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Stuart Revercomb

Stuart Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.

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"Thursday's Fare"

I own a new Chevrolet Tahoe. It's big and comfortable and solid and sleek.

It is my first "new car." Up until now, my "new" ones were pretty darn old by the time I came upon them. If you added up all the mileage on the "new" vehicles I have purchased over the last 23 years you could drive around the Great Wall of China 17 times.

If you added them up AFTER I was through with them you could orbit the moon twice before returning to Earth and still have enough miles left to go to that great pizza place out past Ironto.

I've put some serious miles on some of the best used equipment to ever come out of Detroit -- and some of the worst too.

The first one was a Pontiac -- a 1972 Pontiac Ventura II to be exact. It was dark green with a cream colored vinyl interior. I inherited her from my brothers.

Try for a moment to imagine the kind of car one "inherits" from his unemployed older teenage brothers. It is not a pretty sight, is it?

And it wasn't.

She had 31 million miles on her.

We called her "Vinny."

Vinny came fully equipped with an AM radio and a pair of wipers, and as I recall, the radio had given out long before I got her. But she had one redeeming quality: she had "posi-traction", meaning that both rear wheels were capable of providing power to the road at the same time in lieu of the standard one. Which meant that at heart Vinny was a Jeep -- or so we thought. My friend, Al Watts, and I took that poor car all over the back roads and trails of Poor Mountain, blasting through snow drifts while bearded men in real Jeeps looked on incredulously. Vinny wasn't much of a car, but she was a great truck.

I cried the day we sold her. But it was time. The old man said we had to let her go. The radiator was cracked and the oil pan was leaking.

I had no idea how that happened.

Some months later I heard she had been compacted to the size of a postage stamp and sent back to Detroit for scrap. I cried again that day. It's easy to get emotional over a car when you're young.

I worked all the following summer to purchase a new set of wheels that would be fully my own, and when the manager of the warehouse where I worked offered to sell me his 1968 Chevrolet Camaro, I bit like the style-conscious, speed-loving 17-year-old I was.

Sold! -- to the man in cutoffs for $850.

I was a fool -- but I was a happy fool. The car actually looked great and with a little bit of tinkering by myself and a real mechanic from time to time, she remained reasonably road worthy. "Worthy" is, of course, a relative term. I wouldn't let my son sit in that car, much less drive it. If Ralph Nader wasn't too hip on Corvairs, be glad he never drove a '68 Camaro with 130,000 miles on it. "Unsafe While Parked" would have been the title.

She had a great stereo though, and at the time, that was what really mattered. I drove that car straight through high school and halfway through college, before I met a fool who loved her as much as I did. He wanted to trade his mom's 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Brougham straight up.

(Now there's a moniker you don't see Detroit pasting on their cars anymore - "Brougham." What the heck is a "Brougham" anyways? )

Sold! To the tall lanky dude who failed to appreciate the virtue of a his momma's Oldsmobile with the over-nursed, under-utilized, never been stomped, Rocket 350 engine complete with four-barrel carburetor.

This car was subsonic, but not by much. As long as you were traveling in a straight line there wasn't much on Earth that could catch it. If you pressed the gas fully to the floor the engine would go completely quiet for a moment as though gathering its thoughts and then with one huge gulp of air and gasoline it would go hurtling forward as if shot out of some gigantic cannon. Won a lot of "unofficial" races in that car.

Embarrassed a lot of guys in their Camaros.

But when she developed her own atmosphere, complete with rain clouds and morning fog -- even when it was bright and sunny outside -- I knew it was probably time to sell.

She went for $350 to a boy who had no car.

The $850 I had originally paid for the Camaro had kept me in an automobile for almost 10 years. That wouldn't pay the tax on the Tahoe. But I suspect my maintenance cost might turn out to be a little less.

And who knows? Maybe there's a little bit of Vinny in this thing.

I hope so.