Oh, the joy of having your first car. We all have memories of our first car. I didn’t get my permit until I was 19 (yes, I was a late bloomer) and wasn’t driving with a license until later that same year. I remember being filled with a sense of excitement at around this time. I mean come on, I was finally able to drive! But I’ll be honest, it wasn’t an entirely fun transition for me. I remember it being rather upsetting at times. I got my first car in January of 2013, a 2004 Hyundai Sonata, that I cherish to this day, but the road that led me to that car wasn’t an easy one.
When I first got behind the wheel of my mom’s car, a silver Eagle, my oldest brother, Jesus was teaching me how to drive when I got pulled over by the fire department for driving around a dirt road. I think it was something about me going in circles around the block for half an hour that got someone’s attention.
One day when I was driving back from my community college, I learned a valuable lesson: cars need gas. Um, yes… this seems like a no-brainer but at the time, I didn’t know that my mom’s fuel tank emptied quicker than what was indicated on the fuel gage. So there I was driving in the country, growing confident with my driving skills when I noticed that the car would stop accelerating and I would have to pull over to the side. This happened twice. Good thing the car was already parked in the college’s parking lot the first time.
Not too long from the time my mom’s car broke down on me when I was driving it (I swear it wasn’t my fault, it was just my luck), my second oldest brother, Steve had finally fixed my oldest brother’s hand me down car: a 1996 Pontiac Grand Am. Or what I liked to call it, the Grand Crap. This car took a lot of months and a lot of money to get running with a new motor but in reality, no matter how much was done to that car, it was beyond redemption and all I really got out of it was a polished piece of crap. I felt like every week that car needed to be looked at. Eventually, I wasn’t able to get into the driver’s seat because the key wouldn’t open the driver’s door so I would have to walk over to the passenger door, open it and reach to unlock the driver’s door, then walk back around so that I can get into the driver’s seat. Since the driver’s door and passenger door were the only doors that had key latches in them, if the passenger door latch were to break as well, I would have had to go into the car through the trunk.
There were times when I couldn’t even roll down the windows because they would get stuck and on one hot day summer day when I was driving, I noticed that the temperature gauge on my car’s dashboard was swinging rapidly back and forth from hot to cold. Yeah, what the hell. One time when my dad stepped out of the passenger seat then closed the door, the interior light above the two front seats fell loose and hung by an electrical wire. I honestly didn’t even care and just pushed the light back up and stepped out of the car. I also don’t think I ever went without at least one warning light on my dashboard.
“Hey, what’s with your car, man?” My friend Noe told me one time, pointing at my dashboard of warning lights.
“Oh, those? Those are my Christmas lights.” I would jokingly reply. After all, it was almost Christmas.
This may be an exaggeration of my hate toward the car, but it was pretty annoying.
When the winter months grew colder, so did the Grand Crap. One morning when I started it, it made one of the most horrific noises I have ever heard. It sounded like a screaming cat. As soon as I heard it, I ran into the house and called my brother, Steve to check it out. When he yelled over the horrible noise for me to take out the keys, I raised the keyset up to show him that they were already out. As I sat in the seat of the dying animal, my brother lifted the car's hood and it was then that I noticed the bristles of a brown push broom swinging in the air above the open hood. My brother was using the handle of the broom to tap on the starter because the starter was stuck. Needless to say, it was at that moment that I knew I needed to get another car.
Despite all the faults I found in the car, I still had hope that it could be improved. I thought to myself, it wasn’t entirely hopeless; it just had some hiccups every now and then (oh, how naïve I was). After having that car for a little under a year, I got the Hyundai Sonata and used the Grand Am to pay $500 from its price. I’ll be honest, I was sad to see it go. I did have some good memories in it with family and friends (mostly involving talks about how bad the car was). When I left to get my new car, the Hyundai Sonata later that week (as seen below), my dad told me that I should consider it as my first real car. That sounded great, but I still won’t forget my first (and hopefully last) half a car.
