That title says a bit, doesn’t it? First off, yes, I’m talking about automotive violence, or as I’ve heard it called throughout the years, “hot-shoe stuff”, “wheelman adventures”, or as my mother coined and as I’ve pretty much adopted, “driving like an asshole”. Somewhere between the Dukes of Hazzard dirt-road power drifts and the ditch-to-ditch bootlegger turns that would’ve impressed early NASCAR types, from my middle school years onward, I’ve been a fan of violent driving. Day to day, I can keep things civil. But give me an open onramp with nobody in sight, or a backroad that stretches for miles, or the widest intersection in no man’s land, and believe that things will go down. It’s how I was raised…the uncle who would rip from stop sign to stop sign, the stepmother who knew where the road with the rollercoaster hills were, the stepfather who allowed me to be a heathen unchecked…I learned from good people.

So how does that tie into this 1973 Chevrolet Chevelle? I first met this car sometime in the mid-1990s…it belonged to someone my stepfather was related to who worked for a car audio shop, and originally this thing was a rolling boom box. This car had bass before that was a thing. Then, sometime before the summer of 1998, my stepdad bought it to replace a hole that was left when his 1969 Chevelle left and the 1950 Chevy truck that was supposed to take it’s place turned into a sky-blue turd that loved to shed it’s front wheels at will. The ’69 was a monster…and the ’73 was mythical. I drove it once before my mid-1999 exodus, as gently as you do when you don’t trust the machine. The throttle needed half my weight to push down and it felt like the car would break loose if I tested fate. Driven quietly, it was almost like a roomier version of the Olds Omega that my mother had for years prior. Open the taps up and the world became a blur. 

Several years and some fence-mending later, I bought the car as a gift to myself while on vacation from my second deployment. The Chevelle was showing it’s age on it’s body, but the engine sure wasn’t. I can’t tell you specifics on that block, because I don’t even know what was up with it other than it was a small-block Chevy that was not a 400. Could be a 350 built to the hilt, could be the most wicked 305 I’ve ever seen. All I knew: it was geared to the moon and had the torque to back it up. If you were under 70 MPH, yanking the shifter back into first and standing on the loud pedal was an option. Do that from a dead stop and the Chevelle would announce to half of Puget Sound that things were going down. My superiors thought I was insane driving this rude, crude and socially unacceptable bit of iron to the hangar every day. My ex-wife learned fear in this car the one time she called me a pussy and told me to floor it while driving back from a friend’s house, thinking that I was full of it with all of my claims. She never did that again. She never drove that car, either.

I wish the story was good for this car, but it wasn’t. I peeled the vinyl top off like a retard and found enough rust to startle my senses. From there, it went downhill quick and by early fall of 2010, the car was sold off to assist in my move to Arizona. I have no idea what happened to it afterwards. I doubt the car lived much longer, but I hope the engine is still raising hell today.