The fenders didn’t fit, the doors didn’t close, and the trunk hung open, too. The large chrome flares that had once been on the side of the car were either hanging on by the remaining cobwebs on one side of the car, or were thrown onto the front seat. They were either pitted, broken, or peeling. I don’t think any part of the once-chromed pieces were on the car at all. From the looks of it, many stray pieces seemed to be stuffed in a box, which was then shoved in the back of the car.
After walking around the car and then putting my head through a window of the driver’s side, I saw that the interior of the car wasn’t any better. The seats were rotted away from neglect and the intense heat of the sun. The carpeting had huge, gaping holes. The dashboard was cracked and hidden beneath years of more neglect, dirt, and something that looked like an animal habitat. Heck, in the back seat of the car there was even a bird’s nest. I couldn’t tell whether the engine ran or not, but really, I didn’t think it even had one.
I looked over my shoulder at her and with a straight face I asked, “How much did you pay for it?”
“Six hundred dollars!” she replied happily, with a smile and a bounce in her step.
We all broke out in hysterics. We couldn’t help it—the car was so pathetic, the only option I could have seen for it was to be taken to a scrap yard or sold at a Pick-a-Part.
“What are you laughing at?” Her eyes changed from sheer happiness to intense, glaring anger as she looked around at us.
“Runaway,” Grant said calmly, while he walked around the trailer, trying ever so hard not to laugh, “You got suckered—six-hundred dollars was way too much to pay for this hunk of junk. Now, if you had gotten it for free… well that would be a different story.”
We were all still trying to contain ourselves—Grant literally had to put his hand over his mouth to keep his laughter in check.
She looked away from us and said, “Well, I don’t care what you bozos think—it’s going to be the best damn car you’ve ever seen after I get done with it.”
“Where on earth did you dig it out from? And why didn’t you leave it in its burial plot?” Brandon asked, with a disgusted look on his face.
He almost looked like he was staring at a dead body with the entrails spread all over. Come to think of it, I guess he was—it didn’t look like a car, or even a memory of a car. But that didn’t bother Runaway—she started in with her story anyway.
There was a sparkle in her eyes, “Well, first of all, seeing as you all can’t tell a good deal if it were to slap you in the face, the body is straight and there is no rust,” she began proudly.
“How can you tell?” Stephen asked. “The entire car looks like it’s been sitting outside since its inception.”
Runaway rolled her eyes. “Ugh, what do you know?” she countered. “Anyway, I was going to tell you about where we found it. My dad has this friend, Jim, and he lives way out in the desert… no man’s land, really, where he has about two acres. Well,” she continued. “He likes to collect things. You should see this place… it’s a junkyard and a dream come true all at the same time. He’s got a ton of stuff—everything from junky old motorcycles to playground equipment to toilets. It’s a weird place.” Her excitement was palpable.
“And this is where you found this thing? In the middle of a junkyard?” I asked, pointing to the car. “No wonder it looks like it does, especially if it was being housed with toilets.”
“Well, it fits, doesn’t it?” Stephen said, raising his eyebrows, “I mean crap goes with…” He was cut off before he could finish.
“Oh, stop!” She glared at him. “Can I finish?”
“Please,” Stephen grinned slyly. “Certainly—be my guest.” He motioned with his hand, as if he was a butler.
“To continue,” she resumed, giving Stephen a stern look and then directing her attention to all of us. “Jim also collects cars—he buys some of them, but he also gets them from people. They just ask him if they can store their cars there—he says yes, and then he never sees these guys again, half the time. Heck,” she rolled her eyes, “he even has a bus!
“So one day, this guy comes up and says to Jim that he got his name and address from another friend of his and he’s wondering if he can park this ’57 out on Jim’s property. Well, Jim is so nice, he can’t say no, so he takes the car. That was about twelve years ago. But this other guy never comes back. Apparently, the guy was the car’s original owner. He just didn’t have any place for it, so he just left the car.”
“Was it in this bad a shape when Jim first saw it twelve years ago?” Grant asked, with raised eyebrows.
“Of course, probably not as bad as now,” she said, “It’s hard to imagine the car ever looking really good except when it was first purchased because it used to be a family car, and this guy had four sons. When each of the four boys got old enough, the car became his. I guess all four boys learned how to drive in it. Anyway, as it came time for each boy to drive, they all did to the car what suited them best.
“The oldest boy raced the car on the town’s quarter-mile for money. Can you believe that? On our quarter-mile?” Her smile rippled across her face.
We just nodded in agreement, but she didn’t take notice of our response. She kept going with the story.
“Then the second eldest didn’t really do anything to the car except drive it. The third boy ripped all the really cool chrome and paraphernalia off and used the car to haul parts, junk, and anything else he could find. Then, finally, the youngest boy had the car all the way through college—he drove the hell out of it, because he would drive back and forth from his college, which was about five-hundred miles one way.
“After that, the owner brought it to Jim’s house. The car was parked and left to sit in the back yard. Then, about five years ago, the youngest boy shows up and decides to restore the car to its original condition. But he doesn’t take it home, he figures it’s easier to work on at Jim’s so he just leaves it there and stops by every now and then to do something to it. He basically stripped the rest of the parts off to have them re-chromed or replaced, but he left the rest just sitting. That’s what happened to most of the trim and tires.”
She finally stopped to take a breath. “The next thing he did was to spray paint the car various colors, to see which would look the best when he painted it. But either due to lack of interest or lack of funds, he stopped working on the car, walked away, and then left it to rot. Jim said the windows were broken due to kids throwing rocks at it, and it’s been sitting ever since. My dad had taken over one of his cars to have Jim work on it, and my dad saw it sitting out in the yard, he told me about it, so of course I made him take me. I think the Jim was glad to be rid of it, really,” she finished triumphantly.
“No kidding,” I said.
“Now, twelve years later, some adolescent girl purchases the poor thing and uproots it out of its grave,” Stephen said.
I looked at Stephen and mouthed the word “respect,” and then smiled. He didn’t bat an eye, but laughed with me instead as we thought of the car’s resurrection.
“How on earth are you ever going to fix even the body?” Brandon finally chimed in. “It’s falling apart and it looks like if you touch it, the fenders will fall off.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” She looked at us with a knowing grin, “My dad’s friend Jim is also a body and paint man. He did all my dad’s show cars.”
“Figures,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You have connections in the weirdest places.”
It didn’t matter what we thought about the car—Runaway loved it. Every time she would look at the car (which seemed like every five seconds), she got all bright eyed, as if she was imaging how she wanted to restore it. It was like a dream come true.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, we rarely saw Runaway—her garage door was always closed. When we did see the car, it was tarped and wrapped in its own cocoon, being rolled to and from the house on its car trailer. She would come out of the house breathless at times, and when we asked her how it was going, we would receive a rushed “good” in reply.
Runaway usually appeared disheveled, yet driven. She spent many a night and day locked away in her garage. She didn’t feel right about letting anyone else build her car. Her dad was pretty much a master mechanic and he would help her, but he wasn’t going to do it all. She was going to get right in there and work on it with him.
Runaway’s driven personality inspired us. We loved her vision and came to share in it. We all had been saving for a car of our own, but perhaps in the back of our minds we just thought it was a pipe dream, not something that we would actually do. Runaway forced our dreams to come true.
Each of us went about looking for something we were interested in. I even found myself staring at the Wall of Fame, just to find a car that I liked—I noticed Grant and Stephen doing the same thing. In an offhand way, we would sometimes discuss our favorite pictures. Brandon, however, never paid attention to the wall, because he had a sure thing—his dad’s old car sat nicely tucked away in the garage at their house.
What was so interesting is that Grant, Stephen and I had such wildly different tastes in cars. I never would have figured that the cars they ended up buying would have been those specific ones. I surely would have chosen something different for them. But in the end, their choices were clearly the best possible ones for each of them.
Chapter Four
After actually researching Wall of Fame for what seemed like an eternity, I finally decided on what I thought was the perfect car. What was so amazing was that it was right in front of me the entire time—I guess I just never noticed it.
From a car club at Bonita High School, there was a picture of a boy standing next to a 1968 Chevrolet Rally Sport Camaro—it was black, sleek, and beautiful. I was instantly in love.
I never really believed you could be in love with a car, or that when you saw the car of your dreams, it could be love at first sight. But man, was I wrong.
I guess what I had heard about preferences for cars was indeed true—once you saw the one that suits you best, you immediately knew. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. It was small, yet menacing, and it had gorgeous lines. From that moment, I went on a hunt to find one.
After what felt like months of looking, I found an ad in an obscure little paper under “used cars.” The ad read simply, “1968 RS Camaro, $2,500.” I told my parents and they immediately drove me out to Alta Loma, where the car was located.
Alta Loma seemed to me to be about as far to the east of us as I could have imagined because it was like another world. The drive to get there was usually taken on Baseline road even though Route 66 would have been faster—but Baseline was much more beautiful. Leaving Glendora and heading east, the landscape changed from citrus groves to vineyards, and it was amazing to see as the land just change right before your eyes. It felt like the drive was forever long, even though it was a short sixteen miles away. The north part of Alta Loma was surrounded by citrus groves, but the grape vineyards and wineries took over what was left. Alta Loma High School was in the Baseline League just as Glendora High was, but I only had heard of it through football when our team played them.
The address I had for the Camero led us to a long-forgotten home with a barn, located far north on Baseline Avenue on a street called Wilson. The house was so hidden behind large eucalyptus and pine trees that we almost missed it entirely.
Most of the homes we passed were farm or ranch houses built of rocks and boulders. The house we were looking for was set back from the street a considerable way, and only had access by way of an old dirt driveway. I wasn’t sure whether I had the correct address as we drove through citrus groves. I could tell that my parents were a bit apprehensive, as well.
When we knocked on the door, an elderly gentleman in his seventies answered the door and led us out to a barn on the back of his property.
He walked incredibly slowly, and I was getting both annoyed and irritated. I wanted to see the car, and following this guy was like following a turtle.
When we finally got to the barn, he opened the door and I caught my first glimpse of her dusty and slightly worn body. I didn’t care—I was in love, and I now knew how Runaway had felt.
“Was my wife’s, you know,” the old man said in a raspy voice. “Bought it for her new on her sixtieth birthday. She was a wild one, that girl,” he said reflectively, with a big smile on his face.
I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about his wife or the car.
“Is that right?” my dad said.
“Yeah, had some fun, we did… but she’s passed now…” His voice trailed off.
He suddenly looked at me and said. “Well, boy, you want her, or what?”
Taken by surprise and his quick questioning, I stammered, “Ye-yes sir.” I didn’t need to look at her much more—I already knew.
“Well,” he said, “Take her—hell, race her—she’s got some serious nerves under that hood.”
“Yes, sir,” I said with a smile.
It needed paint, tires, an interior, and some work done to the engine, but her body was as straight as the day it came off the assembly line. All the money I had saved over the years went into the purchase of the car, but I can tell you, it was the best purchase I ever made in my life. The old man was right; she certainly had nerves of steel under the hood.
Over the next two years, I was like Runaway, in that I spent every waking moment working on my car. I bought my Camaro when I was fourteen and I ended up pouring every penny I had into it. Anything I earned, I spent it on my car, and it was well worth it. Since both of us had been “born” the same year, I felt she was my signature car. When I finished, she was powder painted black with silver pinstriping. I put stock rally rims on it with raised white-letter tires. It had a rebuilt big-block 350—a smooth-running engine, although her whole body shook when she was in idle. It was a beautiful car, and I loved it.
About the same time that I finished my car, Runaway had also finally finished hers. Obviously, her car required more restoration than mine, so she finished hers somewhere around her sixteenth birthday—it had taken her a full three years to complete. There is, of course, a great deal of time and money involved in restoring an old car like that, especially one in such a state of disrepair. I knew she had wanted to do it right and to do the best she could. I was anxious to see it.
The day she told us it was done is forever etched in my mind. I will never forget the day she rolled it out of the garage. She had called each of us early in the morning on a Saturday and simply said, “It’s done.”
Without hesitation, I ran to her house, breathlessly waiting to see the final result. All four of us gathered on the sidewalk in front of her house. We hadn’t seen the car in years because we each were so busy working on our own. Every day had been filled with going to school and then to our after-school jobs or whatever it was we were doing to earn money. It was only on the weekends that we had enough time to work on our cars, and even then we still spent a good deal of time doing our small jobs.
We were all in a great nervous state to finally see Runaway’s ’57 Chevy.
Standing on the sidewalk, we were hanging out, making idle conversation. Stephen was telling us about the1970 Buick GS that he had just completed. He explained that it was half luxury car, half muscle car. I had never known a muscle car to come standard with power windows, seats, and air conditioning. It was so Stephen, though—half refinement and half loaded pistol. I was a little disappointed in myself that I hadn’t seen it coming. He said that after searching The Wall, he found himself grilling Mr. Thompson about which manufacturer made a muscle car that still maintained its integrity of elegance.
He told Stephen, “You want a Buick, hands down—there is no other choice.”
So a Buick it was. After doing some research, Stephen said he found that the 1970 GS was to be one the fastest and finest muscle cars that still maintained its luxury—so he bought one.
“Although,” Stephen was telling us, “Buick’s coming out with the Grand National next year, and that would have been a better option.”
“You can’t buy that!” Brandon quickly interrupted. “We said no cars newer than 1970.”
“What part of ‘I bought a 1970 Buick GS’ escaped your attention?” Stephen snapped.
“Oh,” Brandon looked around, like someone else had spoken. “Yeah, that’s right.” But switching gears, he immediately said, “What’s the big deal with a Grand National? That’s a brand-new car, right?”
“Correct.” He affirmed. “It happens to be one of the only supercharged engines on the market. However, I must admit that I prefer my GS for its stately original integrity.”
In the previous months, we had been over to his house and reveled in the splendor of his Buick. It was also black, only it had wide red pinstriping that set off the fenders and the length of the car. The original design was beautiful indeed, for it came standard with a stabilizer fin on the trunk and a tachometer actually mounted into the hood. Most tachs are located either on the dashboard of the car or even sometimes on the A-pillar of the frame, but those were usually aftermarket, in most cases. The car also came standard with two flush hood intakes, in which air was forced through insulated tunnels. All in all, this helped the car to exceed its 360 horsepower.
Stephen had also searched high and low for a set of Riviera rims, paired with the same raised white letter tires I had. They completed the look of the car. The personalized license plate read SNISTER, for “sinister.” As with all of us, he was very proud of his car. He, along with all of us, kept it garaged when not in use.
Suddenly my attention was drawn back to Runaway’s house as I saw the garage door opening. The sun created a glare that came off the white door, hitting at just the right angle. We all had to squint just to make out what we were looking at. I finally put my hand over my eyes to shield them from the sun. We couldn’t see it until it was fully out of the garage.
As the car came out of the glare, all we could see was the bright fire-engine red paint job. The next part that came into focus was every piece of chrome on the car shining with the dignity of past royalty. The front end of the car had been dumped, meaning the front end had been dropped closer to the frame than the rear end. This line changed the car visually, as the front end was now visibly lower than the rear end. Putting smaller tires in front added to the rake, or the line of the car, as the larger Goodyears in the back made a statement—all four tires had raised, white letters, which gave the car an ornery look.
I saw that Runaway had found a set of old, vintage Corvette rims, which added class to the overall look of the car. Every inch of that Chevy was polished and glassy. Nothing on the outside of the car was done any other way other than original condition.
The inside of the car was just as beautiful as the outside. The once-rotted seats were now done in tuck-and-roll red vinyl, with black piping in the center and the outside of the seats. New black carpeting replaced the insect-infested original—the door panels were done in matching two-tone red and black. Even the dashboard was painted black, with all the gauges newly re-chromed and carefully set back into place.
The only thing that Runaway added to the interior, besides a Hurst shifter for the manual transmission, was a Tach mounted beneath the radio. That made me smile.
I looked at the back of the car again and now noticed her license plate. It read, “Rnawy33.”
“What’s with the 33?” I asked.
She smiled softly, and answered, “It’s my favorite number.”
“You have a favorite number?” Grant asked clearly surprised.
“Yes,” she looked at him. “You aren’t the only one partial to favorite numbers,” she said clearly referring to his favorite football jersey number.
“So, what’s it stand for?” Brandon asked.
“Everything I guess. The first three is for my family and the next three represents all of you, and the car.”
“Huh?” I think most of us did a double take.
“Three is my favorite number,” she began to explain, “and I have four friends. If each one of you represents a three, and there are four of you, then that’s three times four which is twelve.”
I was following her so far, but I wasn’t understanding the car part.
“Then if I think about what to add to get to twelve it’s…”
Five and seven,” Stephen said. “Brilliant.”
The year of her car—cool.
Runaway clearly had put a lot of thought into what went in and on her car—and like Stephen, Runaway’s dad had an affinity for Buicks. I knew she couldn’t resist including something of her father as well—and of course, Stephen was pleased by this too. Runaway and her dad had taken out the original Chevy engine and put a Buick 454 in it instead of the original small-block V8. They had to make major changes in order to get the engine to work in the Chevy. However, once it was finished, it was awesome. The engine was blown—in other words, it had a super-charger that sat right on top of the engine, which not only gave the 454 more horsepower, it also made the engine sound like a cry, or maybe even a whine. There are quite a few moments that I think to myself, “Remember this.” That was one of those moments. I couldn’t take in enough of the car. It was incredible. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.