Funny Car Stories

 For some reason, when I think back on some of the funniest happenings in our family, they have to do with cars. I will share some of them now.

The time Chubby dropped a bomb on us, baby. Dropped a bomb on us!

I've mentioned that our family has traveled the Alaskan-Canada (AlCan) Highway a lot. Well, one of those times was when my older brother, Chubby flew from Alaska to Arizona to drive my mom, sister, and some of the kids back up to Anchorage. They'd be coming back in a newly leased Honda Accord that the ladies weren't used to yet. (You'll understand later why we had a hard time getting used to new cars.)

Where it could take my sister and me a week or more to get just from Anchorage to Seattle, Chubby could get from Arizona to Anchorage in the same amount of time.  And I guess he was making good time, as usual, but he did need to stop for naps.

On one of these naps, he just pulled over into the breakdown lane, ate some of the packed sandwiches and things from the cooler, and ratcheted back in the seat to snooze for a bit. My mom in the front passenger seat and my sister in the seat behind mom's also dozed off. Until they were awakened by something awful and mysterious that was (as my sister later put it) coating the inside of her nose and gagging her awake.

It only took a couple of seconds before both women realized that they were not under attack by military-grade stink bombs. The stink was coming from Chubby as he happily continued snoozing.

My sister said that she hadn't seen our mom move so fast in years. Once she had snatched off her shoe and boomeranged it against one of the kids' heads when they let slip a cuss word. Mr. Murphy knows what I'm talking about...

(Excusing the language, that is one of the funniest and most relatable - for me - bits of comedy.)

Apparently, both women looked like keystone cops trying to get their car doors open. But the doors were locked. They looked for the manual locks and couldn't find them.  When they did find the locks, the doors wouldn't open. 

My sister swears that, if anyone had driven past the car at that point, they'd have sworn there were kidnapped women trying to escape.

As if the first stink bomb wasn't bad enough, Chubby let loose another one - a silent one that my sister claims she could see. It reminded her of the twisting smoky green clouds used in cartoons to indicate reeking garbage.

That did it for mom. She reached over and started swatting Chubby upside the head and yelling for him to "Open the damn doors before we die in here!"

Chubby came awake, ducking mom's hand, and realized what was happening. He quickly released the master lock from the driver's side door and laughed himself to tears watching mom and my sister practically fall out of the car.

The car had to be left open to air out before Mom would even go near it again. I bet they didn't feed Chub any more bologna sandwiches.

The car and the fishing rod

Okay, this one is hard to explain because I can't remember now how the fishing rod worked. But...

We never had new cars back in the day. Our used cars weren't usually too bad but we had a couple of rough ones. One of them - I think it was a Dodge something or a Gremlin that played lead in another of my stories - would only start if we used a kid or a fishing rod. Let me explain that.

If one of the kids was around, we would open the hood and get into the driver's seat, ready to turn the ignition on the count of three. We had to time the ignition turning with the pushing down of something under the hood. (I wish I could remember the details.)

We had to keep a fishing rod in the backseat because we didn't always have a kid or someone else with us. It took coordination and a spectacular lack of public shame to hook the line on the fishing rod to whatever that part was under the hood while we got in the driver's seat and started the car.

I was young and extremely vain. There were times I would put off going somewhere because I just couldn't deal with the public humiliation of starting that car. And I wanted to be mad about it. But my mom reminded me that we were three single women who owned a nice home and were able to feed and clothe our kids with no help. And if that didn't buck me up, Mom would throw in one of her favorite sayings about a "Po' ride beating a proud walk any day." Yeah.

When all you can do is laugh

That Dodge-or-Gremlin from the last story comes up often when we family members tell funny stories. This one happened to me and my sister one day when we were having a girls' day out.

A "girls' day out" for us back then was to hit the mall, maybe buy some shoes or a purse, or something for our hair. We'd sit somewhere to people-watch while my sister cracked on passersby, keeping a perfectly straight face while I would be in danger of getting my butt kicked by some of those passersby. She was never mean about it - well, not super mean. She'd maybe see some really crazy-looking guy walk by and tell me to "go get my man before I lost him". That kind of silly thing. All the humor was in her delivery.

After we finished hanging out, we might grab something to eat. Then we'd go home. On this one day, we had gone to a salon that belonged to a really close girlfriend. She had done up our hair really cute. We looked too good to go straight home, so we did the mall thing and then started home.

Now, remember, I was really, really vain back in the day. I thought I was just too cute and I know that my sister was really pretty. So I am driving that thing we called a car - got it started and everything... On the way home, I was stopped at a light when another car pulled up alongside us. A car full of some young handsome guys. Too young for us, but still really handsome. And they were hurting themselves looking over and flirting with us. Made us feel good but we did the whole "not paying attention to these silly little boys over here" and ignored them.

The light changed and the thing we called a car, did something new. It sort of hitched, as if it was going to die and it didn't move forward. Puzzled, I pushed down a little more on the accelerator and 

BANG!!!

I was sure that someone had hit us with a missile. Not only was that bang deafening, but there was this absolutely humongous cloud of black smoke that had burst from the tailpipe and obscured everything behind us. Cars behind us started moving quickly into other lanes. 

But the car was at least moving. Slowly. We went about five feet before the car got over its hissy fit and drove normally. 

In the meantime...

The cute young guys paced alongside us for the next couple of blocks before they turned in a different direction. I'm surprised they didn't run into something. They were laughing so hard that one of them just slumped against the window and slapped the front seat in amused agitation. 

I was so embarrassed. But my sister found it really funny. She ended up laughing harder than those silly boys. 

Then when we did get a nice car...

I can't remember what year it was that we got my favorite car ever. One of my older brothers found it for us - another lease - and I was in love from the first time I saw it. It wasn't brand new but it didn't need any special talents to start it up or to drive it. It was a smoky black 1992 Honda Accord with a sunroof and a great stereo system. It is still my favorite model of car. 

My brothers had just had it with our used junkers. They lived in places like Seattle, California, and Arizona while we lived in Alaska. They worried about us driving around with the kids in raggedy automobiles in a place that had snow and ice-coated roads for much of the year. So we accepted the help and got that Honda.

It was a good time for us to have a more reliable car. I worked at a hub near the airport and I was going to work the night shift for a while. The boys felt better that I'd be making the drive out to the airport in a car that was safe and very reliable. I mostly liked being able to play the stereo and use the wipers at the same time with no issues. And, don't forget, I thought was SO cute.

So on one winter evening, I am on my way to work. It's around 7pm and it's pitch black. In the winter, "pitch-black" started at about 4 in the afternoon. Because, you know, Alaska. 

Another thing that was great about the Honda was that it sat low and got great traction on slick roads. That's important. 

I was at the final stoplight on the roadway before starting the last stretch to the airport. I have maybe 3 miles to go when I stop at this last light. I'm sitting there, just grooving along to - I don't know, probably Earth, Wind, and Fire or something "old school cool". There has not been a lot of traffic and I think I'd only seen three or four cars on my way to this last light. All of them had exited off except for one. I see it come up behind me and then move to the other lane and stop on my driver's side.

I say that I "see" all of this but I really wasn't paying a lot of attention. I was listening to music and already thinking about work stuff. Because I work in an airport-type setting - a lot of offices connected to a big hangar - and because I'm on the night shift, I am dressed casually in jeans and a company shirt. I have my hair slicked back in a little bun and I have a baseball cap on. 

As I am sitting at this light with no other traffic but that one car next to me, I get that feeling of being stared at. I kind of casually turn my head to look at the other car and my heart just about thuds right out of my chest. The driver - who I can tell is a big guy and probably really tall - was looking at me and when I turned my head, he raised his finger and motioned firing a gun at me.

What???

I turn back to look at the light and am even thinking of running it when it goes green. I hit the gas and stood that Honda up all the way to work. And it didn't skid, slide, or act any kind of a fool. I didn't even look to see if I was being followed. 

One of the benefits of working at the airport is that there is always security. And this was post-9/11 so airports had security like crazy. We damn near had snipers on the roof.

I didn't even go to a parking space. I pulled up in front of the entrance where the security guards could see me. And then I couldn't move. My legs were just shaking and I knew I wouldn't be able to stand. One of the guards came out to check on me and ended up parking my car while another guard helped me inside. 

I was shook. Literally.

Anyway, I have a lot of brothers - play and real - who asked around town about the guy and car I described. Turns out that there was a drug dealer, badass in town who was mad at someone who drove a smoky black 1992 Honda Accord with a sunroof. One of my guys saw the other Accord and said that the only difference was that mine still had its California plates. 

I went out and got some kind of big, bright-colored radio station sticker for the back window and bought some things to hang from the mirror. Anything to make our car look more distinctive. 

Yeah.

But we weren't walking

Looking back now, I can laugh. Matter of fact, some of our best times as a family is spent laughing about the horrible cars we drove. And I only told about some of them. I didn't mention what I drove for a few months while waiting for my family to follow me from Arizona back to Alaska. It was some Toyota (I think) or something that I bought for a couple hundred dollars. I only needed something to get around in before the family arrived with our newer car. This temporary ride was laughable. There were no keys to it. They weren't needed. I had to use a paperclip and a bobby pin to turn the ignition. Right after I got it, it started conking out on me at stoplights. One of my brothers had a friend who owned a gas station and he told me to bring it by for him to check it out. When I did, it took him and his crew a minute to stop laughing. He wanted to give me one of his cars to use. But my mom raised me to be tougher than that. I just asked if he could do something so it wouldn't shut off at lights. He did something alright. The car didn't shut off at lights anymore because it constantly revved high. Oh well. I got my money's worth before I finally gave it to someone else who needed a car.

Another junker we had would frost up on the inside. We had to use a scraper to clear the frost from the inside windshield every now and then. Yet another beauty had a bungee cord holding the passenger door closed. It was fun to get in and out of. 

We had an old Audi once that stopped on me halfway to work. I spent half an hour on the side of the road while some helpful passerby tried to find the battery to give me a jump. We didn't find out for another half hour that the battery was located under the back seat.

I didn't know how to act once we got that Honda. It was almost too boring. The next car we got was an even newer Accord. Then we got the Ford Explorer. New. 

But I never forgot my mom's saying about poor rides and proud walks. I have since ridden in Hummers, concept cars, limos, sports cars... They all do the same thing: get you from one point to another. I'm blessed that I was never without a vehicle back then. I'm just plain blessed.

Peace

--Free