The Adventures of Louie

I had a rather nostalgic moment during my commute to the suburbs yesterday afternoon. The heat and the traffic were finally getting to me as I approached the turn onto Santa Fe Drive when, the black car that had been following me down Broadway for the last couple of miles, pulled up beside me into the turning lane. The name and logo of the long horn steer on the side of the car immediately caught my attention: it was a Maverick.

My very first car was a red, 1970 Ford Maverick. My parents originally bought the car for Jenn for Christmas when she turned 16. Even though it was technically Jenn’s car, it was understood that the car would be passed on to Abbey and me when we too became old enough to drive. In quintessential small town fashion, my parents had purchased it from a man whose daughter I was an Oompa-Loompa with in summer theater years before. He was the second owner of the car and we were the third. The original and only other owner of the car was a man by the name of Louie (someone who my parents were also familiar with). Louie had taken very good care of his car and obviously took great pride in it. The body was in great shape, the interior also in great condition and the dash cover (that matched the maroon interior of the car) even had "Louie" embroidered into it in fancy script.

Built like a tank, it was the perfect high school car. Sure, it had its quirks (Trout, you think my car now has issues, you should have met Louie), but looking back I really did love that car. The gas gauge only registered to half full, and as a result, I had to calculate gas mileage to figure out when I needed to fill the tank. The car took leaded gas and within the first couple months that we owned the car (before I was driving) leaded gas was discontinued. Every once in a while we had to put additive in the gas tank to make up for this. The seat belts were primatively adjustable. The lap and shoulder belts each buckled in the middle and could be adjusted very minimally for a person’s size . The passenger side barely adjusted and left little room for that seat’s occupant to move. Oil had to be added every two or three weeks, brake fluid about every two months. There was no passenger side mirror, the car just didn’t come with one. We eventually replaced the AM radio with an AM/FM tuner and tape player (major upgrade), but on really cold days, the tape player was slow and cold. The Dixie Chicks and Sarah McLachlan were baritones or basses until the car warmed up.

There was an art to starting the car. It involved reaching through the gi-normous steering wheeling, pulling back slightly on the gear shift, turning the key and pumping the accelerator (no fuel injection on that car!). Abbey never could get the whole process figured out (and was one of the reasons she drove the car the least out of all three of us). For awhile, the passenger side door automatically locked, and I think before we fixed that problem, for some reason the driver side door wouldn’t open from the outside. This problem was quickly fixed, but I’m pretty sure there was a week or two when everyone had to climb in through the passenger side door. Say it with me, people…Class-y!

The body of the car took some hits while it was in our possession. During my year and a half stint as a waitress at Ole’s Pizza and Spaghetti House, one of my fellow employees backed into my car and then was nice enough to drive off and not let me know it was hit. I still remember heading out to my car around midnight, after a particularly long shift, smelling of fried foods, pizza and salad dressing, seeing a very large dent in my car, just in front of the driver’s side door, promptly turning around, walking back into the kitchen, completely livid, and saying to the remaining cooks and my boss who were still cleaning up (avert your eyes, Mom and Dad), “Who the fuck hit my car?!?” It was one of the only times I dropped the f-bomb at work, and certainly the only time I did so in front of my boss. The large dent only allowed the driver’s side door to open about a quarter of what it used to. Eventually, the dent was beaten out by my Dad with the help of some 2X4s and a rubber mallet.

In order to avoid plowing through a line of a Mother duck and her babies, I hit the brakes a little too hard on a dirt road, over corrected and ran through a barbed wire fence…an interesting spiraling design ended up on the hood from the wire. No ducks were hurt and the fence was repaired.

In high school, Abbey and I played in our community college’s band and had to attend rehearsals every Wednesday night during the school year. On two, count them two, different occasions, on the way to practice, a large buck deer came barreling out from the shoulders of the highway (one from the passenger side, on from the driver side) and actually hit the car. I kid you not, we did not hit the deer, they hit us. Thankfully, both times the deer lived and the car only suffered minor scratches.

The car took us to proms and school dances, parties, jobs, graduations, school functions, to the lake (but never the mountains) and weekends with friends. Sure, the car rarely went outside a thirty mile radius from home, but we somehow managed to put 30,000 more miles onto it. However, perhaps the greatest story I have about the car is Louie’s last adventure.

During the summer before my sophomore year of college and having spent my entire freshman year without a car (Louie just wouldn’t have made the 4 ½ hour trek to L-town and back), I knew I needed a car. By the middle of the summer, after spending a day in Billings car shopping, I had a new (to me) car. Abbey didn’t like driving Louie, and we had both been sharing my Dad’s old F-150 to get around. Sadly, Louie’s use had run its course and we couldn’t have five cars sitting in our driveway. I worked at the front desk of the Best Western that summer, a job that has led me to despise hotels, but that a subject for a whole other post. Because very few local high school or college age students want to spend their summers cleaning hotel rooms, the hotel hired international students every summer to work as housekeepers. This particular summer we had a group of Turkish guys working at the hotel. They had international driver’s licenses, could obtain insurance, but had no car. Well, I had an answer to their problem. For a very small amount of money, the four pooled their paychecks and bought Louie from us. I left for college soon after that, and upon my first couple of trips home people I would see around town would ask if I had sold my car. When I told them that I had, their response was usually something like “Oh, that’s what I thought…I saw a group of men driving it through the Wal*Mart parking lot the other day and thought, well that’s not Kathryn.” So once the stories died down, I didn’t think about Louie much.

That next summer I worked at the hotel, again. I worked with almost the exact same group of people and had the same boss. One day, Bob was helping out at the desk and he asked if I had heard what had happened to my car. A little worried it had met a violent and fiery end, I told him I hadn’t heard the story. Louie’s greatest adventure goes something like this: The Turk whose name the car was purchased under had apparently run away from home, was living and working in the US illegally and unbeknownst to the rest of his family. The INS eventually came to the hotel and the poor guy was bounced around the country to various immigration centers until he was eventually deported back to Turkey. The three remaining Turks, after they had finished their housekeeping commitment, took the car and drove it to California. My little car, that hadn’t gone farther than 30 miles from home somehow, someway, made it to the west coast. I don’t know what happened to Louie once he got to California, maybe I’ll see him in a movie someday. I think Julieanne Moore drives a red Maverick in Bennie and Joon, but that was long before his trip…but hey it could happen.

So now, every so often I see a Maverick (but I have yet to see another red one), and a little bit of me misses those late nights driving home from summer jobs or racing home to make curfew.

Here’s to you, Louie, wherever you are.