Parrothead Ramblings

What a babe magnet, shoe prints and all.

My beautiful wife and I have been talking for some time now about buying a new car. Talk is cheap. Cars ain’t. What we really want is one of those new ‘05 convertible Mustangs, which will give us a nice little match for the ’66 convertible we already own. But we are car payment free at the moment, and launching into multi-year debt over a car sounds a little too much like a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling. You see, even putting down a wad of cash that would choke a manatee, the payments on one of those bad boys is still easily over $400 per month. That’s more than I paid for my first car. Lots more. Like $305 more.

That’s right. My secret is out. I only paid $95 for my first car. I’ve always lied, and told everybody I paid $100 for it. I mean, hell, I didn’t want people to think I was poor or anything. The year was 1972, it was a 1959 Mercury Monterrey, and it was a road yacht. No, that’s not fair. It was more like a road battleship. This car had different zip codes for the front and rear. I didn’t have it long, just long enough to get in trouble with it. Like the time my buddy and I went down to the river with a couple bottles of Boone’s Farm. I ended up tap-dancing on the hood at some point in the festivities. The footprints never came out entirely, which was tough to explain to my Dad. At least I wasn’t wearing golf shoes.

It was in that car that I asked the prettiest girl in my high school to go steady with me, and offered her my class ring. She accepted, and I got so pumped and excited on my way home, I snapped the turn-signal lever off. That was another tough one to explain. But that’s OK, because I married that girl and somehow convinced her to stick with me ever since, despite that ugly-ass car.

I treated that car like a Hummer, taking it through farm fields and river bottoms, over curbs and mesquite bushes, and challenged the rocks and boulders of Six-Mile Hill more than a few times. That poor ol’ mistreated conveyance finally met its match when I went to watch my best friend’s little brother play in a little league baseball game. What are the odds that, of all the players in that game, and all the cars in the parking lot, my best friend’s little brother would be the player that fouled a ball over the backstop, and that the vindictive little sphere would home in on my car like a Scud missile? It bashed a hole in the windshield big enough to fling a cat through. The windshield would cost $105 to replace. That, coupled with my many other misbehaviors involving the car, and my Dad’s obviously mistaken belief that I was partying too much, led to the car going away. He sold if for $90. Depreciation, you know. I saw it, a couple of months later, chugging down the road with an octogenarian at the wheel. She was just tall enough to see over the gigantic dashboard, and just short enough to peer underneath the baseball hole. The car was perfect for her.

There was an ad in the Classic Car Trader a couple of days ago for a 1959 Mercury Monterrey, along with a picture. It looks just like mine. And the owner wants $12,500 for it. Who’d a thunk it?


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