The Legend

Hello,

I'm the aforementioned boyfriend and I'm going to share with you the glory that is my ex-car.

I've always liked cars. I used to sleep with my toy cars in the place of stuffies. I bought my car a few months before I could legally drive it alone. 

I ended up failing the test twice. I was pretty pissed, and telling people that makes you look like a bad driver. Maybe I'm a bad driver.

I bought my first car in October 2011. She was a 1985 BMW 318i sedan, automatic. I called her Webasto.

My car was an E30, the name given to all 3-Series BMWs produced from 1982-1994.

Webasto represented the lowest common denominator of E30s. My 318i came with the smallest engine, she was automatic (making it slower), and she was a sedan (slower still).

She was slower than my grandmother paddling a tin canoe upstream with a limp noodle.

She wasn't even good on gas.

I loved Webasto, despite her lack of speediness. By the time the car had fallen into my hands, she had gone 439 000 kilometers. That's ten times around the equator. I admired her grim determination.

She had her quirks. Webasto was originally from San Fran. She was a dull grey colour with bits rubbing off.  Came with a loud muffler, which is always cool for some reason. It fell off once on Victoria Street. I ran over it. It had a crank operated sunroof, my friends broke the crank off, so I used vice-grips. One of the electric windows wouldn't go back up sometimes. For a while Webasto would do strange things if I didn't buy premium gas. The front brakes were wonky.
The clock was always wrong.

Don't let me fool you. Webasto was tuff. She started every time. I always reached my destination. A friend of a friend told me she could do sweet power slides and donuts. She saved my life once. 

I have always wanted to have a hand painted car. I have always wondered why it isn't more common. Every person in North America owns a car, and they're all a solid colour. Probably silver. So I painted Webasto. I started with yellow. I sanded it and and did a few coats of Home Hardware bought Tremclad Rust Paint. Not that she was rusty. Webasto wasn't like that.

I drove her yellow for a few days, then added the stripes. I had the hood planned out, but the rest was more or less improvised. The whole thing cost me about sixty bucks, I used masking tape and the foam rollers you paint interior walls with. I took two weeks working after school. I listened to Q107.1 with that British guy. I never decided if he was annoying or not.

I was proud of the job I did, I thought she looked pretty hawt. I think some people looked at her and thought I was deluded. That I was under the impression that a clearly unprofessional paint job turned my car into some souped street racing vehicle. Sometimes I think people saw the me and saw the classic "teenager-drives-a beater-with-a-loud-muffler-and-thinks-he's-all-that". I missed Webasto's original blotchy grey inconspicuous looks sometimes. Not often though.
I did it because I'm an artist and I like to paint things and I wanted a pretty car.

I was always told that Webasto would be a magnet for speeding tickets. I once was followed into a McDonald's drive thru by a cop. A friend of mind had given a moving rendition of Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer. He stuck his head out of the sunroof for better acoustics. We got a warning. No speeding tickets.

In February 2013 my dad wanted to have the car looked at, to ensure I wasn't going to die of reckless admiration. The mechanic reported the car was unsafe. But he said it was because the front wheels had gained sentience, and could decide to go wherever they pleased. And the front brakes were gone. So I sold Webasto a few days later, to a guy who promised to dismember her and sell her bits to unsavoury types.

I miss her. It was time though. Somewhere on a desert highway, her passenger side door still feels the breeze. Somewhere on cracked city blacktop, her left rear wheel rolls occupants towards adventure.

I kept the rear BMW emblem. I'm going to have it surgically inserted close to my heart.

When I get x-rays the radiologist will know I'm a performance machine.