Pinto: Till Death Do Us Part

My first car was a fire-engine red 1987 Chevrolet Cavalier Z24 with over 200,000 miles on the odometer. I bought it for $200 in 2002, and it was clearly at the end of its life. It had a hole where the stereo used to be, and the LED instrument panel would often flicker in and out, which could be terrifying indeed when I couldn’t figure out how fast I was going. I gave it a number of different names, with the only one that stuck being Pinto.

I drove Pinto to high school every day of my senior year, picking up a friend on the way and dropping him off on the way home. People made fun of it, called it old and busted, but I liked the somewhat-unreliable instrument panel — it looked futuristic to my young eyes, and it dovetailed well with my then-obsession with eighties rock music and the fact that it handled more like a go-kart than anything else. It was just fun to drive, and that, more than anything, is why I loved that car.

Of course, it couldn’t last. Given the price and mileage, it was only a matter of time, and during the third oil change I performed on the car, the oil came out with white globs in it. My stomach turned when I found out that this was an indication that antifreeze was mixing with oil in the engine. This was a very bad sign, and I was told that repairs would cost more than what I paid for the car. I resolved to drive it until its death.

It started making noise shortly thereafter; the engine roaring and chugging, the idle varying widely. Sometimes, the engine just stopped. This once happened in the middle of an intersection while I was making a left turn; thankfully, the driver of the vehicle that was hurtling toward me toward me had the decency to stop, and just honked at me until I got Pinto started again and pulled over.

But that wasn’t the end. The end was on a cold winter night when the engine started smoking. There was no place to park and I had to keep driving until I got home. When I finally turned it off, it smoked for a long time. The next morning, it didn’t start again. And that was the last of Pinto, my first and favorite car.