The End of an Era
As the summer slowly came to an end and the next semester of college started up, my parents started to pester me about the second Nova I had sitting in the Driveway gathering rust. I kept telling them I had plans to use it to restore my Red Nova. Of course, because I had a girlfriend I was really too busy for that. I said I was going to wait until it was warmer. Then it was too hot. Now that it was turning to autumn, my parents said do something or get rid of it. So with the help of Dena and Jean, I took the front end off of the white Nova and put it onto the front of the back one.
My red Nova had since been hit in the rear by a Ford Taurus while it was parked in front of Paul’s house one night, possibly by someone who was drunk, so it still looked like junk. But now it was two-colored junk. I know it was a Ford Taurus, because there were parts of it all over the street and only a slight dent in my back quarter panel
Two weeks after I changed the front end, my bumper had clipped another car as we both made a left from opposite sides of the street. This one was a Ford Escort. I rubbed their paint off my car and there wasn’t even a scratch on my car but their car was crushed. I felt bad for the guy and didn’t dare let him see my car, but I did find it amusing on the inside. New cars are built like crap.
The next morning, while carpooling with Paul and Don to school. Karma got me back as I drove head on into a 1978 Buick Skylark. Perhaps if we had put all the bolts back on when we replaced my front end, my car would have fared better, however that was not to be and my dear “Super Nova” had died. That was, up until that point, the saddest day of my life.
Adding salt to the wound was my father taking me to the insurance place to report the accident.
“You already reported the accident to us yesterday.” The insurance rep said.
“That was yesterday’s accident. This is today’s accident.”
My father recants this story every chance he gets.
Now that I was without a car, I needed to find a way to get to my college classes. Mondays and Wednesdays were fine, Paul drove those days. But Tuesdays and Thursdays would be an issue. My father had tried to teach me to drive a stick shift a long time ago and I hated it. After the lesson, I pulled over and said “Only a madman would want to drive a stick shift.”
My first day of classes after the accident, my father drove me to school, but I would have to take public transportation from school to the mall where I worked. Never having taken a bus before, this would turn out to be quite the adventure. At first I thought my biggest fear would be the ‘Exact Change Only’ rule, but it turned out I was wrong. Getting on the bus was the easiest part.
I didn’t know quite how people notified the bus driver they wanted to get off, so I figured I would observe others. The first stop after the bus left campus was the Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital and oh boy, the collection of people who got on the bus from there..
I didn’t last long on the bus at all. Well before we got to the mall I decided I had enough. I got off on a random street corner in the middle of a bad neighborhood that I figured was halfway between the school and the mall. It couldn’t be more than 3 miles, but I wasn’t quite sure which direction I was going. I walked anyway. Within minutes of walking a car stopped next to me. It was an older lady I worked with at Penney’s named Carmen. She was Puerto Rican, but looked African-American, which came in handy at work. When she is forced to ask kids to behave in the store when parents are completely neglecting their responsibilities, the Hispanic parents would usually call her a bitch to each other in Spanish and then Carmen would proceed to scold the children in Spanish the next time and watch the parents faces go pale.
“Kerry?!” She called out. The luck! She gave me a ride. She asked me what I was doing in this neighborhood. I told her my story and she told me it was a good thing she saw me when she did, because if I went down two more blocks or so, I may have gotten myself killed. To this day, I don’t really know if she was exaggerating.
That weekend I learned to drive a stick shift.