A Personal Interlude: My First Few Cars

My dedicated reader, Moi -- who has a delightful blog and who juggles more talents, skills, and interests than I could dream up in five lifetimes -- is a fast-car freak. I sent her an article that I thought would interest her, and it prompted a quick email exchange.

Moi had mentioned her lust for the present series of Jaguar E-class vehicles. I relay here a slightly modified email response of mine.

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Growing up, when I barely cared about such things, I always thought Jaguars were the most elegant cars on the road. Their standard sedans would have done me just fine. Something like this:
 

As far as I'm concerned, most sedans since -- from the Lexus on down -- tried to match this look.

Here's a display of the first few cars I received from my dad, the Chevy/Olds dealer. Unlike most other car dealers' kids -- who had nice cars -- I always got the stuff Dad absolutely couldn't sell, even on the used car lot, or that he might have been too uninspired to unload on the wholesale market at Jerome Avenue in the South Bronx, at the time (and perhaps still) one of America's worst neighborhoods. But I could never beat the price, and until I got out of college and wanted actively to wean myself from the corporate/parental teat, they always came with gas credit cards.

My first car appears below, which I had for the last three months of high school and then until I went off to college. Seven miles a gallon. Car weighed 5700 pounds. If the driver's door accidentally closed on your leg, your next stop was the prosthesis store:

Next stop: Summer after freshman year. I was very surprised to receive a foreign car, as my father naturally thought that they were manifestations of the antichrist:

I had the Audi for about a week. Dad asked me what I thought. I was pretty pleased, but I mentioned in passing that the radio didn't work that well. Dad's response? "OK, give it back. We'll take care of that."

He sure did:

So I drove around the Pinto in the height of the exploding-gas-tank scare; Dad didn't care. I'll always remember this car because one time when I was on the FDR Drive in Manhattan, driving at a pretty good clip, I went into a dip and came out of it in mid-air, seemingly shifting half a lane to the right in the process. Good thing it was late at night and no one was in the lane next to me.

And the vehicle for which I was famous, the body of which was festooned with duct tape to cover the rust (remember, at this point I am the potential heir to a GM dealership that had been in business for 50-something years): I give you the affectionately monikered "Ghetto Cruiser," which lasted me for about four or five years:
 

The quality of cars courtesy of my father finally improved when I had a wife and kids who were riding around in them.

A gas credit card billed to someone else's account sure sounds good now, though.