Part Five: Spinning A New Odometer

I don’t remember a whole lot about boot camp, primarily because you never have time to think about anything. I had even forgotten about my Buick, only being reminded of it in my mom’s and Kirstie’s letters about how they were taking care of it for me, and how it was almost smashed by a tree limb in Hurricane Gustav. Navy boot camp is a cinch compared to that of the Marine Corps, but it’s still two months of go-go-go, where you’re re-wired to think, speak, and act Navy. All common sense and rational thought goes away as soon as you land in Great Lakes, and it takes a while for you to get it back. In the meantime, I made it, graduating with Division 373 in October 2008. My mother cried seeing me in my uniform for the first time.

After boot camp, I reported to the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center, in Dam Neck, Virginia Beach, Virginia, for ‘A’ school to become an intelligence specialist. I was allowed to have my car there, but scheduling and money kept me from retrieving it right away. It was the first time in two years I hadn’t had one, apart from the week and a half or so it was out of commission before the LN3 swap. I didn’t like having to rely on “boot shuttles” or expensive cab rides to get anywhere. Virginia Beach and Norfolk seemed like nice towns, but I wouldn’t get to really do any exploring just yet. In the meantime, I was slowly acclimating to the new routine. New Sailors at their first school command generally fall into a handful of categories, and I’m not overly proud to say that I was very close to the line of being the “dirtbag”. I was occasionally late, I didn’t spend too much time preparing my appearance or my uniform beyond cleaning it and myself, and I chafed against most of the authority figures in general. It seemed like, just like the LN3 swap wasn’t entirely done properly, I hadn’t been fully re-wired to Navy standards. I would “get it” eventually, but I never forgot who I was or where I came from.

I had to wait until the holiday leave block to return home. I was happy to be back, but everything felt different, as though I no longer had a place there even if I belonged. The Electra seemed to be a lot rougher than I remembered it. The paint was worn down to bare metal in places, especially around the hood and fenders. But the 3800 fired up first time, just like how everyone who saw me welcomed me warmly, and everything still worked just as it had when I left, which is to say good enough, but not very well. Even my meager E-2 Navy pay was more money than I had ever had in my life, and it always came on the first and the fifteenth of every month, so I decided it was time to make another round of big improvements to the Buick. On the long drive up to Virginia, my mind pored over the possibilities.

The most important and obvious thing that needed to be taken care of was the permanently Christmas-tree’d two-gauge cluster. I wanted a full set of gauges. 90s Buick LeSabres and Park Avenues were plentiful in wrecking yards, but they had different engines and wiring setups, so I went to eBay to find a cluster from a LeSabre T-Type of the same generation as my Electra. I probably paid too much for it, even at the time, but it was confirmed good by a well-rated seller. Since my car had the LN3 out of a LeSabre, and having found a decent YouTube tutorial, installing the T-Type cluster was a fairly easy job. The cluster swap further complicated the story of my car’s actual mileage (bought at 167000, unknown-mileage engine swap at 176ish, now new gauge cluster showing 132568.4), but the gauges and idiot lights worked! It also transformed my old dashboard from grandma-spec to 80s-tastic cool, with the odd shape of the auxiliary dials and the x100 tachometer.

What needed to go next was the ancient and barely-functional original audio system, which could only play FM radio through two speakers that grew weaker every day. I have an irrational, burning hatred of aftermarket stereo head units, I think they’re all hideous, have maddening interfaces (those who think MyFord or LincolnTouch sucks have clearly never tried operating a $49.99 Coby special), and never fit the factory stereo space properly. I wanted something factory, so I naturally went to go find the first 1997 LeSabre in the junkyard that didn’t look like it was turned down from a background part in Mad Max because it was too much of a hooptie, and yanked its complete Concert Sound II six-speaker stereo system. Unplugging things is easy enough, but wiring jobs were foreign territory to me at the time, which meant I needed to find some help. I didn’t have access to the Cool Loaded Uncle or my mom’s boyfriend and his friends-of-friends-of-friends, nor did I know anyone in person who could make a ’97 LeSabre stereo work in an ’85 Electra, so I had to call around. The bemused clerk at the Best Buy stereo-installation informed me that they could not, in fact, install a junkyard LeSabre stereo into a hooptie Electra. That left me to talk to one of the local “E-1 AND UP APPROVED” stereo shops, trying to keep them focused on what I wanted, not what they thought I wanted, which was apparently a 1200-watt, 12-speaker setup with built-in satellite TV. A few days later, I returned to Best Buy for an installation they could perform, an XM Radio box. With an ultra-high tech cassette adapter to play my Zune through, my in-car audio setup had improved by at least a full decade.  

Having made the most necessary improvements, the possibilities in my mind expanded. I started thinking about engine swaps; a supercharged L67 3800 would bolt right into my Electra with little fuss, giving me 240 horsepower and enough torque to shrink Nebraska, but I held off on that dream for the time being. I had graduated from intelligence specialist ‘A’ school, but I wasn’t ready to hit the fleet as a real Sailor yet. I also had to attend a ‘C’ school, at which I would learn one of the four specialties within the rating, all of which required a top-secret clearance I did not have yet. Thus, I went on hold. Being on hold is an interesting position. You have all the esteem and privileges of a ‘C’ school student, such as the blue liberty card giving you no curfew any day of the week and no barracks duty, but none of the actual­ work of a ‘C’ school student. I settled into a routine of buffing floors at the schoolhouse during the day, out no later than 3:30 PM (1530 to me back then, although I have long since abandoned 24-hour time), first in line out of the barracks at the 4:30 PM liberty call, and into the Buick. Even more so than they had in high school, where I generally had some state highway I wanted to clinch or some other destination, my drives while I was at Dam Neck generally had no destination. Sometimes I would drive out to the Lynnhaven or MacArthur Malls to just wander around and carb-bomb on mall Chinese food, but more often than not I would find myself just driving, which the Buick had long since proven itself to excel at, watching my new gauges move.

Cash for Clunkers was also coming into full effect around this time. Dealers would practically chase you down if they saw you driving a vehicle that was more than 10 years old, or had out-of-state plates. If they could kill it with sodium silicate, they would give you several K-notes of trade-in value. I was tempted a time or two, given the prospect of getting several times what I paid for the Electra back in trade value on something I wouldn’t have to put new engines in at trailer parks, and the credit I could get for which had a long-term guaranteed source of income to pay back. After a Buick dealer heard my stories about Christmas Tree during a test-drive of a 2009 Buick LaCrosse Super (which I thought was awesome with the weird front-wheel-drive V8), I was advised to hang onto my car, even if I ended up getting a new one, because as he put it, “you just can’t put a price on that kind of thing”. He went on to say that I had the perfect car for my age and position in life, that the fact I had already done so much with it with my bare hands (it wasn’t all my own hands, but I didn’t tell him this) meant that I was going places. I took his advice, not so much because I was inseparable from the Electra, but even though I was making more money than I ever had in my life and I only had a few fiscal responsibilities, I found myself broke more often than not, and I was wary of how much more often I would be broke if I also had a car payment to deal with. Nevertheless, I continued taking the Electra on tours of the car dealerships in Hampton Roads, sometimes curated ones with friends along. The Electra brought a few people to the place where they bought their first car.

I took another two weeks off to drive back to Louisiana, spending an extended amount of time with Kirstie for the first time since before I left for boot camp. I was surprised to find out that I really didn’t want to go back to my indefinite drag at Dam Neck, and I waited until the last possible minute to leave, but I still pulled the all-nighter to make it back on time. Not too long after I came back, my transmission began making some odd noises, as if it was trying to make its best impersonation of a Porsche racing gearbox. All Electras of the time period used the same THM440 transmission regardless of engine, but mine had spent over 20 years and 170-some-thousand miles behind the leisurely LK9 base engine. It had apparently decided it could no longer handle the extra power, and one day on the way out on Dam Neck Boulevard for a drive, my car stopped moving altogether, nothing but the noise. Not wanting to get towed, but also not wanting to pay for a tow, I recruited a couple of my friends to push the damn thing the two miles or so back to the barracks where the amused base security questioned each one of us as to why we were trying to push a hooptie-ass Buick back on base.

Just like the Trailer Park Hooptie Repair Hell episode two years earlier, the thought of abandoning the Buick altogether passed through my head, but it was followed closely behind by the Buick sales manager’s advice, so that weekend I hit the junkyard with a couple friends to find a new transmission. We eventually found one in another Electra that had been the unfortunate middle piece in a Fender Bender Centipede. Wrestle it out, stuff it into the trunk of their then-new-to-them 2007 Ford Five Hundred (wrapped in a barracks blanket to keep his pristine trunk clean), bring it back to base. Normally, heavy vehicle maintenance is verboten on military bases, but we had nowhere else to go. I found out that my car would still move as long as the running gear was still cold, so I parked it behind a sand dune in the parking lot of the base officer’s club, and there we got to work. Unlike Trailer Park Engine Swap Hell, we had access to an excellent YouTube tutorial that informed us on both the junkyard transmission removal and the installation on my car. With that and three people to lend a hand, I was back in business in time for curfew. Now that even more of my sweat, muscle, and blood was expended for it, I was even more attached to the Buick, and the T-Type odometer kept spinning.