I can’t remember how that old VW Beetle came into my possession, really. No idea who bought it or what. For all I knew, someone had just given it to Dad or Bruce and now it just sat there in the yard.

Waiting to fall apart.

That shouldn’t have taken as long as it looked like it was going to. It was all rusted out. No floorboards at all. We called it Fred Flintstone’s bug.

I do remember that Keith I tried to kill it… and failed.

Well… we really didn’t try very hard. But when I took it over to Keith’s place and told him we could do whatever we wanted with it, I knew it wasn’t coming back.

I’d been driving it around in our cow pasture for… I don’t know how long, and I guess I just got bored doing that. The thing had no plates so I wasn’t supposed to take it on the road but I did anyway. I wanted Keith to see it. No telling what HE would do.

Cars were plaything for Keith.

I once dropped by and saw him poking around among the many, many wrecks behind his dad’s barn. When he found an old Chevy that still ran, Keith went and got their tractor with the forked loader on the front and stabbed the old junker right in the side windows. He then hoisted it up and brought it out onto the gravel in front of the workshop and lowered it a bit.

I watched in amazement as Keith cut the body off that old junker with a torch. It didn’t come off as easily and quickly as he’d wanted and some of the upholstery was starting to burn a little. I could tell the smoke was annoying him but Keith didn’t curse like my dad did when stuff like that happened. He just got up on the tractor and bounced the loader up and down till the car’s frame dropped. He then proceeded to cut the frame in half, shorten it, and then weld it back together so his new vehicle had a square wheelbase.

He called it his “go go cart”.

Keith added a trailer hitch to his go go cart so he could use it to haul bales of hay out to the furthest reaches of his dad’s considerable pastureland. I asked him why he’d botherd to square the wheelbase and he grinned and said…

“Better for pulling shitties”

Shitties” (also known as “doughnuts”) were the way fun thing to do with cars. Especially in the winter. With no body weight to hamper it’s V-8 engine, when pulling shitties Keith’s go go cart certainly did… GO!

Wayyy fun.

So I brought Keith our little bug and we took it for a ride. We went wayyy out into a hilly section of their land and tried doing some hillclimbing with it.

It didn’t climb.

It actually just got stuck on the first try and that’s where it stayed. Kinda boring compared to Keith’s go go cart, eh? The last bit of attention we gave to that stupid, boring old VW junker was to see if we could blow up the motor. We put it in neutral and placed a rock on the gas pedal. The thing just ran and ran. It made a lot of noise but obviously wasn’t going to blow up so Keith drained the oil.

It still didn’t blow up.

It just ran out of gas.

Boring.

So we left it there in the field. At the bottom of a hill. Stuck in the mud. Out of gas. With no oil. For all I know, that beat up old VW bug that refused to die is still there.

Whatever.

More to come…