I spent the summer of 2012 lifting cheap plastic weights in our double-wide trailer, flexing in front of the mirror, and anxiously counting down the days until I turned 16. A July baby, I had spent the preceding school year sick with envy as my friends got their licenses, started disappearing from the buses, fighting for the best spot in the parking lot to show off their wheels.
My father fancied himself a “car guy”, and took me to shop for a car at the start of the summer. It didn’t take long; I knew exactly what I wanted as soon as I saw it.
I was cautioned by everyone, perhaps my mother the most, not to buy the vehicle. It was an obnoxiously bright orange, with black racing stripes on the hood and sides. The stock V6 engine had been upgraded with a big shiny 302 cubic inch V8. I’m told that’s a lot. It got less than twenty miles a gallon. It didn’t have power windows or power steering. It didn’t have automatic seatbelts and I’m not sure it had airbags. It was a 1972 Ford Maverick, and was exactly thirty years old when I bought it.
When it was hot outside, I had to wrap a rag over the black plastic on the steering wheel or I’d burn my hand. It had bucket seats in the front, with no console between them, and a wide bench seat in the back, just big enough for a pubescent boy and his high-school sweetheart. The gas tank was underneath the trunk, and anything you put in there would come out smelling like gasoline. I kept a sleeping bag rolled up in there in case it broke down, along with some jumper cables, water bottles, and a frisbee. The hood of the car was held on with chrome pins, which of course complemented the chrome bumper, fender, rims. It was hot and shiny and loud.
It was fun to drive, in a masochistic way. The oversized engine and steel paneling meant the whole vehicle shivered and shook like a rabid dog. The lack of power steering wasn’t even noticeable once you got going fast enough. Any sort of parking would geletanize my arms though, and the suspension was so bouncy I could name the potholes on my usual routes. I think the bumpy dirt roads that I tore down to get home may have rattled my brain loose.
If you do not fancy yourself a “car guy”, you may not have heard of the Ford Maverick. It didn’t really catch on the way the other “classics” have. It looks a bit like the Mustang’s unpopular little brother. It was a sports car, kinda. The stock engine wasn’t anything to brag about, and it had an automatic transmission, which was just starting to become popular when the Maverick was released. There was an upgraded version, called the Grabber, which had a sleeker body and bigger engine. The Grabbers, if you can find them now, have amassed a bit of a cult following because of their quirkiness and potential for modification. The non-Grabber Mavericks have been mostly forgotten and are not typically as sought after.
Despite driving a car that was so figuratively and literally loud, I was still as quiet and socially anxious as I am today. Probably more-so. It got lots of attention, more than I did. I’d park nearly next to the door of our small school. I showed it to anyone and everyone. It was the closest I ever came to being popular. It was gratifying to have something so cool it would make me cool by association. It was nice to be on the giving end of envy for a change. This phase lasted for about a month. Eventually the transient friends transited, and people realized that the weird kid was still weird even with a cool car.
I believed at the time that my Maverick was one of those special Grabbers. It had been painted to look like one, it had a 302 just like they did. It was not a mediocre compact sedan, it was a vintage classic. It was a muscle-car, it ate smaller cars for breakfast. I learned much later that it was in fact not a Grabber, and had only been dressed up as one. Whoever had it before me attempted to pass it off as something much more valuable. I had thought I had found gold at the used-car lot. What I really found was a mediocre lemon disguised as something special.
One time, my best friend Jose and I took the car up to the city to see a movie, The Avengers, with a group of similarly nerdy friends. My brother had helped me replace the original radio with a new fancy one and put new speakers in. With no AC, Jose and I treated all the world to our sophisticated musical selections. We drove for about an hour to reach the theater. My phone died during the movie, which was a problem since I used the GPS to get everywhere. It was okay though, Jose assured me he knew the way home.
We took a wrong turn getting onto Interstate 74. We drove for about an hour, but it wasn’t until we started seeing mountains that we realized we may not be headed in the right direction. It was also around this time I ran out of gas. I’d like to attribute it to chaos theory, but it was probably just poor teenage planning. We pulled, literally sputtering, into a gas station in Saluda. I might have been humbled by this, but on the other side of the pump was a car full of cute girls. We waved, they giggled. Jose wanted to ask for their numbers but I was too scared. As they were walking into the gas station, I realized I did not have any cash on me to pay for gas.
The first time I washed the car myself, I used a brush that was intended only for tires on the body of the car, and scratched the paint. One time I removed the pin clips that held the hood on so I could check the oil. The next day I had a mild heart attack when the hood flew up in my face while I was on the way to school. The corners of the hood were bent in the process.
After a while I started to feel like a cliche. I was a dork who bought a fancy car so I could be one of the cool kids. It’s like I had never seen a sit-com. I don’t know which hole I was plugging exactly, but it wasn’t holding. I felt pretty lame for having a midlife crisis at sixteen.
The first time it broke down was due to a frayed throttle cable. It’s a simple fix, just replacing a threaded metal cable that connects the gas pedal to the engine’s throttle plate. Nevertheless, it scared the shit out of me when I was driving and the gas pedal went limp. I replaced it with a fancy steel one that ate up half of my minimum-wage part-time check.
In the year before I sold it, it broke down about four more times. I walked to work when I could, called out when I couldn’t. I noticed it was using more and more gas. I shrugged it off; I had bigger problems on my mind. One day, I stepped into the driveway only to see a puddle beneath the car. The metal gas tank had rusted through. I couldn’t afford to fix it, and I couldn’t work without it. I had to sell it.
Jose and I made it home safely that night. We paid for gas with a bucket of change I had in the car. The girls saw. They laughed, and then laughed again when the now gas-starved car stalled out in the parking lot. We got back home around midnight. He got an earful from his parents for being home so late. My mom was at work and my dad had recently left now that the last of the kids was out of the nest.
The Maverick made me feel cool. It also made me feel like a fuck-up and a wannabe. It made me feel like a poser when around the real “car guys” when they asked me questions I couldn’t answer. It made me feel spoiled, even though I made the payments myself. It went from 0-60 in a sluggish 8.7 seconds which, it turns out, is not quite fast enough to outrun feelings of inadequacy.
I met my high school sweet-heart my senior year, a year before I sold the car. I took her everywhere I could in the car. If she minded all the annoying quirks about it, she never mentioned it. When I took her home, she would direct me through the country roads that led to her house. We missed a lot of turns and took a lot of back ways. We’d talk and laugh over the snarling engine. I’d kiss her with one eye open for lurking deer, crawling down the dark roads along as slow as possible. Not having a console between us, she could lean over and put her head on my shoulder. On long trips she would even fall asleep like that, or with her head in my lap. She’d look up at me and smile and I would try not to wreck.
When I sold the Maverick, I was glad to be rid of it. It had been a headache to maintain, and I felt embarrassed to have driven such an obnoxious car. I sold it to a sixteen-year-old who was just as taken with it as I had been. He was so excited to have it, he had a lot of big plans for how he was going to fix it up and improve it after the two years of abuse I gave it. He knew a lot more about fixing up cars than I did. I thought about warning him, but then I remembered the warnings I had been given.
It’s been about a decade now since I first saw it. Most of that decade since I have spent driving a Prius. It got great gas mileage. The girl I used to drive around is now my wife. We reminisce often about that damn Maverick, and how we wish I had never sold it. I have another car that’s shiny and loud now. It’s brand new in fact, and I have yet to find anything malfunctioning on it. But it’s not the same.
When I think back to seeing it for the first time and sitting in it and falling in love with it, hearing no reason and taking no counsel, I can finally admit that I never bought it to please anyone but myself. It brought me joy before I subjected it to my desire for other peoples validation.
I still keep track of it, googling the VIN number every once in a while. It’s easier than I thought it would be to find. I’ve seen it for sale in various states, being resold by what I assume are collectors and flippers. The guy I sold it to did fix it up quite a bit, as have the subsequent owners. He fixed the bent up corners on the hood. I wonder if he found a way to keep the trunk from smelling like gasoline. It’s still not a real Grabber, but it’s looking pretty beautiful. Part of me hopes I can buy it back someday if I can. Part of me thinks it’s in better hands. I just hope whoever has it finds at least a much happiness as I did with it.
Jason is an amateur writer studying English at the University of South Carolina. When he's not writing or reading he enjoys playing tabletop role-playing games and watching horror movies with his wife Sydney and their two cats.