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April 11, 2006
The Thugs take a Road Trip
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.
Junior Year: 1982.
It was Friday afternoon and two of the Thugs, we'll call them Tom and Dick to protect their identities, and I decided a road trip might be a good idea. Our friend, Roy, was going to Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, and we picked him as our target destination.
Prior to departing we drove by Sherry and Lois' dorm.
I'm not sure why we stopped by. We weren't all big buds with the girls or anything at this point in time, but we thought Sherry might want to go. We were likable guys (we still are)! what girl wouldn't want to road trip with us? Aside from Lois?
[I'm certain that Lois will back me up when I say that she didn't particularly care for me at that point in time and I'm not sure she knew Tom and Dick yet. She would eventually marry Roy. (An example of my awareness that Lois didn't care for me: Roy had road tripped to Miami to visit me and told me he needed to meet a girl. I remember telling him he was out of luck as the only girls I could think of were Sherry and Lois and Lois didn't really like me. Hmmm .... If Roy needed to meet a girl, had he really come to see me? )]
Anyway, non-nagging female companionship always makes road trip a little better.
Sherry was not a nagger. But, as I recall, wasn't anxious to go. She wasn't hesitant either; she just had things to do. One of those things was laundry and she decided she'd make the trip if she could bring her dirty clothes along. Why not? Tom, Dick and I told her we'd drop her by her house on the way back to MU so her things could be washed.
We took The Bruise, my primer black and faded-light-blue Beetle of late 1960's vintage. It was a really sweet ride. About as sweet as you'd expect anyway. I'd mounted speakers in the front doors and had speakers behind the back seat mounted on a homemade deck so they were flush at back-seat height. I'd removed the AM radio and in the hole put a graphic equalizer; when the windshield wipers were on the wiper mechanism would rub up against the equalizer and cause it to rock up and down in its mounting. Talk about pimped out!
The Bruise had an electrical problem that I'd spent a lot of hours trying to sort through (Dad would eventually sort it out in about 5 minutes). If too many electrical things were turned on at one time the car would shut down. It took a while to figure that out as, for the longest while, it seemed the car was just instantly dying sometimes; and not just dying in an engine-has-quit-running sense, I mean everything shut down. One of the keys to the electrical part -- and I'm no electrician ... I'm not good with amp vs volts etc. -- came as I drove home one night. I'd turned on to our driveway and, as was the custom, had the radio blaring. I was listening to Jay Ferguson's Shakedown Cruise -- think of the opening notes, bars, musical stabs, whatever you want to call them (I'm no musician either) -- and noticed that my headlights were dimming/brightening to the beat. It was really cool; probably not really good.
The Bruise also had what I recently identified as a fuel delivery problem. I'm certain, now, many years later, that the problem could be tied some sort of charcoal-filled canister that was under the hood and part of the fuel system. Not long ago the guys on Car Talk got a call from a Thing owner who had a problem with the same symptoms The Bruise had. The canister gizmo was gummed up and wasn't allowing the tank to vent so fuel wouldn't flow in the needed amount. Something like that. Anyway, the guy's Thing would die and whenever the guy took the gas cap off he'd hear a sucking sound like air was rushing in. The Bruise had the same problem and feature.
Let's see what we have here. Me. Tom, Dick and Sherry. And a sweet black and blue old VW Beetle that was not known for its reliability. This is a scenario that just screamed ROAD TRIP.
Who were we to stand in the way of scenarios?
Off we went.
(In all fairness to us, I'm certain the electrical problem had been sorted out by this time. I'm certain. I remember that dad had it fixed months before the fire.)
Posted by delmer at April 11, 2006 8:46 PM
Comments
Those were the days when "Roadside Assistance" was one of those cardboard signs you'd hang from the windshield that said, "SEND HELP."
Posted by: The Phoenix at April 12, 2006 9:03 AM