Classics: Buying an MGB, Part Two. Louis Shalako.

Image stolen from the internet.

Louis Shalako

Buying an MGB, part two.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen. In a previous post, I have mentioned two MGBs in the Sarnia area. A red 1966, a southern car, in fairly nice condition, $12,000.00, (and a 12-V positive ground, and a generator, assuming it has not been converted, also, the three main-bearing engine), and a black '78 not nearly so nice and a price of $9,998.00 or so. That car has the rubber bumpers and it is jacked up from the factory 1.0" to meet North American headlight and bumper regulations of the day. It also has the gold coloured pin-stripes, which are not all that desirable from my own unique point of view...

(You will note the ’66 has two wiper blades and the ’78 three; due to required square inches of ‘sweep’, of 100 squares). It also has the 67-bhp engine. The dreaded pollution control engine, although it would have five main bearings, assuming the original motor or an appropriate replacement unit. Back in the day, I could buy a good motor and gearbox for two, three, four hundred dollars. You could literally drop that in and it would run fine, it was the car that had rusted out, or been totalled in an accident. A real enthusiast collects, and some guys just had more stuff laying around than they could ever use, and some of them were undoubtedly married as well. 

(Always a factor. - ed)

Ah, but there is this one 1971, (already sold), split rear bumper for $8,500.00 and it has a ridiculously low mileage. The car looks fairly clean. The only real problem is that it is in Mississauga. How in the hell do I get to Mississauga, safety check and register the vehicle, get insurance, and somehow get the thing 200 kilometres down the road to my own home town. There would be some logistics, and therefore, costs, involved in that transaction.

So, here we are, scrolling through ads on Kijiji and one or two other websites…just doing the research, ladies and gentlemen.

I just saw an '84 Vette, $5,400.00 or so. That one's in pretty rough shape, with uncompleted body work, needs paint, the interior is very rough. Its condition tells its own story...one wonders what we would find underneath, also, you had better have a budget and some idea of what you are getting into. As for a '71 MGB with less than 17,000 miles, ah...not making any accusations here, but you can simply unscrew the speedo cable out of the back of the gauge and make it look lower mileage than it really is. I could tell with a good inspection underneath, especially if it truly has never been winter-driven. I would have to read the ad again. This engine would have 94-bhp. Ideally, you get in and drive it for the summer and no major repairs required...

Well, we can always dream.

There are some cheap and simple performance modifications for the MGB, and vintage technical bulletins from the factory on the subject are available.

From the blog of Ian Cooper.

When I bought a 1971 MGB roadster in about 1978, I was an eighteen year old kid. Lots of guys liked sports cars back then. There were a lot more of them, and even as fourteen and fifteen year-old kids, naturally we dreamed of the day we would turn 16 and get our beginner’s license.

The cleaner, the better in my opinion. Yet you can see the panel, the sill under the door is problematical. There should be a little round tube below the door, the original jacking point. It's missing. This vehicle, does not have side marker lamps...those are aftermarket alloy rims, 14" four-bolt pattern. Panel lines are notoriously difficult to align on some of the British cars. The door has sagged a bit, and yet this one seems kind of exceptional. Things to look for: I see bumperettes on the front, yet they are not visible on the back end...

Over the course of the seven or eight years I drove the car, I blew the engine, burned out a clutch, scored brake rotors when the brake pads wore down to the metal and I was a hundred and forty miles from home. I had all sorts of adventures in that car.

The car was modified to some degree by the time I was done with it.

The original motor had an air pump for pollution control. On someone’s suggestion, a guy with an M.G.B. G.T., I removed the air pump, changed the pulley belt for it and then used five-eighths national coarse pipe plugs to fill the holes in the head.

Purists hate to see you do that sort of thing. I'm not saying they all smoked pipes, wore chirper caps and had leather elbow patches on their tweed coats, it was just a different philosophy. I was also flat broke most of the time...the circumstances were also different.

I even liked working on cars, and maybe they did not...right? My old man got all As in auto shop in high school, my girlfriend's old man was a mechanical engineer. You ask them guys a question, trust me, you're going to get an answer.

I wanted to race. It was my big dream in life. I read Road & Track, Rob Walker’s F-1 coverage and all the road tests—we read tests of cars we could never hope to own, but guys of a certain age drool over a red Countach.

By the time I was done, the car had an aluminum hood. Once you’ve taken the motor out once or twice, you quickly realize that the sealed and bonded ends of the oil cooler hoses are a pain in the butt because the hoses go through flared or rubber-ringed holes in the radiator cross-piece. You had to take it out sometimes. In the M.G. it's easily removable with a few bolts. The solution to this was to cut the metal part of the pipes, and then substitute Aeroquip hoses. The oil pressure in that car was good, fifty to seventy pounds per square inch depending on engine speed. Not knowing all that much about such things, I used double hose clamps. I used a fairly big clamp which meant that it had a fairly big screw to tighten it. I could use a fairly big screwdriver to tighten it properly. Some guys told me that oil pressure was wrong. They were seeing thirty to fifty psi on their gauges. I didn't care if it was right or wrong. What I wanted to see was consistency. As long as it behaved the same way, all of the time, that was good enough for me. Oh, and if the pressure seems down a little, you might want to check the oil level...

The two dials down low, (#9, #10),  are heater and air controls. #11, a map light. This is probably a '68 or so. So, you've got a brake test light, headlight switch, fuel gauge, tachometer, oil pressure, speedo and coolant temperature in the top row. #6, charging, #7 high beams. This one might have had the horn on the centre of the steering wheel, later models, on a stalk on the control column, later models an airbag front and centre. (Research shows the MGB never had an airbag. - ed) I always thought these steering wheels were dangerous, if not downright ugly. I have no idea what #5 is, (the turn signal indicators? - ed.) the molded vinyl dash is definitely familiar. Do the research.

Another modification happened by accident. I was in Delhi, working at the News-Record, and the car had charging problems. The alternator was shot. I needed it for work, M.G. parts were expensive. More than anything, it took time to get them. A guy at the Canadian Tire store in Delhi suggested changing it for a Chrysler alternator. I thought he was nuts until he took me out in the parking lot and showed me how he had done it to his red Triumph Spitfire. It took a piece of flat-bar, a couple of holes, used the same belt, and now produced seventy amps where the little M.G. unit would do thirty-five.

On that car I put Hooker tube headers. I had a Supersprint free-flow exhaust. When you look at the ads in magazines, (online nowadays), they make claims. Guaranteed increase in horsepower, anything from ten to thirty-five percent. It’s probably best to assume lower numbers. You’ll talk about it and your friends will try and shoot you down. It’s best not to make extravagant claims. The combination sounded good and the engine probably did rev higher and produce more power. The engine blew one day at over a hundred miles an hour, and that’s how I ended up with an engine from a 1969 M.G.B. that I pulled out of a back yard on Pine Street and we towed home on the end of a rope.

What I did next, before sticking that old motor in my car, was to pay a little machine shop, just down and off Vidal Street to rebuild the block properly. Then I did a little porting and polishing on the cylinder head.

Air cleaners removed, the 1 1/2" S.U. carbs...there's something a bit funny about the angle on these carbs.

I had never done it before and I’ve never done it since. I didn’t go too insane. Going mad in there will create thin spots. Coolant flows through the heads and uneven thicknesses in port walls leads to uneven cooling and heating cycles. The M.G. head is cast iron, which is somewhat more forgiving in an overheat situation. Overheating is often the death of cast aluminum heads. This will result in hairline fractures and eventual failure. I just tried to match up the profiles where the exhaust ports met the manifold. I smoothed it up, not to a mirror-like shine, but matte. I used little stone grinding stones similar to what you stick in a Dremel-type tool. I did a similar process on the intakes, which were round—the exhaust ports were little rectangular holes inside the larger round tube of the header. I just made them rounder and flared in terms of the casting…I basically just cleaned up the intakes, of which there are two, and continued using the stock manifold, which also got a quick polish inside using a wire wheel on a cheap 3/8 power drill...this is an overhead valve, solid pushrod engine. The MGB has an electric fuel pump. I suppose I could talk all day.

***

When doing the cylinder head, we milled her down about 0.030”, something rational like that. That was three passes of ten thou each. A typical clean-up cut would be ten thousandths back in the day. If you were absolutely certain the head had never been done before, you could try it. If you are not certain, the basic cut is your best bet, otherwise there is the possibility of the valves hitting the top of the pistons.

I took the heavy and boxy old M.G. air cleaners off and made my own. There are small, flat but cylindrical filter elements. Back then, they were for a Pinto or a Maverick or something. I took two round plates of one-sixteenth hard aluminum. The outer plate needs a couple of holes for the bolts, and the inner plate had the hole to match the carb plus the same two holes for bolts. I had to use shorter bolts, that is true.

The other thing with the M.G. or any small car is weight. On a roadster, the roof comes right off along with a little folding frame-work—the stays. You can leave that at home. The bumpers were easy to remove. That saved some weight. The air pump weighed a few pounds. You might have to go to a smaller diameter V-belt. You can switch out the thermostat housing/bracket combination to an older type, if you're obsessive about such things and I was. When the rug was shot, I took it out. A rotten old rug weighed something. I switched from two six-volt batteries to one twelve-volt. I got rid of the original three-blade wipers and used a two-blade system from the ’69. I paid a guy down in Chatham, Ontario to do that work for me. If he thought I was nuts, so be it—I blanked off the one hole, and we might have moved one hole, and we used the sort of crank cable assembly from the '69.

The triple wiper system was in response to improved safety regulations of the era, something to do with having ‘a minimum of 100 square inches of swept area’ or whatever it was back then.

The M.G. was a fun car for a young guy. You could look up under the dashboard and find the four bolts. You could remove the windshield. I took the front fenders off. I propped her up on an angle of forty-five degrees once to do some work to the chassis, which had some rot when I first got hold of it.

I took the engine and transmission out, changed the clutch plate and then put it back in the car again. I stood the engine on its nose on a couple of baulks of timber...I did not have a pilot shaft, I eye-balled the alignment. It worked fine. I was alone, just me, a set of chain-falls, a few tools, some lights, and then there was the car.

I ran mine on unleaded fuel without major problems. Interestingly, with no engine computer, no internal sensors for every little function, running a higher octane fuel also increases power. In the modern vehicle, the machine senses the octane...somehow, and compensates accordingly. The cars were relatively good on fuel, and the systems were so simple, you could just advance the spark a bit, or retard it a bit, and in fact there's a little micro-adjustment on the side of the distributor for just this eventuality. Way back when the vehicle was designed, fuel varied considerably, from place to place in terms of grade or even simple cleanliness. With the cars exported all over the world, fuel standards were very different in different markets.

This is a bit of what I call 'intuitive reverse engineering'. Question. How do I know the modern engine computer can sense the 'octane' of the fuel? Well, I don't. Not really. And even if I did know it, I sure as hell couldn't properly explain it. But if the modern engine computer can't sense the octane of the fuel, what fucking difference does it make, as to exactly what grade of fuel you decide to throw in there. The only difference with the old technology, is that the engine computer is essentially the driver, and the mechanic, the dreamer, if you will. Not just some silicon chip that don't really give a damn either way.

And now we all know how I really feel.

Throw in a little bit of aggression, and that was a pretty quick little car for its time, its place, and its budget.

END

Note. By removing ten percent of the weight of a car, you get ten percent more power for free. It will accelerate ten percent faster, go ten percent faster, and use ten percent less fuel. Not only that, but the tires have to pull ten percent less vehicle through a turn, as well as stop it under braking. Ten percent is a huge improvement in automotive terms. Also, by extension, the springs are now ten percent harder (relatively speaking) and the shocks ten percent more capable of damping out major wheel movements. Braking distance will be reduced by ten percent. This is not an extravagant claim but the result of simple physics. With more modern tech, we can substitute run-flat tires and dispense with the full-size spare in the trunk. We can leave the jack and handle at home. In the event of a puncture, we can slow down and drive it home, in extreme circumstances, we can use the cell phone and call the auto club for a free tow, and bring it on home on a flatbed. It is a sports car. Maybe, just maybe, it takes a certain kind of sporting personality to drive one of these things.

Ah, in the previous post, I advised readers to join a club, an association, subscribe to the newsletters, get out and meet some of the people. I have just signed up at this here website, and I don't even have a car.

The M.G. Experience.

END

Additional Note: two of the cars (on Kijiji) under discussion have sold, literally as I wrote this story. It's a good question as to whether they got their price, but they're gone now and I appear to have missed out...

No bargain at $3,950.00.

You're not going to save any money by buying this one and 'fixing it up'.

What does it take to convert from positive to negative ground?

Jay Leno’s Garage: Moss Motors MGB. (Video)

Kurt Tanner Motorcars. (Video)

Writer Ian W. Cooper is on Amazon.

Classics: Buying an MGB. Louis Shalako.

Poor old Louis is also on Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Cut the metal tubes on the oil cooler pipes just at the flange, subsitute Aeroquip & clamps...the fenders bolt on. The real problems are underneath, for example the sills, and the roof, the interior...everything. I think you can learn a lot, for example the hose from the fuel filter on the right side actually bends around and goes back to the carburetor, you can see the removable radiator frame, oil cooler, two horns, the coil, the later model oil filter, (upside down), and on the upper left, the charcoal EVAP system, etc. There's a grille just ahead of the windshirld, the chromy bit just behind the hood. There's a black airbox, top, centre, with a squirrel-cage fan, and ducting through a heater core...a little flapper-door that sends warm air to the windshield, the feet, or both. There's a lever way up under the dash to open that door. The hot water is controlled by a valve, connected via cable to a control on the dashboard and there's another control for fan speed. There are large, sort of rectangular rubber plugs, in the far upper corners on the firewall, pull them out and you can get at the wiper assembly.

 

Classics. On Buying an MGB. Louis Shalako.

This yellow '71 has the wire wheels, side marker lamps and looks nicely complete. The exact mirrors mine had...

Louis Shalako

I was coming home one night in the MGB. I was eighteen years old, and I just loved driving that thing. It was Egremont Road, it's pretty dark and there are curves along certain stretches. And there's little flashes of light from under the dashboard. I hit another bump, more flashes. British cars of the era were known for the Lucas electricals. The company did not have much of a reputation compared to some of the American companies such as Delco. Labour troubles and constant strikes, go-slows and frankly, assembly-line sabotage were not unheard-of in the U.K. of that era.

Putting my left hand under there and feeling around, sparks fell onto my legs. Fucking loose wires and connections. The guy who had it before me was not, shall we say, mechanically inclined. Twisting the ends together, a bit of electrical tape is all very well, but the tape dries out and comes loose after a while—yet you can buy all kinds of connectors that crimp on and then, you wrap that with tape...British cars of that time did not have plastic panels under the dash—assuming you could crawl in, lie on your back on the seats, you could see and reach pretty much everything. I spent a little time on the electrical system, I can tell you that much...it was, quite literally, a pain in the neck.

#vehicles

If it wasn’t for that car, I’d probably still be a virgin.

This red one is listed at $12,000.00 firm. There is a later model, a 1978. Those had the rubber bumpers, engine de-tuned to 62.5 bhp, all the pollution control, and the ride height jacked by about 1.0 ". I'm not too interested in the '66, due to the three main bearing engine, and the '78 looked kind of rough plus they're way down on power. That ’66 might be a positive-ground electrical system, I’d have to check. They would have a generator as opposed to an alternator. 

These two vehicles are at least in town, I could at least go and have a look at them.

For me, in a North American model, the optimum would be a 1969-1974, something like that. They have the five main bearing engine, and they’re just in the early stages of pollution control, for the first three years or so in that period, still producing the rated 94 bhp. The ride height is the 'proper' height. The bonus with this car is it is claimed to be a N. Carolina car, where presumably, there is a hell of a lot less salt used on the roads, which contributes to corrosion. The basic car can be upgraded, modified, changed to negative ground, an alternator, even a bolt-on supercharger from Moss Motors. My '71 had been treated with Ziebart rust control, which was fine underneath, but it took a lot of work to get it out of the engine compartment--a lot of rags and spray-on Gunk took care of that; although traces remained in the nooks and crannies. Considering what I just said above, you can throw endless amounts of money at a car that will never bring that back in resale value…a bit of tough love, but it is also honest.

Red '66, $12,000.00.

This article is as much fantasy as non-fiction. I looked on Kijiji here in Sarnia, and there were two MGBs for sale, one for $12,000.00 and one for $9,999.00. Searching Kijiji Ontario, I found 35 ads for MGBs and related products. This would be a good place to find used parts, project vehicles and NIB parts and accessories. I would also point out that someone, will almost inevitably buy these cars on the private sale market. It might take a little time, especially if the owner wants to get their price, but they will sell.

I think you have to decide exactly what you’re looking for. The cleanest car of the bunch may still not be matching numbers, original and exact, and will never win the Concours d’Elegance. Yet the cleanest car of the bunch, might still be the best if you’re looking for a daily driver—something almost unheard of, as these vehicles are the stuff of nostalgia as well as genuine antiques in terms of the technology of the day.

1971 Roadster.

Yeah. I stole a few pics here, but this is essentially the dashboard of my ’71, (below). The original shift knob was a small black ball with the pattern molded in and etched in white. This one, and mine, did not have a glove box, just a padded bolster in front of the passenger.

A couple of minor points here. I am not in any way an authority on MGs, and there is no good reason to post too many links here. Car ads will disappear on Kijiji, in that sense link rot is inevitable. The reader can just Google ‘MGB for Sale’ in your preferred market and shop your way down that list. There are other car sales websites, some of whom specialize in sports cars. I follow a page on Facebook, an auto sales shop specializing in just these sort of classic vehicles. I just like looking at the pictures, but seeing a clean, right-hand drive MGC—the six-cylinder version, going for twenty-two thousand pounds tells you something as well. These are the folks buying the history, and the more documentation you have, the more original it is, the more well done it is, I guess that drives up the price. I really don’t think you’re going to find too much of that in the Canadian market, and in my case, I think I’d just like to drive it rather than compete against rich guys with a lot more resources than I will ever have.

The split rear bumper and rallye steel wheels.

My point here is to educate yourself. I know that I can at least work on an MGB. Join a club, an association. Subscribe to the newsletters, and get to know some of the people.

I have hundreds of hours of experience, working on the MGB. I’m also too tall to drive a Spitfire, Midget/Sprite, or the GT-6, surely one of the most pleasing small car designs ever. The TR-6 commands a higher price due to the six-cylinder engine, and Healeys are very pricey vehicles.

I know what I want, and I know why I want it. I want a left-hand drive, 1971 MGB roadster, preferably in the Primrose Yellow. Low mileage would be good, and good steel in all the right places would be even better…I can pretty much fix anything else, bearing in mind all it takes is money. A guy like me would set a budget, and do as much of the work myself as humanly possible. A real labour of love, and maybe that’s the best way to look at it. It’s best to have a family driver, and the MGB is your new toy. In my case, good running condition and a recent safety check would give me some confidence in the machine and the purchase.

The cheapest car I saw was around $1,700.00. The body needed work—a lot of work, and yet that might be reasonable, assuming every other bit of the car was at least there—there is some market for parts, some (or most), of which might be applicable to your own driver. Also, if you really are good at body work and have your own shop and tools, what the hell. It’s an adventure, a learning experience, and you might end up with a pretty good car—that ’66 is still worth $12,000.00 after all, at least that is the asking price. People have picked up an old Buick Skylark and thrown $60,000.00 into it. They don’t drive them, not too often. They take them to shows, they take them to the drag strip. They throw ten-thousand-dollar paint-jobs on them. In that sense, nothing about this fantasy is practical.

I believe there is a company still pressing panels for the MGB, and a fellow at Obsolete Automotive in Pt. Edward Ontario, once told me that you could build a complete, brand-new MGB from parts if you seriously wanted to spend the money.

It’s important to define what you want. It’s important to shop around, and not to buy the first one you see. A driveable MGB in ‘relatively’ good condition might be a lot of fun to drive for a few months in summer, and then you put it back in the garage and leave it for next year. I drove mine for about seven years, winter, summer, spring and fall. It was a used car when I bought it, and there was some corrosion in the sills, mostly. I took the rugs out one day, and driving it home in the rain, I hit a puddle and I was blasted by dirty water coming up through holes in the driver’s side floor…I cut some mild steel and tack- welded in 10-gauge plating, (right on top, leaving the old floor in place) a crude repair but that thing was never going to be a show car—yet structural strength is still important.

I bought the car for $1,500.00, and sold it seven or eight years later for $400.00. I had everything sorted out—except the body, which was a shitty red-brown primer. I probably spent ten thousand on it, over the course of that time…still, it was a wonderful time of my life and I still refer back to it. All that nostalgia, right.

I still miss that car.

I still miss that girl, if you want to know the truth.

 

END

 

Obsolete Automotive.

South Norfolk Classics.

MossMotors.

MGB. (Wiki)

The History of the MGB. (Youtube)

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. This one is a freebie, The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue.

See his works on Fine Art America.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen. The New Highway. Louis Shalako.

 

Mine was a dark blue, with steel rims and baby-moon hubcaps. Not quite so cool...

Louis Shalako

The new highway. The first time Johnny and I became aware of the new highway, the project had barely gotten started. We were heading north on a gravel side-road, in his full-size Dodge cargo van. He’d paid about $1,500.00, it had a six-cylinder engine and three speeds forward, with the gear shifter on the steering column. I drove the thing, and the brakes were four-wheel drums, and the steering wheel a large, skinny plastic thing.

The clutch was heavy, and over time, your left leg would end up bigger than the right leg…this in spite (or because), of a brake booster. You didn't need to push nearly so hard on the brakes, that's what I'm saying. The steering was pure manual.

Judging by the remains of a red stripe around the mid-line of the vehicle, it was part of a fleet owned (or previously owned), by a local leasing company. Vans were popular, this one had been customized inside, and it was a big step up from the Cricket. Yes, Johnny had a bed and everything in the back…

It was getting dark out, we’d had a couple beers anyways, a doobie or two maybe. And there it was. This big, double lane cut through the forest and the bush-lots behind the farms along London Line, otherwise known as Highway 22. Back then, the legal age for drinking was 21 years of age, and this is where we learned to cruise the back roads.

It must have been in the newspaper, but the highway was actually built in short sections. This one was all mud, heavy equipment, road graders parked here and there, stacks of metal culvert, piles of sand and gravel. They had the basic soil profile, with two long flat strips for paving and a total of three ditches, one on each side and one up the middle…

At one time, the 402, a multi-lane divided highway, used to end at the city limits. Traffic was dumped onto good old London Line, through the Golden Mile, four lanes, two-way traffic, a commercial strip on the city limits, and then it was two lanes, or three with a central, two-way passing lane, all the way to London, sixty miles down the road. The building and completion of the 402 was a big thing for its time, and here we were, bumping across it on some kind of extended crop tour, and the night was black as pitch.

Johnny's was an old leasing vehicle, with a few miles on the clock.

That middle passing lane on what is now London Line, was the scene, and the cause, of many head-on collisions over the years, and at some point that thing had to go. Up north, a short section of similar roads will have passing for northbound traffic, and then the next centre lane section has passing for southbound traffic, and hopefully, never the twain shall meet…although it probably does still happen.

***

The first new section of the highway was open. The second new section was more or less complete…but not yet open. I pulled onto the ramp, slowed it to a stop. My girlfriend hops out, pulls aside one or two big orange traffic cones and I pull the MGB through the gap. She pulls the cones back into position. She hops back in, closes the door and we are off down the curving ramp, onto a big, beautiful, brand-new highway that is absolutely deserted. The top is down, we are in love, it is a beautiful, sunny evening and in a moment, she’s got the wine out. A twist of the wire, a pull on the cork, and the bubbling, sparkling cheap-ass wine blows the cork off into an eighty mile per hour slipstream.

The cork is gone, I caught a quick glimpse in the mirror, of it bouncing down the road, but we aren’t likely to need it again anyhow.

After some hour, the construction workers have gone home, at some point, it is a weekend, a holiday. We were trespassing, considering potential hazards, dangerous driving, speeding, disobeying detours…alcohol, marijuana, the girlfriend in a sun dress with no bra and no panties, kicking off her sandals and shifting up that dress, a hot and naked girl, my finger inside her wet pussy as she went down on me, well. I guess you could say it was pretty much all illegal.

Worth every minute of it, one has to admit—but still plenty illegal.

In that sense, we really were criminals.

We were also having the time of our lives…

***

Image Credit.

Willy had married his childhood sweetheart at this point, Trina was six months pregnant when they got married, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, which was legally permissible without the parents’ permission…

The four of us were cruising in his dad’s 1975 Chevy Impala station wagon, upon which he’d mounted a pair of Mean Mother Magnums, 800-watt spotlights, more normally associated with bush trucks and Australian poachers jacking ‘roos at night in the outback.

We were on the way home from a very long tour, a crop-tour, with plenty of wine, doobies, all kinds of sexual foreplay and other kinds of provocation of a womanly kind, and somehow I woke up in the driver’s seat. One guy can drive, his wife or girlfriend on the seat beside him, and the other guy and female person can fuck in the back end. We didn’t have too many inhibitions back then.

Willy, was asleep in the seat beside me, and the two ladies were snoring quietly away in the back seat. This is when I realized that I was driving.

Fuck—

I sat up a little straighter. I pushed the button and lowered the window in the tailgate to get a little oxygen through there.

I had no idea of how we had gotten there…

I have no idea of how we survived that last fifteen or twenty kilometres, I have no idea of when we switched seats, the only thing that probably saved us was the fact that we must have gotten onto the new, empty, deserted highway…those big fucking lights blasting away from the front bumper. Also the fact that the road was mostly straight. What was really food for thought, was the one or two kinks in the road. Even on the dead straight sections, it really was some kind of a secular miracle.

It was a boat, with a 350 cubic inch engine and a few power accessories.

Just past Warwick, westbound, I pulled off down the ramp, ah, I think Highway 21. The Forest road. With no one to help, I put it in park and pulled the traffic cones out of the way. Back in the vehicle, people were still asleep. Rather than get back on the highway, for the next section was now open, I took it north and followed Michigan Avenue back into town. This was better than a major highway, and let’s be honest. People had phones and truckers had CB radios back then, and sooner or later, someone is going to call it in: those crazy teenagers driving on the new highway again…surely someone must have remarked upon it.

Once or twice, we saw other folks out there, farmers or other young people. We just ignored each other.

It was a good thing Burger King was open late back in those days, or we might have starved to death…just an observation, ladies and gentlemen.

If you don’t believe in resurrection, you should see people sort of wake up and sit up and look around them when you tell them that you’re home, and is there anything in particular you want from the drive-through…???

Oh, and do you guys have any money on you.

***

I was heading out of town, not going anywhere in particular. It was a dark, wet, autumn evening. I had a few joints, most likely, and a cold six-pack of something sitting on the passenger seat beside me. I was driving my 1967 Beaumont, which sounds cool. It had a certain body style, although nowhere near as desirable as a Chevy II S.S. The thing is, you could sort of use the body to build one—assuming you had money. It would be a fake Chevy II, still desirable for all of that, especially with a 327 cubic inch V-8 and a four speed Muncey transmission and a Hurst shifter…

Mine had a six cylinder engine, and a two-speed automatic, shiny (and very slippery) vinyl seats. Bias-ply tires, mostly bald, and baby-moon hubcaps.

The radio was on and a song was playing…All of My Love.

I had never heard it before. It had a plaintive, sad kind of vibe to it, and furthermore, I know that voice—I know that guitar. Fuck, I knew those drums. Convinced, I turned it up a bit, cruising along at about 65 mph, and when the song ended, the on-air personality told us that John Bonham, the drummer for Led Zeppelin, had passed away and it was all very sad.

I smoked a joint, drank a couple of beers and headed on home.

It was the end of an era, really.

Those days would never come again.

***

One day the highway was open. I was alone in the MGB, eastbound on the 402. I took it up, holding the pedal right to the floor. Traffic was light, the road was dry and the car took a bit of time…finally, we’re going over a hundred miles per hour or forty miles per hour over the limit. At about 106 mph, the engine starts to knock and it was time to shut her down…

Fuck.

She blowed up at about 106 mph...

I humped it over farm fields and ditches, and through the woods to a farmhouse along London Line, where the people graciously allowed me to use their phone.

Of course. The first question my old man asked was, ‘did you check the oil?’

Well, that’s dad for you. It had all kinds of oil, although the oil pump may have been on the way out. It is also true I had been running it pretty hard. Basically, I had ‘spun a bearing’, and when I took the thing apart, sure enough, the little curved pieces in the oil pan were paper-thin. The block and the crank were fine, but sometimes it’s cheaper just to find a used motor somewhere than doing a major rebuild.

This, is why we pulled an old ’69 MGB, up, and out, it was literally sinking into the ground in a backyard along Pine Street. The roof was collapsed, the bottom of the vehicle sitting on the ground and the wheels stuck in holes of their own. I used to see that thing all the time, walking over to Pete’s Variety at the East Street Plaza.

For fifty bucks and a bit of labour—a stout rope and my old man’s Volvo, a bit of air in the tires, I got another engine block, a transmission, and that aluminum hood. They even had the ownership, which is important. I stripped that thing down to nothing and then had it towed for scrap.

But that, as they say, is a story for another day.

END

Louis has books and stories available from Barnes & Noble.

Louis has art on ArtPal.

Listen to his free audiobook, One Million Words ofCrap, here on Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content.)

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

Author’s Note. Chapter 12 was difficult to write, not so much from the technical aspects of writing, but from the emotional standpoint. I also sort of knew I had to do it—for reasons which are difficult to explain or even justify. I was lower than a sidewinder’s belly at the bottom of Death Valley for a couple of days beforehand. Writing it seemed to help, and then again, the day after, I was literally in tears a couple of times, perhaps for myself. Perhaps more so for all those other victims, most of them a lot more serious than my own experience.

 

#Louis