My First Car

My first car was a white Pontiac 6000, four door, four cylinder, maroon interior. I paid $500 for it, and it sat in my front yard for almost a year while I took Driver's Ed and got my license.

Now, everyone's fond of their first car, but I have absolutely no reason to be. Every six weeks for a year, there was something new wrong with it. When my timing gear went, I was driving up a hill in the middle of nowhere, and back in 2001, not many highschoolers had cell phones. Luckily, a van passed and the people in it did have a cell phone. The computer in the car died twice; I can't remember where I was, just that when my dad tried to get the codes from it, it kept telling him that different things were wrong. It got to a point with this car that I was afraid to call my dad, it broke so much.

I got two flat tires, one of which didn't go flat until the giant screw I had run over was pulled out; then it looked like a cartoon and the air flowed out of it with a hiss. Luckily tired back then were only about $40 a piece for my car.

The alternator died, too, and that was probably the most interesting thing that died on my car. If I stopped, I stalled, and I was driving in town. The radio went wonky, if I turned my blinkers on my wipers turned on as well... Just strange, strange happenings.

Like many people, I used my ashtray for change; once, someone threw change in and a penny went into the cigarette lighter's hole, which was always empty. When I tried to turn my dome light on, the Check Engine light came on. I had to change a fuse at night in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Toward the end of its life with me, my Pontiac started stalling whenever I tried to stop or accelerate too quickly. The steering column got bad enough that until the car had been warm for an hour, I had no power steering to the right side.

I was pulled over three times in that car. Two were for speeding, one of which got me a ticket, and one was because my driver's side headlight was out. Of course, it was out because I'd somehow managed to have a rock hit it so there was a tiny hole, and moisture was getting into it. When moisture touches a halogen bulb, they tend to explode. I'd blow three lights already by the time I got pulled over, and I was let go with a warning. The funny part is that the epoxy my dad used to fix it just fell off, so I ended up using the glue that you use to stick a rearview mirror to the windshield, and that worked like a charm.

I got rid of the car when the engine started making ticking noises all the time; funny thing is, I saw it on the road more than a year later. I miss my first car.