BITCHIN CAMARO

If you could pass driver’s ed., driver’s training and manage to jump the 70 percent hurdle on the written test, there remained just one last, huge question – Camaro or Mustang? You think I’m kidding. Once you’re handed that temporary, photoless piece of paper, you are totally flooring it. At least I did. That license to drive was really a license to let your dick fly for the first time. And in the city of Sepulveda, host community to a weirdly legendary weekly drag race on Lassen Avenue, it was the car that made the adolescent.

From a socio-economic perspective, it made complete sense. Sepulveda was not the kind of place where kids inherited Dad’s Pinto or ’73 Chevy Nova, or, shudder, the family Olds with a puffy vinyl roof. Sure, some kids wound up with family cars, but they took those keys with great reluctance. Then again, they probably didn’t work. The rest of us took shit jobs – busboy, shoe salesman, donut maker, irregular t-shirts-at-swapmeets vendor – and saved our singles and fives, trying to calculate how many $3.10 an hour minimum-wage hours were required for that sweet ride.

I was among the last of my friends to get a license; a September birthday is really messed up when you’re 15. I had to spend a whole summer bumming rides and traveling via bicycle and RTD, which, as we all know, is only acceptable, until you’re, like, 12. I did, however, have $1,200 burning a hole in my pocket, thanks to many months of work re-stocking sheets and curtains at my uncle’s linen store at the Northridge Fashion Center.

Now I had to choose what to buy. Most of my friends were Mustang guys. A few of them were even Mustang thieves, having not-quite-perfected the act of grand theft auto. They were, however, righteous car stereo stealers. The parking lots of the Forum or Santa Monica Civic were particularly fruitful spots. With thousands of unattended cars at their fingertips, they never left empty-handed.

By 1980, though, it was conventional wisdom that the mid-60s Mustang was a “classic,” while the early Camaro, not so much. But I was a Camaro guy. I came from a General Motors family. Each of my three dads swore by the automaker. Our driveway and/or lawn was always filled with an assorted vintage of Chevys and Buicks.

So a Camaro it was. I found a ’68 in Simi Valley and that was that. Sold. It was, as they say, stock as a rock. It ran like shit and had zero guts – it had a 6-cylinder, 235 engine, white with light green interior. It only lasted two years before I abandoned it for a 1976 Honda Civic (what can I say? I was starting college). At the time, I was happy to see it go.

Yet I was too young and dumb to appreciate the Camaro’s significance until much later. To be able to describe it as my first car with pride rather than irony. To this day, that Camaro still remains in my dreams, usually sitting in my garage as a second car. And it always runs better in my dreams than it did in real life. I embrace the Camaro and the suburban majesty it represents. It defines me in some sick trashy way.

Which leads me to my next sick revelation: I want a 2010 Camaro. They’re beautiful, sweet, badass, and [insert some obscure 20th century slang here]. Luckily, so many factors conspire against me. The first, and most obvious, is that it screams “mid-life crisis.” Before I know it, I'll be wearing Hawaiian shirts and pucca shells, and parting my hair in the middle (oops, I can't do that). Part of me thinks, so what. Fuck ‘em. But I possess a big helping of the self-consciousness gene, so this red flag would probably be enough to keep me in my Prius.

That’s another thing – the idea of trading in a Prius for a Camaro is just so perverse. I would surely go to hell for this. Yet, deliciously, that’s exactly the reason to do it. Of course, there’s the whole GM bankruptcy. That’s a potential problem. And of course, the additional financial burden would definitely not be a good thing. I don’t think I’d approve of my Pro and Con list. But if I had 25 grand lying around….

Better get back to that Big Score. I figure if I cash in, I can get a Camaro (but not with a V8; that wouldn’t be sensible), and then it’s only nine years or so before my son gets his license. At which time, I can hand it over to him. By then, hopefully, we’d be out of the Valley. A Camaro in the Valley in 2018 might be such a cliché by then.