I burned a bunch of checks in a hubcap in that same parking space

That’s funny. A year earlier I burned a bunch of checks in the very same spot. (I too had an apartment in that building on Clyde Street.) Mine weren’t in a hubcap, they were in a makeshift aluminum-foil tray. And they took forever to burn. After several very smoky false starts, my friend Mike heard a fire engine in the remote distance. “Wouldn’t it be funny if they were coming to put out this?” I joked. “Where were they five minutes ago?” returned Mike. “We could have used their help starting this!”

The fire engine got closer. And closer. And closer. Growing nervous, I satisfied myself that the checks were by now illegible. When (from the sound of it) the fire engine was just a block or two away, we hastily kicked dirt and gravel onto the fire, ran into the building, into our apartments, and into our pajamas. From my window I could see a fireman giving hell to the pain-in-the-ass neighbor who’d called them rather than simply asking us to stop.

- It was originally owned by the father of my college girlfriend, and he had 3 kids by his 2nd wife. My girlfriend’s youngest stepsister was unhappy she didn’t get to ride a schoolbus like her older siblings, so her Dad (a professional art director) got a yellow VW Rabbit and put white numbers on the side just like a bus’. I think it was “511″ but I don’t know why that particular number was chosen.

- I met the car in the “parking lot” (an alternately weed or mud filled area in front of the farm house, depending on the season) at the Dad’s place outside Leesburg, VA in late 1985. It hadn’t run for a couple months. I offered to take the car off Jack’s hands for the low cost of zero dollars. I got it running (damned Bosch air-mass mixture controls) and replaced most of the brake parts in the rain. I had a lot of time on my hands in those days.

- I parked the VW outside my Clyde St. apartment after the holidays of 1985 and set the emergency brake. The car didn’t move for 2 weeks (I walked to campus) and when I fired it up it wouldn’t move. Turns out the rear drum brakes had rusted solid (damned PA road salt) to the shoes. I broke the car’s lug wrench, and then a Craftsman ratchet, trying to get the wheels off. I bought a más macho lug wrench and fixed ‘er up again.

- Later I burned a bunch of checks in a hubcap in that same parking space when I moved to a different apartment, but I don’t think that really had much to do with the car.

- The night at The Balcony that I “lost” the car, I ate seafood. It might have been shrimp.