Muscle Car

Since Tara and SA Eric have chimed in with tales of teenage speed freaks, I feel obliged to tell my story.

On April 14, 1983, I purchased a muscle car. It was a blue 1969 Mach 1 Mustang that I bought for $1,500, money I'd earned working at McDonald's. I loved that car. In fact, I wanted it precisely because it was affordable and nobody else had one. It was the only thing in my high school career that made me stand out. It got me no attention whatsoever from females, but I earned the respect of the motor heads, freaks and jocks at school because I'd fixed up my own bad ass car.

I raced it a total of twice. Once I took a quarter mile stop light to stop light blast down Campbell Road in Richardson against David Andrews and his 1978 Formula Firebird. I lost by about two car lengths. A couple months later, I had another stoplight encounter with a stranger in a 1980 LT1 Corvette in Richardson. I beat the Corvette.

Then I was done. I actually shook after taking my car up to 90 mph on the street. I knew it was dangerous. And nobody was in my passenger seat egging me on. I had a lot of power under the hood and I wanted to see what the car could do.

If safety concerns weren't enough, I was afraid I'd blow my engine. I did not have another $1,500 to plunk down on an engine. And it was my car. My dad helped me work on it, but he didn't pay for it. While other knuckleheads in my neighborhood were going through cars and tires at a furious pace (including this chick Julie down the street who ran her Camaro so hard into the back of another car, the engine was pushed into her passenger seat) , I wasn't about to wreck something I loved and paid for with money I sweated over a grill to make.

So the Mach 1 led a pampered life from then on, took me to college at UT, and was put in storage when I graduated from college until I had enough money to completely restore it. I did that in 1994. It was show room condition and won first place at a couple of car shows. I sold it in 2003 just before I got married because I was also selling my house and didn't have a garage to keep it in.

A former cop drove all the way from Arizona to pick it up. He paid me $17,000 for it, and I probably could have demanded more for the car. I couldn't look as he drove it away.