Captainkirk's Duster project

School daze......
The boredom and loneliness was rapidly replaced with a whirlwind of frantic activity come Monday. Classes began, and we started off swimming in the deep end right from the get-go. I met my roommate; I'll call him "Al". Al was a rather out-of-shape, dumpy individual with more pimples than a prom dance. He rather resembled a pizza perched on top of a giant ground sloth. He was not the sharpest tool in the shed; in fact, you'd be hard-pressed to draw blood with this guy! His level of intelligence was fitting with the ground sloth image as well; more on this later. He was a nice guy and all, but.....
I gave him half the MH; I took the other half (with the "master bedroom"....if there IS such a thing in a MH!) First come, first served, right? I was there first so I got dibs. $200.00 a month rent; we split it down the middle. Of course, neither of us had a job, so it didn't mean diddly squat anyway. I'd payed my 1st month's rent and the security deposit, so he owed me a hundred bucks. That gave me about 30 days to find a job.
School was tough. Eight hours a day, half classroom and the other half shop. Homework every night. Every Friday was "quiz day"....where everything you had learned that week was put to the test. Each section was either 2 or 4 weeks long, with a final exam at the end of each section. You needed a 70% or better on both the quizzes and test to move on to the next section, or you were doomed to repeat it. This put an enormous amount of pressure on all of us; Fridays became the do-or-die day for all of us, especially on the Big Test Friday.
Naturally, this made me want to run out and find a job to fill my nano-seconds of not having something to do, but my little 340 was a thirsty little bugger and my bank account was dwindling fast, so reluctantly I started looking.
Within the first week of class I hooked up with a bunch of car guys. One of them was rooming in the spare bedroom of a little old lady with lots of house rules that he didn't think a hell of a lot of, and bunking on our sofa sounded better to him than abiding by the rules (such as; light out by 10:00pm, no music, etc). Splitting the rent three ways sounded OK to us as well. I'll call this guy "Dave". Dave was nuts; no two ways about it. He drove a nice old aqua-green '68 Impala that had no rust or anything, 327 2bbl. Al bought himself a car as well; it was a big old 4-door boat; a Chevy Caprice, I think. Sometimes we'd all leave for school at the same time; we'd be jinking and feinting on that 4-lane ribbon of concrete; then I'd get bored with it and wail on the little motor and it was like, "See ya!"
I found a job first; some dinky little grocery store. My impression of the manager was immediately that he was a bitter little toad that hated life and the fact that he was managing a grocery store staffed by youthful kids that had no intentions of making the same mistake. He barked out orders like Hitler's little love child and I took an immediate dislike to him. But a job was a job, and I kept my mouth shut and my opinions to myself.
If memory served me correctly, I started work on a Wednesday evening; after school. The store closed at nine, by the time we cleaned up and closed it was ten; do the math! That left about 2 hours to drive home, shove something in the ol' pie-hole, and hit the books with a vengeance. I worked Wednesday, Thursday and Friday; I'd done well on the quiz Friday, and after work that evening, Dave, Al and I decided to have a few beers and relax......I had to work Saturday as well.
Except Dave had been busy drinking most of the beers while I was working (which sorta pissed me off, since I'd bought it) but hey, what're roomies for, if not to take your stuff? So after a couple beers, I realized we were on "empty" and I volunteered to light off the rocket and orbit myself down to the U-Totem and pick up another 12. Now, the U-Totem was on Pine, down the street from the school, which was several miles away. This left me no option but to romp on it, as the traffic at 10:00 was non-existant. What a cruise! It was late September, the damp, cool night air felt good for the soul, the car was running like a raped ape; what more could one want? I made the U-Totem in record time, picked up a twelve of the nasty 3.2 swill that Okies passed off as beer in convenience stores (you could only buy "real" beer (5%) in "drinking establishments" or liquor stores) and headed home, Jeff Beck doin' the Freeway Jam from the back seat. The little minx was teasing me again, taunting me to drop the hammer. I didn't need to be coaxed. I turned left onto Mingo and let the horses run free!
And run they did, probably leaving a good 6 feet of rubber hoofprints in their wake. I throttled 'er back about 65 and leaned back in the seat, my left hand loosely gripping the wheel, and my right palm draped over the trembling Hurst, my fingers feeling where the suede had worn through to the cool metal underneath. This was not a car, this was a living, breathing thing I had created and it was talking to me, singing Songs Of Thunder and responding to the slightest pressure of my right toes the way a champion racehorse responds to it's jockey; we were in tune, baby, carrying on a conversation in Metalspeak and she was hanging on my every word. There was not a better car in the world; ever. I was sure of it!