Way back in the before times, somewhere around about 1984 I found THE CAR. Now just imagine you wuz 26 in 1984 and your mind was wondering over the best possible car that was worthy of being in the presence of a superbly gifted 26 year old dude. What would that car be? For the TCOU, that car was a 1980 rear wheel drive Mazda RX7 with a five speed manual transmission. You’re prolly thinking “Wow! WTF you talkin bout Willis? I thought you’d say a 1966 Corvette or sumpin, but you starts to spoutin off about Wankel rotary engines and shit.”
Well, lemme tell ya. You hadda be there I guess. I loved that car to death and sadly that was where it eventually ended up … dead. I always felt like the coolest cat in the room tooling around town in that little silver bullet.
Life was all roses, burnouts, and hairpin turns with squealing wheels, and then one day it happened. I don’t wanna point any fingers, but at this point the fickle finger of blame must be pointed squarely at my good friend Angry Bob. You see, in 1984 I rented an apartment from Bob, but Bob was not the greatest maintainer of houses or driveways or snow or ice or lawns.
One dark and stormy day, we had a blanketing snow storm accompanied by freezing rain. Now normally I didn’t race around town in my cute little sports car on such a wintry day, but on this particular day I was working second shift at an office in Albany. Angry Bob was conspicuously absent from his snow plow duties so I had to improvise my way out of his icy driveway to get to work.
Climbing into the cockpit I fired up the Wankel rotary engine and proceeded to rock the car back and forth in an attempt to gain some momentum down the driveway. The rear wheels just spun uselessly on the ice. But right then, a lightbulb appeared over my head. What if I shifted the car into reverse, got the wheels spinning, and then hopped out of the car and gave it a shove? Genius! So that’s what I did.
Shifting the car into reverse, letting out the clutch whilst giving the gas pedal a tap, the wheels started gently spinning on the icy surface. The plan was to climb out of the car, leaving the door open so that I could quick like a bunny hop back in once the car started easing down the driveway, and then jump back in to sail away into the sunset. I guess I shoulda diagramed it out first on some graph paper, because that ain’t what happened. I got out and gave the car a shove, and sure as shit, the car sailed down the driveway. Unfortunately the car was much faster than me, so no hopping back in to sail away occurred. Instead the car ricocheted off of the air conditioner that Bob had left hanging out his living room window, and bounced off of the house, twisting the driver side door around to meet the front fender. All this while I stood there with mouth agape. The car came to rest in a snow bank. So there I stood cursing the snow, Angry Bob, and my stupid plan to get the car loose.
I called my boss and tried to explain what had happened. I don’t think that he believed my amazing tale, because he said something like “You need to get your ass into work, these computers don’t maintain themselves.”
Somehow I got the car the rest of the way down the driveway, while holding the door shut, steering, clutching, and shifting like a Barnum and Bailey juggler. Spotting a sketchy looking garage near my apartment, I pulled into the lot and pleaded for help from a large African American fellow. He looked me up and down, eyeballed my mangled door and said to me “I got a special tool that can fix that.” He then proceeded to stick a chunk of a two by four into the door jam and slammed the door shut. He pulled the wood out of the jam and closed the door with me shouting “Holy shit!”
I don’t remember what he charged me for his precision repair, but I do know that I did somehow make it to work. The car was never the same and I never did get the door completely fixed. I did try to replace the door and it kinda worked, but sadly the car never recovered and I sold my one and only prized possession for a song. Someone may have fixed it up and driven it, or maybe it’s sitting in a junkyard somewhere waiting for the right person to take possession. For me it’s just a sad tale of love and love lost. The only thing that remains of my beautiful RX7 is an old memory and this pitiful blog article documenting my love affair.
