This last weekend was kinda good. I rolled down to Dad’s and we spent a ton of time going through unorganized pictures – boxes of them.
But this is a car story.
A long long time ago, I had finished my first year of school… you know, I’m now mixed up on this timeline. Huh. How wierd is that?
So, my thing on it was that, well, I finished my first year, and came home for the summer. Hung out at lunch one day with my brother, Roger and his friends, and spent my last twenty bucks on lunch and some bits and pieces. With five bucks left, I went to the smoke shop across the food court, and bought a drink, and a scratch’n’win BINGO ticket. I won five grand, and one of the things I did was buy a car.
But that doesn’t actually work. And that’s the story I’ve had in my head for two, three decades now. But it doesn’t work. Because the first AND second year I was at Carleton, I was at Barb’s place on Marco Lane, and the third year, I was on Chesterton with Max & Pils in the apartment. I didn’t have a car those years. The summer I bought the car, I drove back up to Ottawa in the fall and parked in the driveway at SKEENA – and I was dating Sharon* by then.
So, I must have won that BINGO card in ’97, not ’94.
Well, I’m an idiot, aren’t I? These are old point’n’shoot pics, so, of course, THEY HAVE THE DATE PRINTED ON THEM. This would be around the time I brought the car home, so, yes July 28th, 1996 is the date. That puts the timeline as: 1st year 93/94, 2nd year 94/95, 3rd year, 95/96 and… then into the house on Skeena in the fall of ’96, with the car in the driveway there. That fits.
Huh. The mind does weird, weird things. You know, dad found the picture of the cheque from way back then, too, from OLG (or whatever it was at the time) so… Nope. the picture Peter Ramsden sent me of the picture of the cheque is super blurry. I can’t see if there’s a date on it or not.
So, anyway, when I got that win (and there’s a story to that, that involves my incredulous mom giving me ALL KINDS of hell for bailing out on taking Roger to his dental appointment), I decided to buy a car. I had to use most of the money for school, but I was gonna have a car.
And it turns out, that Jason’s Aunt had The Pig sitting in her underground parking in Toronto, non-running. See, this was a car I had a history with – Jay had driven it all through high-school, and there had been ADVENTURES. Those are stories for another time.
It was a car i loved, and it felt (or rather, I remembered it feeling) like a powerhouse, too – a big ol’ V8. This was (assuming the timeline is now correct) nearly ten years after I’d been in it last, and it was a 17 year old car at this point, with 182,000km on the clock.
The Pig – a 1980 Pontiac Parissienne with a 305cu.in (5.0L) small block, and a 3 speed transmission. It was, in a word, a fucking boat. A land yacht, in fact. We joked you needed a passport to lean across and open the passenger side locks. WHich were manual. As were the windows.
So, one night, after Jay had told me about this, we drove down to Toronto with some parts, as Jay already knew what was wrong (starter, something I’d become intimately familiar with changing, as it was located directly next to one of the exhaust headers), and took a look. I fell in love again. So, on the condition we could get it to start, I said I’d buy it. Jay got the starter in, and sure enough.. .off she went.
I didn’t drive it home that night – in fact, I’m not certain how it got to the Canadian Tire Jay worked at. I think he drove it there, where he ran the full gamut and had it saftied for me, at which point, I got plates and insurance and… boom.
That first night driving it home from that Cantire in Mississauga? Awesome. I locked it in at 80km/h on highway 5, and for some reason, I was passing everyone. Turns out, the speedo was less correct than we had been led to believe. This was before GPS, so… I just learned what the right place on that big long speedo (not a dial) was for the particular speeds.
Thing is, I hadn’t told Mom & Dad I was doing this. There was good reason. I was fairly sure they’d have forbidden me from doing it, so I was 100% playing the forgivness rather than permission game.
And Mom hated that car. She truly did. From the moment I rolled it into the driveway, she hated it. Years later, I found out why, at least in part – She had a glorious 1994 Toyota Camry (Yes, that one. The one of Toyota’s legendary reliability), and when she backed out of the driveway, she turned the wheel three-quarters of a turn and it turned ninety degrees into the street and it was good. The Pig, however, I backed out off the driveway by turning the steering wheel about four times to the same effect as her 3/4 turn. So, she thought I was driving a permanently broken car. Years on, I told her no, that was just the over-boosted nature of those old landyachts. That didn’t exactly put her at ease, honestly.
I had that car for about four years after that. During that time, A huge amount of shennanigans took place – fifteen (a mulitude of delinquents, who I won’t name here, but they’re mostly on my friends list) people stuffed in it to go to On Tap, or Spodie-Odies downtown Ottawa , ride sharing between Ottawa and Toronto to make gas money (even at $0.39/L, it was a big tank, and I was broke), winter lunacy in a huge rear-wheel drive boat with all-season tires on it. Cottage runs, and just using it as a drinking bench in the driveway. So much more with that car.
During that time, I put nearly 230,000km on the clock. No, I didn’t run it from the 182,000km I bought it at to 230,000km, I put ANOTHER 230k on top of that 182k. It had around 427k km on it when I let it go. I learned how to replace brakes – drum and disc – and I learned how to use a 6′ extention pipe to pop the bolts on the water pump at -20oC in the garage at Skeena. I kept two fuel pumps and two starters in the trunk ($20 each at NAPA at the time) because both would fail on a whim, but were easy to fix at the side of the road, once I learned how.
Come to think of it, the car lost the fuel pump for the first time the Friday I was driving to Milton for my citizenship test & swearing in. Fortunately, I got a ride from my then girlfriend in her Neon. I hated that Neon, but that weekend could also have been a nail in the coffin of my mom’s hatred of the Parissienne.
Once I got to know her foibles (and she had many) she was totally reliable – in that I could rely on her and I could rely on the issues she had to be predictable and fixable. The problem was, as the decade, and century, turned, I wasn’t in a great place in terms of employment. While Jay was 100% going to just pay to fix some stuff himself, there were other issues creeping in (like major rust from Ottawa’s winters) and it was time to let that marvelous beast go.
And I still have regrets. I adore that front end – that little point that really, really said “no fuck you, get out of the way” in very clear terms. I miss wallowing down the road (it really needed springs and struts and shocks, even when I got it) and just cruising. I’d have one again (and I tried – I briefly had an ’88 Pontiac Parisienne Safari Wagon, which is REALLY the body style to have). But today, I’d almost definitely find a way to EV swap it. Body-on-frame for batteries and motors to live in? Oh, yeah. You could make things HAPPEN with that.
But that car was good to me. And, I truly believed that there were no surviving pictures of that car during my ownership of it. Turns out, there are. And there are a ton of memories, of friends, and of family (who hated it) built in, too. It was a good car, and it probably deserved better than me. And I still remember, the day it got towed away, My friend Jessica came to that shit hole house at Bronson & Fifth, to hold my hand while I watched her go, and I appreciated that.
Turns out, this isn’t a car story, this is a people story. I think that’s the way it goes, most of the time.
*this means nothing to most of you, but it’s a point-in-time, and so… relevant to my story.
The Drunken Wrench 