titty pink and big

I was on this message board where folks were talking about their first car. It got me to thinking about back in the day when I used to be such a car guy. In high school I used to tool around in a titty pink 1956 Cadillac. My father sort’a gave it to me after he found it in a friend’s garage where it had been sitting for twenty years. The car only had forty-six thousand original miles on it and had the entire interior covered in plastic. That was a habit of black folk back in the day. It didn’t matter if it was the fuckin furniture in their living room or the seats in their car; they always covered the muthafucker’s in plastic.

My father gave me the car to drive as long as I did the work on it. Which was cool till one day me and my brother got into this fight which carried out into the front yard and I ended up throwing my brother thru the front windshield of the damn thing. My second car was a 1968 Mercury Monterey highway patrol car. This car came with a 429 police interceptor that I souped up with an oversized cam and a tricked out manifold and carb combo. I also threw a shift kit into the transmission so that when I put my foot into that muthafucker it would chirp the tires going thru the gears. The car was such a sleeper; except for the fat tires it looked completely stock but once the key was turned it was a whole different story.

First thing you noticed was the sound, at idle the engine didn’t run, it loped, and combined with the two-inch duals coming out the rear it had a sound that didn’t fit the car. Kind’a like seeing me in a tracksuit and spiked running shoes. And on the inside across the dash I had installed every gauge a cat could buy back in the day. I had oil pressure, oil temp, tach, tranny temp, water temp, exhaust temp, manifold pressure, vacuum, fuel pressure, engine temp, rear-end temp, outside temp. Fuck, I even had a clock and compass. If I could find it and hook it up I drilled a hole in the dash and put it in. Plus I was a switch freak and not only did each gauge light up but I had a row of switches to make em do so, along with a switches for the electric fuel pump and the oil primer. I drove this car until I blew the engine fucking around one day.

There’s this stretch of highway fifty that I used to run every time I worked on the car due to how stright it was and I could see miles ahead. One day I’m running down this stretch of highway when this Corvette pulls along side. We’re both running between fifty or sixty when the cat in the Corvette gives me the universal signal to roll my window down. I do and he tells me that he’s used his CB to check up ahead and the road’s clear so why don’t we have a go at it. So at sixty miles an hour and side-by-side we slap both cars into low and light the tires up.

Sixty, eighty, one hundred miles an hour and we’re still side-by-side. One ten, one twenty, my speedo’s reading one hundred and forty miles and hour! The fuckin telephone poles are going by so fast they look like a picket fence! I’m now seeing one hundred and forty-five fuckin miles an hour and starting to pull ahead when the cat in the Corvette waves at me and walks away from me like I was going backwards and shit. Just then I heard something pop and my oil pressure gauge just bottomed the fuck out. I shut everything down and limped back home but the damage was done.

"and the monkey flipped the switch"