but here is my history with rubbish cars.
There were multiple rubbish cars but the all-time worst was the first one. I was working in a petrol station and the supervisor had an old beater Rambler. It looked terrible but it somehow got him to work each day and that was all I needed to know. He wanted to get rid of it so I bought it from him and thus took ownership of the Eight Dollar Car.
Somehow the Eight Dollar Car made it home ... but that was as far as it was ever going to go. From the brief pride of ownership there was an almost immediate transition to How the Hell Do I Get Rid of It.
There was a collective meeting of my brothers and sisters and none of us had any money so we decided, aha, we would use my father's car to tow the Eight Dollar Car to a junkyard. There were a few problems with this idea as none of us had ever towed a car and we didn't have any equipment to do it. So we tied a rope between them.
This was not our best idea despite being a family of relatively-intelligent individuals. In towing the Eight Dollar Car, the lead vehicle would drive off and take up the slack in the rope at which time they would be a huge lurch in the Eight Dollar Car. Whomever was driving the Eight Dollar Car would then freak and hit the brakes but wouldn't get off them and the result was that it wasn't so much being towed as being dragged, tires squealing all the way.
By some miracle, we finally made it to a junkyard and were just about to dispose of it when the owner of the yard asked for the car's title. I asked what title was that as I didn't have it and then he started questioning how I got it. Things got a little unusual then as I had to question why this guy would ever think anyone would steal this piece of junk but finally that got settled and the Eight Dollar Car went off to Car Heaven.
The next rubbish car was a Sunbeam Alpine and these cars have incredibly good handling with highly-responsive motors but they break ... a lot. My father paid $1900 for the car and that much or more was spent in fixing it over the following year. Even the fan broke and it didn't just break, it disintegrated, and part of it flew up into the bonnet where it put a nice dent in it. Have you ever in your life heard of a fan breaking in your car. If not then buy a Sunbeam Alpine and you too can share the experience.
The electrical system in the car was totally screwed and I don't think we ever managed to sort out what was causing it. The short in the electrics meant the battery would drain down fairly quickly so it was necessary to charge it up every night to have any chance of it getting through the next day without a dead battery.
The battery compartment in a Sunbeam Alpine is exactly where one would expect it: a compartment on the floor behind the passenger seat. I'm not going to try to explain that but apparently it makes sense in England where they make them.
Lotho was the youngest brother and the trade for a ride to school was that he would disconnect the charger in the morning and reconnect the battery cables. There was a little problem with this. In charging a battery a great deal of hydrogen is produced as a byproduct. In an enclosed space such as the interior of a sports car this gives all the ingredients necessary for a modern-day Hindenberg.
While reconnecting the cables, someone got Lotho's attention. He turned to look to find out what was wanted but at the same time dropped the wrench he was using. The wrench shorted across the battery terminals and KA-BOOM the battery and the hydrogen exploded thus spraying battery acid all over the place and specifically all over Lotho.
It was only the fact that he was looking away that saved Lotho's sight or he would have been permanently blinded by it. However, this did not save his clothes which developed quite large holes in them as the day went on. It's unknown how he explained this at school.
The same battery problem caused the next incident as I was coming home from some late-night assignation. The battery was nearly dead, the lights were very dim, and the motor wasn't firing all the cylinders. While trying to nurse the aching car up a hill, I was pulled over by a District 5 cop for speeding. I was tempted to tell him there was no possible way I could have been speeding as the car was hardly running but you don't argue with cops when you're sixteen. Any kid with the temerity to argue with a cop will be summarily dispatched to Juvee where demented malcontents learn to commit more crimes and to stick their fingers into each other. Worse, they learn to like it. This notion is specifically what has kept me out of jail all my life.
Eventually my father somehow convinced the dealer to take the car back up again. I have no idea how he did it. Maybe he just left it there and threw the key out of the window from another car as he was driven away.
The last in my list of rubbish cars was the Duckmobile which enjoyed the position of one of the worst cars I ever earned but was also the one I liked the best. As usual, I didn't have much money so I bought an old Plymouth station wagon. It was ugly and it was boring but, by God, it was mine. However, it did have a few little problems.
If you don't need reverse gear in the transmission of your car then perhaps you wouldn't consider that a problem. I found it a bit difficult as Cincinnati has quite a few hills and parking on one of them could result in a bit of a situation. If a car parks in front of you on a hill then there would be no way to get going again until the owner drove it away. It was always better to park the Duckmobile with it pointed uphill so it could roll backward if there was any difficulty getting it out of a parking space.
Perhaps you wonder how it got the name of Duckmobile. As I've mentioned previously, this was one stone ugly vehicle so a group of us decided it needed to be painted. As I've also mentioned previously, I didn't have much money so we used what we had at our disposal: house paint. The result was a glorious job that featured a giant yellow ski duck on the hood, great big green serpents on each side and the rear end of a pig on the back gate. This really didn't finish it so we painted flames coming out of the windshield. Thus painted it wasn't just a car anymore, it was art. Or at least I and a collection of my quite-stoned friends thought so. The Cadillac Man and Lotho live quite respectable lives these days but, oh yeah, there were in on it. Long live the Duckmobile!
In time the Duckmobile died, afflicted by some malady that was too expensive to fix and which prevented it from moving. That it was too expensive probably meant the fix would have cost more than fifty bucks but so it goes ... the Duckmobile was dead.
We decided the Duckmobile deserved a Viking funeral and we wanted to blow it up but we couldn't move it and thought it might be a bit difficult to explain to the neighbors and the cops if the car mysteriously exploded and caught fire. It was the same group of highly-stoned Vandals who performed the ceremony but I think Laughing Gecko got in on too as we set into it with hammers and who knows what else. The result was that we broke every window in it, smashed in all the body panels, and every other kind of devilment we could imagine.
And finally came The Hook to take the Duckmobile off to Car Heaven.
Some have said I should write a book of all the stupid and completely insane things I've done in my life as it might be funny. I haven't done it as there were so many incidents that it wouldn't be a book, it would be an encyclopedia.
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