Puff

When the ex and I first hooked up, fiscal and responsibility were two words that just never went together. He eventually ran out of money, and sold his king of the road 1965 bad boy powder blue Chevy SS with baby moon caps. A friend had an abandoned '57 Chevy that needed a little work. It was just the ticket.

A little work was a bit of an understatement. There was no front seat. A trip to the junkyard bestowed upon us two VW bucket seats in pretty good shape considering the bug had been semi-torched. Being stars in deductive reasoning, we soon realized that reason our baby had no front seat was primarily because it had no floor.

The friend was a welder, so we stole a couple of stop signs that no one ever paid any attention to and voila, a floor. We added a milk crate for a beer console, and to keep the seats from sliding together. After resolving a few minor mechanical problems, we touched her off, and we were off in a puff of black smoke. Everyone named their cars back then, and because of that smoke, Puff was born.

We ran her hard and put her away dirty, but Puff was more dependable that any of our other friends cars. Speed shifting from the column was an art more difficult than I expected, but after a lot of practice, I got it. When she decided she had enough, Puff would lock up on me. She wasn't crazy about being in second, so I usually just skipped second and depending on what gear she wanted to stay in, drove in first or third.

The side road we lived on at the beach was always the last to be plowed in the winter, so we would use Puff for a battering ram and slam our way back and forth through the snow to the house. It wasn't quite as smooth as plowing, but it was a heck of a lot more fun. Of the few casualties suffered, the worst was the new guy in the back seat who kept insisting it couldn't be done. One particularly harsh slam into a snow bank sent him from the back seat between the buckets and into the dashboard, removing his tooth.

I was bored one hot summer day, and decided to paint Puff. The ex said "Don't be stupid", and went to work. So, I stupidly found a gallon of bright green paint and some wood putty. I puttied all the holes along the doors where the trim once was, got a big paint brush and went to town slapping that almost neon paint on the old girl. The heat caused some brush mark issues, but the putty held for years, much to the ex's amazement. He did complain about me not removing the license plates, instead painting around them, but other than that, he kind of liked the fact that Puff was all one color again.

We weren't big on neatness, and all trash got tossed in the back. Eventually the seat disappeared. After a couple of years, the trash was window high. The ex, while tooling through the village one fine evening, attracted the attention of a rent-a-cop, who was conducting spot vehicle checks. The nervous officer approached cautiously and asked the ex if he would agree to a vehicle search.

The ex, enjoying this much more than he should have been, agreed. That rent-a-cop spent the better part of half an hour pushing trash and dead beer cans around in search of God knows what. Finally, a couple of town cops that the ex knew swung by, pointing and laughing, and told the rent-a-cop that the ex was a drunk, not a druggie. I guess the poor guy must have decided that was Ok, because he quickly apologized, jumped in his car and drove off. The ex was disappointed thinking he was going to get the back seat cleaned for free.

We drove her to my friend's house in Bedford for a social event. We were pretty embarrassed to drive up to her parent's elegant soiree and park Puff amongst the Caddies and Jags, but her father did things up right when he brought his diamond studded pals right over to Puff and began telling some of her stories. He had them rolling. Even the ex was "puffed up".

I'm sure most people have some fond memories of that special car. These days it might be a Corvette, or a Beamer, but I gotta tell you, Puff is still a legend around here.

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