Bitchin' Camaro

I came of age in the 80s. MTV came along when I was a tween and I slept each night with the radio on. Reagan-era consumerism was ingrained in me, and I had to know where the beef was so I could consume it.

When I was a sophomore in high school, the cute senior boy who looked the most like George Michael drove a white Camaro. As a result, I absolutely just had to have a white Camaro. It was all I talked about.

Unfortunately, I couldn't keep myself from getting caught doing PG-13 things boys could get away with but girls couldn't. I was always under restriction.

So I didn't get my drivers' license until a month before I turned 17, even though I'd been driving since I was 14. I have a summer birthday and was working my first job as the world's worst waitress when I looked out the window over an ordering customer and saw that white Camaro, my daddy behind the wheel and my sisters' permed heads in the passenger and back seats.

I cannot begin to express how much I loved that car, which I called the "Storm Trooper," after the white, plastic warriors in "Star Wars." It was soooo freakin' hot at the time and made me feel hot by extension. I'd drive around the beach with the Beastie Boys' "License to Ill" blaring from the tape deck, drivers' seat pushed back as far as it would go so, even though I was driving with my tiptoes, I had maximum chillax effect.

That car emboldened me. I was too cool for school (figuratively: I got good grades). So one night on King's Highway in Myrtle Beach when I got it in my head that I could beat the Maserati next to me in a drag race, I blew a rod in the engine. And I got in trouble, as I rightly deserved, having caused more than a thousand dollars' worth of damage to the car. By the time it got out of the shop with a new engine, I was weeks away from going to college and had proved my untrustworthiness, so I didn't get to play with it so much that summer.

My little liberal arts college didn't have a policy banning cars for freshmen, but my parents did. I got dropped off there and had to learn to walk to get where I wanted to be.

That was August. In October, my sister Amy called me in my dorm room. She told me our mama had an accident. Then Daddy got on the phone and told me I needed to get to Duke Hospital as soon as possible.

I had no car. I called my friends from home who were living an hour and a half away in Raleigh to come get me. As she never got out to the area much, the friend driving took me with her to her cousins' house outside Greensboro, half an hour in the opposite direction. I was a freaked-out mess, but what could I say? I was so polite I don't think I relayed to her just how serious the situation was, and she's not an inconsiderate person.

When I finally got to the hospital and told them who I was, I was quickly escorted to the trauma unit. A surgeon came out and handed me a clipboard, rushing through the facts about how this surgery might not save her life, so the next of kin had to sign a release form protecting the hospital against lawsuits in case the patient died. I was 18 years and three months old when I had to sign that.

They wheeled mama past me to surgery a couple of minutes later. I'm so glad nobody else has to know how I saw her. She was covered in blood and her head was split open, her completely shattered lower body covered by a hospital sheet. She was conscious, though, and she held my hand. I was crying my heart out, and she said, "I'm so sorry about your car."* I became 90 percent less shallow at that moment.




*My mother's car, a Pontiac diesel was out of gas that morning, so she took my Camaro to work. She was hit head-on by an impatient passer in the opposite lane. Though she had to be removed from the wreckage by the jaws of life and airlifted 140 miles away to Duke University medical center, the Camaro saved her life, as it crunched right up on impact. Her car would have caught fire and exploded.