Outer Life: The Bug

In 1969, my father bought a Volkswagen Beetle. A used one. 1966, I think.

I loved that car. I'd squeeze into the luggage compartment behind the back seat and luxuriate in the engine heat radiating up through the floor. It looked like a toy. I called it Herbie. Its horn went "meep meep" like it was talking with a stuffed nose. How cute.

Then, as I became known as the kid whose dad drove the cheap-ass car, I loathed that car. "Poor kid coming!" its bone-rattling engine would announce when we arrived. I'd scrunch down when classmates in brand new Cadillacs and Mercedes zoomed by. It had this habit of overheating on freeways. In summer I'd stick to its vinyl seats.

As I got older, I began to wonder whether a car without headrests, or rear seat belts, or front shoulder belts, wasn't, in fact, a rolling death trap.

Thankfully we never found out, for my father was still driving that Bug over 20 years later when I returned home from college and the big city completely broke. Then I managed to meet a girl who lived ten miles away and the Bug was made available to me for visits to said girl at nights and on weekends and I loved that car again.

Comments

Nice. You could probably sell this Bug on E-bay now and make a profit.

Posted by: Neil | October 28, 2005 at 12:01 PM

It's like the classic love story: boy meets bug, boy loses bug, boy gets bug back. I'm choking back tears as I type...

Posted by: Jenny | October 28, 2005 at 07:55 PM

My first car was a baby blue 1972 VW Super Beetle purchased for $500 in Corpus Christi TX in 1984. Sometimes the headlights would go out while I was driving at night. Somehow I figured out I could get them to flicker back on if I banged open and closed the driver's side door a few times (while driving).

I would drive it on the beach at Mustang Island. No problem if it got stuck, I'd just ask a few naval aviators to lift it up and move it out of the soft spot.

We opened Coronas on the bumper.

Posted by: Amy | October 30, 2005 at 07:04 AM