It's Thursday, which means we've once again gathered our writers in a small, confined space, withheld food and water and told them they couldn't come out until they answered our weekly question.

Someone snuck in Doritos and beer. So they took their damn time writing. But once we piped the Celine Dion music into the room, they knew we meant business and they got to answering our questions. Except the Canadians. They stood and saluted.

Anyhow. It's Car Week here at FTTW, so we had to, of course, ask a car questions.

What was your first car?

Ernie:

First car was a '77 Chevy Nova coupe. Primer gray. Red vinyl roof. Straight 6 motor. Very easy to work on. Often had to stick a screwdriver in the carberator to hold it open so it would start. Not my dream car but it was a car. I took the gay looking hubcaps off and spray painted the rims with some chrome paint to make it look like I had cool rims on there. Very Chip Foose.. Put a sparc-o-matic tape deck in it and some shitty 8 inch sparc-o-matic speakers in the back window. Crank up the AC/DC baby cuz it's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. Then the tape got stuck in the deck so that's all I could listen to. Either that or the radio. At least it was a good tape.. TNT. I'm dyno-myte.. Then the passenger side door became frozen shut and was no longer operable. So everybody always had to climb in the passenger side to get in. Great way to impress a date. Climb in sweetheart... It was nicknamed 'the gray ghost'.

Jo:

Like most teenagers I'd asked for a car for my 16th birthday. Like most single, working mothers, my mom couldn't afford to give me the car I'd wanted, or even close to the car I'd wanted. BUT in true Mom-style, my mother did get me a car.

On my 16th birthday I anxiously awaited to be handed a little box with little car keys in it. What I got was a little box with a little car in it. My mom had gone out and bought me a Matchbox VW Bug painted black with little flowers stickers on it and a keychain hanging out of its tailpipe.

To this day its still my favorite car and I still have it.

Shawna:

1973 Opel Manta 4 speed. 3rd gear was stripped, so I had to shift from 2nd to 4th. I dream about this car all the time for some reason. It's kinda weird. In most of the dreams, the car has been stolen. Which is weird cuz why would anyone want a 1973 Opel Manta but me?? I was driving down the street one night when this tick started coming from the engine. It got louder and louder. I wasn't smart enough to realize something was really wrong with that tick until the tick turned into a knock and then it was too late. A bolt on the oil pan blew out and so did all of the oil. Engine froze. I miss that car.

1986 red Honda CRX. I lowered it and made it the La Razamobile. Little chain steering wheel and a skull clutch. I got bored one day and put little dingleballs all over the interior. It was cool. One day I was really bored and I was shopping at a religous store for some priest shirts to wear at a show (don't ask). I found a whole bunch of plastic bible figures. Like little Jesus and little baby Jesus and that kind of crap. So I superglued a few scenes from the bible on my dashboard. I had a little Mary pointing her finger ahead to the road and a little manger scene going on. I had a battle scene happening by the passenger seat. I might have had a few sheep on there too. All in all, it was a cool car.

Michele:

I was the proud owner of a 1973 Oldsmobile Omega. This was in 1980. All my rich friends got BMWs and Camaros when they graduated high school. I had to wait until I saved enough money to buy my own ride. Maybe it wasn't sporty or fast or sexy or brand new, but let me tell you, that car was one solid piece of machinery. When I was behind the wheel of that thing, I felt invincible, like I was driving a tank. Nothing bad could happen to me in that car.

Then I let my pre-licensed sister drive it. With me in the passenger seat. One red light, one distracted sister, one car barreling through the intersection the other way, and my beloved Omega was totalled.

But we escaped unscathed (except for my sister's broken nail, and my promise to her that if she complained about her nail again I would break her head open). The way we were hit and the wreckage of the car and the fact that we weren't dead is a testament to the mightiness of the 73 Omega. You want a car like that today, you'll have to buy yourself one of those monster SUVs that take up six parking spaces.

Jay:

My first car was a 1980 MBZ 450 sel, in 1989. Nice freakin car. It burned down on me in 91. sad.

Meg:

My first car was Squeaky, a '86 Volvo station wagon. Obviously he was my parents' car first, and I didn't get him until he was almost voting age. I drove him all over, thought snowy winters and muddy springs. Squeaky the Swedish Tank also came out victorious in several parking lot misshaps and fenderbenders that would have crippled a younger, newer model. Squeaky didn't quite make it to drinking age, though. Now he's on the farm, where he can run with the other Volvos... and hot Swedish girls come change his oil.

kali:

well, the first car my parents bought me (i wasn't even sixteen yet) was a 1979 pontiac firebird. fuck ya i said that. i was my dad's boy, you see, so he bought this car for me from a friend.

unfortunately, i felt it necessary to steal this car at age 15 to go to the 7-11 to buy dip. and i hadn't learned to drive standard yet. so uhm ya i crashed it. the guy who's car i hit was nice enough to pull his girlfriend off of me so that she didn't kill me with her bare hands. (i did, after all do my best to try to drive the fuck away after i hit it, can't blame her for ripping me out of my seat to pummel me so that i couldn't get away.) he also eventually would report to his insurance company that my mother was driving the car at the time of the accident even though she had to be called at the restaurant where she and my father were have a schmancy meal with their friends.

now that i think about it, i was fucking lucky. that dude saved me jail time, probably.

so years later the first car that i would legally drive would have nearly the same engine but not quite so hot of a shell... a 1981 oldmobile cutlass supreme. ya.. i fucked up

Pirate:

My first car was a red 1962 Jaguar XKE factory lightweight. I eventually sold it to a diamond merchant for 1.3 million in order to finance a much-needed coup in a small, African nation, back in the early '80's.

Um, my next car was an orange 78 mustang with T-tops and a chrome foot print gas pedal. It blew up in my driveway about a year after I bought it and that was good thing after all the trouble it gave me.

Joel:

Let's see. My first car was an 89 Honda Accord, a 2 door. That was around 2000, maybe 2001. I don't remember exactly. The damn thing caused me endless trouble and I made the mistake of having the transmission rebuilt for about $2000--maybe a year before I finally got rid of the damn thing. On the other hand, I'd bought it outright and, if nothing else, it sure as hell could get up to speed quick. That was nice.

Ian:

I would have had a really nice first car, but my parents' finances got tied up in some ugly coup in a small, African nation - apparently some asshole sold the authoritarian dictators a really nice car or something.

So instead, my first car was a '93 Honda Civic, handed down to me from my mom while she got a new car. It's a good little car, and is covered in my hippy-liberal-baby-eating-communist-abortion-party bumper stickers. I still drive it today, occasionally.

My motorcycle, however, is a 2002 Kawasaki Vulcan 750, black trimmed in badass. I love my bike. I nearly cried when it laid down in some gravel and made the gas tank an Innie instead of an Outie.

I'm not sure I would ever bother with a Honda again, though, unless I had money to burn. Which god knows I don't.

Dan:

My first was a crappy old Protege, I didn't have it for very long. It wasn't even that long ago. It was a great car for the money, took me on a lot of road trips, started to crap out but got in an accident just in time. That accident saved me a lot of money.

Branden:

Oh man. I inherited a 1986 Toyota minivan. Good lord, the fun we had in that car. The backseats could be removed, so we took those out and put in bean bag chairs. I touched my first boob in the back of that car. It was mushy and disappointing.

baby huey:

My first car was the truck of pain. Man, that thing was a piece of shit. It didn't have a grill -- we collapsed the box from a case of Busch light and put it in there to protect the radiator. It had no emergency break. The hood release cable came all the way out the first time I pulled it. Had a crappy AM receiver and a worse FM receiver. That was it. No AC. Power nothin.

Finally died on the on ramp to the freeway on the way home from work one day my senior year of high school. Timing chain broke. Would have cost more than the truck's value to fix it.

Bonnie:

My first car was a 1987 Mazda Pick-up with a cap on the bed. It was a stick and had no power steering so for a skinny little 17 year old this machine was tough to drive!! That good ole' machine got me back and forth to college (a 4 hour drive) for four years, one secret trip to NC to visit the boyfriend, a bunch of "road trips" with the girlfriends, and a whole lotta lovin' in the back!! That darn thing didn't let me down once...just one flat tire the entire time I had it! I finally broke down and bought a "real" car (a very girly dodge neon with pink and purple pinstripes) and sold the Mazda to a NY State Trooper for $200. He also got my husband out of a few tickets for that price! The trooper drives it everyday to the station and back home. Did I mention that I had let my little sisters make chalk pictures on it one day?? The black paint was forever scratched with pictures of rainbows and circles but it definitely added character!! Man I loved that thing! I have massive upper body strength from driving that thing!

Matthew:

HEY THERE! My first car was a little red 1989 Hyundai Excel when I graduated high School! It only lasted a month, But we Knicknamed it "The Fairy Flyer on The Pansy Express, Trolley Happy Car!" I had alot of fun driving that piece of Shit!

Timmer:

1967 Malibu Classic in Metallic Mint Green that I had Earl Scheib paint midnight blue for $49.95.

I kind of covered the rest in my current post.

Philbrick:

1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass. Brown. Dented. I bought it from my cousin for seventy-five dollars and a mountain bike. It survived about 90,000 miles before everything died at once at three in the morning on Interstate 5.

Richard:

My first car was a Mexican production VW Beetle, flat barn red, although it hadn't; it looked like it had been painted with house paint. There was an S curve by my house that was a lot of fun to pull hard on the second curve and try to get onto two wheels for a second, which didn't happen for me, I slid 180 degrees and nailed a fire hydrant with the driver's side. I pushed it about 20 feet into the first space in an apartment complex parking lot and walked home. My first real experience with the authoritays was some pissant investigator telling me how incredibly brilliant she was to look for a red car after discovering the leaking yellow hydrant had red paint on it. That and that she apparently didn't think it was easy enough to run the tag, she climbed in and found a crumpled video rental receipt. The worst part of the story is that I now have to admit I got nailed
for renting "Troop Beverley Hills".

Cullen:


My first car was a POS 80-something Ford Fiesta that my parents bought me from a one of my dad's coworkers. He knew it was crap going into it, but, hey, that $300 bought me a few months before it threw a rod.

I used to call it Zot.

MY first car, the first car I bought myself, was a 1965 Ford Custom 500. Now that was a damn car.

So those are our first cars.

Now I've got to go let our writers out of their little room. While they are washing the Doritos dust off their hands and trying to get "My Heart Will Go On" out of their heads, you can tell us what your first car was.

I guess I'll let the Canadians out of the room, too. - M

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