Date Night with the Trans Am

"Seat Safety Switch" (seat-safety-switch) 05/20/2015 at 10:04 • Filed to: trans am turbo, pontiac, hood mounted boost gauge

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I could see it all from my perch at the restaurant, trying to engage in conversation with my lovely companion while also keeping an eye on the unfolding anthropological experiment. The Trans Am Turbo wasn’t my usual date-night vehicle, but then this wasn’t your usual date night.

The oldest and most experienced of the valets stepped forward through the quivering wall of terrified newbies, shoving the smallest of them aside, considering him with a half-sneered contempt as he confidently reached out and grabbed the polished stainless-steel button that would release the compressed-air central locking system. On cue, the beast burst forth with 30psi of built-up pressure, causing the nearest of the junior valets to involuntarily void his bowels.

This was going to be no ordinary drive to the storage lot, but the gravity of the story he had just written himself into had managed to escape him up until this point. Presumably he had been getting baked with the short-order chef in the alley, hadn’t seen, heard or felt the brutish Pontiac arrive and so was happy in his hubris to discard the advice that his amygdalae were screaming at him, drowned out by the need to be stronger - a more suitable mate - than the herd.

His memory of his frumpy wife, a long-distant bar room conquest, kissing him goodbye in the morning had began to fade as surely as the interior carpet of the Trans Am. He stepped over the WRC door bars, grabbed ahold of the engine start switch and engaged it, and then he truly knew fear.

I chuckled in half-empathy, remembering my first time with the Turbo.

I wasn’t worried for its health. I learned early on that any door dings, scrapes or frame bendings that it had picked up during the course of its adventures would heal gradually with the sickening crush of popping metal after long enough parked in the garage. It was as if the crude F-body refused to accept an interpretation of reality in which it was not on the streets, not running. I would find that cars parked next to it would develop spontaneous battery drains, with the Trans Am sitting appealingly next to their dead shells, its pearl chocolate paint glowing softly in the vaseline-soaked dream that my garage fluorescents promoted.

The Pontiac engaged the central locking without his request, and he could see the hood-mounted boost gauge gently throbbing, its retrofit OLEDs burning a hole through his optical nerve directly into the parietal lobe. Before the Turbo, he was a normal man, with hopes, dreams and fears. After the Turbo, he was a passenger.

I returned to the conversation with my dinner date, trying not to jump in on her sentences about her day job with interjections about carburetors or LD28 cranks. She would never understand the Trans Am, especially after she saw what it had done later that night.

gergey - Wishes vette was Datsun > Seat Safety Switch 05/20/2015 at 10:16

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Is this part #2, or have I missed anything?

Awesome awesome awesome btw!

Seat Safety Switch > gergey - Wishes vette was Datsun 05/20/2015 at 12:42

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The continuity is pretty loose. They’re all copied from my tumblr.

Wolc *grammar nazis go f*** yourselves* > Seat Safety Switch 12/23/2015 at 19:55

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Can I get my e36 posessed with self healing like that?