The Thing

The Thing

This is another one you can file under “things I learned in my early adulthood about how material possessions don’t always bring happiness.”

About the same time that I made the fateful windsurfer purchase, (see the August 27th post), I also bought a vehicle which, looking back now, was the most impractical trade of legal tender for heartache and woe that I think I’ve ever made. I was returning to UNCG for the spring semester of 1988—seems so long ago—and it was necessary for me to have a vehicle to get back and forth from: a) my parents house in New Bern where I could do laundry and bum food and money, b) Winston-Salem where I could do laundry and bum beer and cigarettes from my sister, c) Chapel Hill where I could improve my social skills with high school friends who usually helped me along by handing me an unknown alcoholic liquid and saying, “drink this.”
One of these friends was David, who would give a sort of show and tell in his dorm room of substances that were either illegal, explosive, or both. He kept all of these things locked up in a homemade safe, as he had been doing since grade school, and, after displaying different varieties of brass knuckles, switchblades, and various calibers of firearms he would reach in the back of the safe and pull out a mason jar of clear liquid, get this kind of maniacal grin on his face, hold up the jar and hiss “moonshine.” I remember—I use the word “remember” loosely here—one night being talked into taking two shots of the stuff and spending the rest of the night rocking back and forth in a rocking chair humming “Rollin’ in my Sweet Baby’s Arms” and trying not to puke.
I mention David because he figures into the story of the Thing considerably. When he graduated from Military School, where I believe he learned many deviant but useful techniques regarding contraband (he was also an Eagle Scout), he bought a green MG. I remember riding around the housing development he lived in with the top down and being duly impressed and envious. Later, when his mother had moved from Lewisville to Greensboro, I stayed with him and his brothers while I was finding a place to live near campus, and we had episodes of playing quarters with moonshine and developing our threshold for hangovers. It was during this time that I bought the Thing.
One morning, hung-over and dazed, I started searching the classifieds for a suitable vehicle. I circled about half-a-dozen used car ads. The one that was making the top of the list was a Honda Accord with maybe 50,000 miles on it. There might have been a Toyota or an Escort or something like that on the list as well. One of the ads I circled was for a 1973 VW Thing, and whenever I looked at the ad my imagination took me to the Outer Banks where I would be cruising with the top down, the windsurfer sticking auspiciously out of the back. The image was winning out over the more practical Japanese imports with relatively low mileage.
A few notes about the VW Thing. VW only made this model for a couple of years. It was a German version—I guess—of a beach-buggy, but was practical for highway travel also, and, if you were so inclined (I wasn’t), you could paint the car tan, put an Iron Cross on it, mount a machine gun on the back, and pass it off for a German staff car circa 1943. I think VW attempted to soften the martial features of the car by issuing friendly bright paint jobs such as day glow orange and fluorescent yellow. Mine was the yellow variety. It was a strange amalgamation. Sort of Dobey Gillis meets the Hitler Youth.
David drove me to the address listed in the ad. The man who was selling the car was a stout, middle aged, Middle America guy who lived in a cul-de-sac. He took us down into the garage where he had not one, but two VW Things parked serenely in the bright and clean parking spaces. One was orange, the other, yellow. The yellow one was the one I was going to look at, and I fell into a sort of trance as soon as I saw it. When you read about something, especially a car, in an ad or a magazine you can only get a general sense of the material makeup of that object, so your mind develops a fragmented image of that object. When you first actually lay eyes on that object it is as if all the fragments have all been put together and the “realness” of the object is almost overpowering. This is the way it has been for me ever since I got my first set of army men in the mail. Of course that “realness” and actual “reality” are often two very different things. But at that moment all I could see was a fascinating, enticing, hunk of yellow metal. The owner probably knew he had me hooked at that very moment.
Then I drove it. David sat beside me checking the knobs, looking in the glove compartment, adjusting the mirror, and at one point I remember him saying “Man, this is cool!” I heard this over the high pitched whine that is a VW engine at high RPMs, and the approval of my friend clinched the deal in my mind—as if it hadn’t been clinched the moment I walked into that basement at the end of a cu-de-sac.
I can’t remember how much I paid for it exactly but I want to say $2,500. At this point it would be easy for me to say that the guy at the end of the cul-de-sac had sold me a lemon, but that would be untrue. The car was in good shape for being fifteen years old, and although it had relatively high mileage, the engine ran well and there wasn’t a scratch on the body. The paint was a little faded but other than that, the car looked good. As good as a fifteen year old fluorescent yellow German staff car is going to look. No, I think it’s safe to say, that I took a peach and turned it into a lemon.
I soon found an apartment close to the downtown area of Greensboro and enrolled in classes. I could walk to campus, and did so many days because of the parking hassle that plagues every American college campus. I would drive the Thing around in the afternoon, visiting friends and showing off, and artist friends would offer to paint it psychedelic colors and others would just want to ride around in it. After about two weeks everyone, except me, got over it.
It was winter, and one Friday after class I decided that I was going to drive to New Bern and stay with my parents. As I pulled out from Greensboro and headed east, a light snow began to fall and I thought “that’s alright, by the time I get to Raleigh, it will have turned to rain.” I was wrong. By the time I got to Raleigh it had turned into an extremely heavy snowstorm and the windshield wipers were working furiously to keep me from becoming snow blind. It eased up a little past Raleigh, but it was still coming down hard when I got stuck on the turn-off to New Bern. A VW is a rear-wheel drive car, with the engine in the back, so this combination caused the car to dig into the accumulating snow, and I found myself churning helplessly with no results until a driver behind me, probably driving a Honda Accord, got out and pushed me out of his way. I was able to proceed, with the snow still coming down hard, and I happened to glance up at the top left corner of the convertible top and notice that snow was accumulating on the inside of the roof. How, I know not—ask a scientist—but soon it was snowing inside of the car. About this time, the windshield-wiper motor started smoking. By the time I got to New Bern I was starting to have reservations about the deific elements of my new purchase.
Luckily, the weather improved by the time I returned to Greensboro. Soon though, I was faced with more difficulties. I had never owned a car of my own and was very unfamiliar with all of the fluids necessary for ensuring that you vehicle be properly lubed, cooled and insulated. One such unheard of liquid was brake fluid. I had just finished a visit to a friend’s house in Winston-Salem when I stepped on the brakes and nothing happened. This is an unforgettable feeling, and the reaction you see in the movies is pretty much accurate, you start stomping on the pedal to get any kind of stopping power you can and start to wonder of you should just aim for a tree and get it over with. I pulled up on the emergency brake and was able to come to a halt. This was the way I braked (I’m very unsure about that verb) all the way back to Greensboro, using the emergency brake and muttering to myself. My mood was maintaining a foul simmer. By the time I got to the dorms at UNCG I had had it, and my temper got the better of me. I pulled up as hard as I could on the emergency brake and the whole thing tore out of its frame. Whoops. Lesson: a temper only makes things worse. I remember being past the threshold of reasonable thinking, but at the same time I was fascinated that the brakes of the VW use the same wires as a bicycle. The whole emergency braking system had been exposed by my anger.
After a $300 brake repair job, and another month of eating Oodles of Noodles exclusively (due to the expense), the Thing was road worthy again. I got home from class one day and noticed that someone had dented the front of the car just enough so the hood wouldn’t close properly. There was no note or explanation, but the dent didn’t look that bad, and I decided to wire the hood down until I could afford to get it fixed. When that might be I had no way of knowing, but I was hopeful. I got a piece of strong wiring and I looped it from latch to hook and forgot about it.
That weekend I was off once again to Winston-Salem to stay with my sister Forsyth. It might have been March at this point and the weather was drizzly and cold. I got about halfway between Greensboro and Winston and was doing about 60mph when suddenly I heard a horrific WHAM and my field of vision was immediately turned to nothing but bright yellow metal. The hood had flown up. To avoid becoming a highway patrol statistic, I used both of my mirrors to navigate over to the shoulder and, fortunately, was able to stop the car. It’s amazing how your reflexes take over in a situation like this, and I suppose years of driving made the reaction to use my mirrors and coast over to the side of the highway automatic, but I still can’t believe I wasn’t broadsided by a Mack truck. There but for the grace of God go I.
I got out and assessed the damage. The hood had flown back so hard that it had knocked the front windshield back four or five inches. This meant that the rag-top could not latch properly to the windshield and would have to remain down. I got the hood fastened back down, very, very securely, and continued the next thirty-miles to Winston through the forty-degree drizzle with the top down and fellow travelers staring at my wet, dejected, and quite unnerved silhouette slowly making its way to safety at dusk.
Other mishaps occurred, like breaking down in nowhere town, North Carolina or having a friend think he could make the radio work by putting a beer tab in the fuse box (note: this causes fire), or being shot at in a field in Davey County (turns out it wasn’t the best place to party) and not being able to get the engine to turn over, and many more instances where the detrimental aspects of owning this car far outweighed its assets.
I ended up finally parking the Thing in front of my sister’s house when I moved in with her after being evicted from my apartment in Greensboro. I started work at a Restaurant nearby and walked there everyday, because by this time, I had all but killed the Thing. I had some friends who destroyed their cars, but did it in one fell swoop, rolling it down an embankment or totaling it by hitting a tree, but I believe that I subjected this car to a slow death. Its final indignity came when my sister called me at work to tell me that the neighborhood kids had rolled it down the hill, and it was now sitting in the middle of Washington Street. I ended up selling it to a used car dealer who said he’d give me “a buck fifty” for it. In used car jargon, this meant $150, and I could do nothing else but take the offer. The era of the Thing was over; I had owned it for less than a year.
The Thing sat in a used car lot for a couple of years and I would pass by it often. It looked a little beat up and bored sitting there with the used Honda’s and Toyota trucks, but it also looked a little relieved to be out of my hands. One day it was gone, and occasionally, when I see a VW thing driving up Reynolda Road I like to think that someone with a more responsible nature gave the car a second life and that I’m seeing it in its new incarnation, driving its happy owner to Pilot Mountain or somewhere, with a new hood latch, emergency break, and plenty of break fluid.