Part Two: You Get What You Pay For

Although I would have to wait another couple weeks to get my official pass to park my new-to-me 1985 Buick Electra 300 on school grounds, as its purchase and related expenses wrung me dry, I drove it to school anyway. I would get up 30 minutes early to pick up my friend Lucas on the way in, after which we drove to the Sonic down the road from school for breakfast (with me flying and him buying, of course). I parked the Buick in an empty lot next to a machine shop a block or two away from school at first, then after a few days the owner not-so-gently chided me for leaving my hooptie next to his property, so I moved it into the parking lot of an empty office building a block over. 

I had never felt so accomplished and cool before in my entire life. And now my stories were real. Although just like people had when I was 12 years old and pretending to have a car, most people who I excitedly waved my key at and told of every single feature my Buick had weren’t particularly interested, but so what? Mom and Dad’s money (and occasionally, a good bit of their own) had gotten them into much nicer cars than mine. Among my small collection of friends, all of us gamers, outcasts, and weirdos, I was finally the first one at something, and not something that most would consider lame either, like being the first to have a self-pissed-in seat during a long car trip. I quickly learned that having a car meant you rarely had to pay for anything. Just like my mornings at Sonic with Lucas, I always charged a meager fee of sodas, energy drinks, food, fuel, whatever the rider could spare in exchange for passage virtually anywhere. 

The novelty was slow to wear off, but reality was setting in. For $300 I had a running, driving, shifting, turning, and stopping Buick, but it had issues. Any 20-plus-year-old car purchased for a couple C-notes would, but this fact irritated my mother and grandparents, who operated under the assumption that you spent more on a car to spend less on repairs. My grandfather had been a mechanic most of his life, keeping C-130s flying in the Air Force through the Vietnam War, then for a local machine shop for another couple decades. I cajoled him into taking me on a guided tour of my car’s mechanical situation. In the previous installment, I provided some specifications on my Buick, with knowledge I have now as I write this (since I was not alive in 1985 to obsessively pore over the Electra’s brochures and spec sheets), but at the time I had no idea what engine I had. At a minimum I knew it was not terribly fond of starting on some days, the rear end was slammed to the ground in a sort of proto-Carolina Squat, and it produced a variety of unusual and potentially dangerous noises and sensations as it drove down the road. It also had the low-speed throttle response of a Congressional committee, it needed a special session or two before processing and confirming my requests for acceleration, although I wasn’t sure if this was a problem or a feature.

Eventually, my grandfather estimated that at a minimum, the car needed a carburetor adjustment, new brakes, bearings, ball joints, tie rods, rear shocks, tires, and “a new car while you’re at it”. So not too bad then, right? I took the Electra to the shop my grandfather had always taken his cars to so they could give me an opinion on how much it would take to fix each issue. The word was that I could buy several more $300 Electra 300s for the price the shop wanted to get my car up to something resembling new-old-stock spec. My eyes opened a bit wider at the wallet-draining prospect of used-car ownership, but I was not fully discouraged. Surely, I thought, I had some level of access to mechanical knowledge. I purchased the Gospel of Haynes, GM C-Body Chapter from AutoZone and pored over it with the same obsession I poured onto brochures. This was before YouTube was in full effect to give the world 1080p videos of any car repair you needed to conduct, so I was left to find help on my own.

My grandfather’s help began and ended with diagnostic assistance, although he did loan me a couple hundred bucks to get started (with the understanding that my grandmother was not to find out). My friend Cliff had the Cool Loaded Uncle that every group of Southern high-school losers seemed to have access to. He had a cavernous shop next to his modest-on-the-outside house on the edge of West Monroe city limits, backing it up with the apparent ability to fix just about anything. It was there I started my descent into Hooptie Repair Madness. I bought the parts and the Cool Loaded Uncle talked me (and occasionally Cliff as well) through the job. Over the next several months I fixed some of the most pressing issues with my own hands, such as the brakes, the front wheel bearings, and the rear shocks. For Tax Time Christmas I even managed to convince my mother, who was still half-skeptical-half-proud of her son and his hooptie, to get a set of new tires installed on the Buick, Mastercraft Avenger G/Ts, 215/65R-15, white letters and all. By the time I turned 17, the Buick was back to riding almost as well as it had when it was new, although the interior was still rough and smelly, and “tepid” was the most PC term to describe the 3.0-liter LK9 V6’s acceleration. Nonetheless, I still spent as much time spinning its odometer as possible, and on the first possible day after the end of the school year, I proudly pulled up to the DMV at Cypress and Natchitoches to take my driving test. Of course, my Electra was rejected because it had a brake-lamp bulb out, but a trip to AutoZone fixed that and I was soon ready for the summer as a fully-licensed driver in my own car. 

While I was working hard to make the Electra better, I was also making some decisions I hoped would make my own life better. I had taken the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) and performed remarkably well, which meant that my 17^th birthday also brought the stream of recruiting calls. Military service was a tradition on my mom’s side of the family (my unknown-to-me father had also served). I had been decidedly mediocre as a student, having long since dropped out of all gifted and advanced-placement programs due to boredom and dislike of my fellow students, and my prospects for college were dwindling. So after some soul-searching, both privately and with my family, I made the decision to enlist for my own term of service. The plan was that I would process into the Delayed Entry Program (a form of inactive reserve) before my senior year, then go active duty after I graduated. 

The first omen that this may not be the greatest idea came within 20 minutes of departing with my recruiter to the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in Shreveport. In the midst of a blinding rainstorm, a pickup truck traveling the other direction on Interstate 20 spun out into our lanes, causing a five-car accident that bent the government-owned Dodge Stratus into 1:3 scale and blocked the westbound lanes for hours. We were rattled, but unhurt, and I was undeterred. Two weeks later, I successfully arrived at the MEPS to undergo the battery of tests and lab work needed to ensure only the strongest and healthiest enter into the military. After a long day of being poked, prodded, and paraded, my mother and brother had driven all the way out from West Monroe to watch me raise my right hand to start my own military adventure…only to find that it was not to be. I had made the mistake of disclosing the recent accident involving myself and my recruiter, after which the approving physician refused to approve me without seeing with her own eyes the hospital records proving that I wasn’t hiding some fatal internal injury. Rejected. 

With nothing else that could be done that day, we left empty-handed and furious, my mother so much that she began having chest pains. I had asked her to drive my Electra out, as I needed to get some practice driving on the open interstate while also seeing how well the car worked in the same setting. My hopes of an enjoyable drive home in the Buick, thinking forward to an exciting future in the Navy, were dashed and I instead spent the first third of the drive with one eye on my mother, concerned she would have a real, serious cardiovascular episode. Her pains slowly subsided, but both our moods remained sour. Furthermore, my attention was turning from my mother’s health to my car’s health. For several decades, General Motors—the Buick and Oldsmobile divisions in particular—decided that the average driver didn’t need a complicated and confusing dashboard layout overloaded with such frippery as rev counters and auxiliary gauges. Drivers are smarter than that, they thought, downing martinis at a rate that would have James Bond being thrown into a cold shower, so my Electra and millions of other cars had but a speedometer and a fuel gauge with a bank of warning lights that would illuminate when there’s a problem. 

When there’s a problem, not before there’s a problem.

It was a typical July day in north Louisiana, nearly 100 degrees with nearly 100 percent humidity. About halfway between Minden and Ruston, I looked down and saw the red temperature light was on.  My heart sank, my already sweaty palms began to shake. I backed off the throttle, slowing down to about 65 or so, keeping my foot just enough in it to maintain speed. The light went off. I gently accelerated back up to 70 so as not to be an impediment to traffic, only to be greeted by the light again. Another 10 miles and I was barely able to keep 55. The throttle, lifeless on a good day, had completely turned to mush. I began to panic. I didn’t want to pull over on the side of the highway and risk a hugely expensive tow back home, or worse, get crushed by a truck driver craning their neck to see what was going on. The space between Shreveport and West Monroe was largely unfamiliar to us, but my mom knew of a small shop just off the interstate we could stop at. Maybe it’s nothing big, we thought.

Limping along the shoulder, hazards on at 50 mph, half-panicking and half-crying, I don’t remember how long it took us to reach Ruston. The temperature light flashed ominously and I barely made it to the top off the off-ramp, much less into the parking lot of the shop. The car died with a shudder in the middle of the shop lot, not even in line with a bay. The three of us pushed it in front of a bay, where I broke down crying explaining to the mechanic the symptoms. Sensing the reason for my tears, or perhaps just wanting to get away from the crying teenager, the mechanic assured me they would get it figured out. We walked across the street to Subway for lunch, but I couldn’t eat. All I could do was stare at my faded champagne Buick, the car I had bought with my own money, sitting in the shop bay broken and defeated. I had even forgotten the fact that I had just been rejected from the military. 

About two hours later, the mechanic came into the office to deliver the news. Water in the cylinder. I was already an ugly, hyperventilating mess, so I couldn’t cry any more than I already had. They weren’t sure what it was, could be a head gasket, could be the intake, and I definitely was not going anywhere else in the Electra today. But in my head, I already knew it was worse, there was no way to me that it couldn’t be. Failures like this are what send First Cars to the Crusher, especially $300 ones. The shop told me they would give me an estimate in a few days, but for now we had to get back home. I stared out the window from the back of my grandfather’s LeSabre the entire ride back to West Monroe. I had begun calming down and thinking clearly. Given that I had already spent the past several months getting the handle on mechanicals to bring my Electra back up to driving shape, surely I could get a bit of extra tutelage to fix this problem, right?