1981 Dodge Charger

This was my first car. I can’t believe my Dad bought it for me.

He tried to teach me how to drive using his maroon and black Plymouth Turismo, which is a very similar looking car, but that was a manual shift transmission and I had not yet mastered that art.

If you look on the back you can see several stickers including:

– One VT parking permit
– One VT sticker
– One University of Toronto sticker below it. (The week after I graduated high school, me and two high school chums drove to Canada because we heard you could drink beer legally at 18.)
– Two Godwin H.S. parking permits
– Vanity license plate that read “J-BE-GD” for Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” one of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar and the song Marty McFly plays at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance in “Back To The Future.”
– A black and white WYSP bumper sticker. (This was a “classic rock” radio station in Philadelphia that I used to listen when I lived there. Even then I was trying to show off my indie cred.)
– A red and white Godwin H.S. bumper sticker. Mortifying now that I think of showing so much school pride.

The car served me O.K. from about 1986 to 1989. I crashed into a truck on an icy night coming back from Anne’s house near Byrd Middle School and banged up the front right side, then my parents announced they were going to California for a trip and the house would be unoccupied.

I’d never been able to have a house party in high school because they were always around, and I thought this was finally my chance.

So, I left Blacksburg and made the three hour drive going 80+ and the car shimmying the entire time. I met up with some friends and we started partying and I passed out on a couch in their apartment.

The next morning I woke up and my car was gone.

In the days before cellular telephones, it took me a while to figure out what happened.

After I’d parked the car in the apartment parking lot, the engine caught fire and totaled the car. Completely.

The fire department came out and put out the fire, ran the plates, and had it towed to my parent’s house where my younger brother was staying. He saw the burnt out hulk of my car and assumed the worst, so he called my parents in California and told them he thought I was dead. Meanwhile, I was passed out drunk on a friend’s couch.

This was the same weekend where I decked Brother #1 waiting for a ride to take me back to Blacksburg.