So like I said, I really didn’t have any interest in cars… Then, as luck would have it, I became friends with a guy who did – Tom Walsh.
Tom Walsh was older than me – I want to say he was a Junior, but he may have only been a Sophomore. Tom was a real hell-raiser – imagine the classic image of a member of an 80’s “hair band” – that was what he looked like – LOTS of curly dark hair, a little taller – really pronounced facial features – perfect. We somehow started hanging out in Biology class, and since I didn’t really fit in at the private school (more on that later…), and neither did he, we really hit it off.
Early that Spring, his parents bought him a car. His parents were much older, and had adopted Tom after years of trying to have their own kids (I think…) – but they were MUCH older than my parents at least – who were about 37… Somehow, he talked them into buying him a 1980 Trans Am (it was 1986…) – and if Tom was the perfect image of the 80’s, the car was even MORE so! It was an automatic, 6.6-litre, with the shaker hood and ALL the trimmings. It was white with a red interior, T-tops, a red and orange Firebird on the hood, and about 18 miles of pinstriping around every door, window, hood, trunk, vent, mirror – wherever they could stripe it, they did. It was perhaps the tackiest car I have ever been involved with – I LOVED IT!
Once Tom got his license straightened out, he started driving me home from school and just kind of “around” occassionally. I can’t believe my parents put up with this, actually – and as it turns out, he was a maniac driver! It was no big deal for him to jump into the oncoming lane of traffic – on a back road – and pass 4 or 5 cars! He drove that car like you would in a video game! And just to round out Tom’s “early 80’s perfection” – and I swear I’m not making this up, he listened to Billy Squier ALL THE TIME! He had two cassettes of the band “Piper – featuring Billy Squier” – which we played in an 8-track adapter!
Tom also had a girlfriend that went to public school. She was cute, very shy, and they were very sexually active. And so for those few brief months, I LOVED hanging out with Tom, and I started to think, “Hmmmm…. Maybe I should get some of this…”
The adventure with Tom seems to have kind of fizzled out – I’m not really sure why, but he MAY have been thrown out of the private school we were going to – as he did go to public school the next year. And I also seem to remember some of the staff of the school telling me to stop hanging around with him (I was there on a scholarship, so I was supposed to be a good example I guess…) Anyway, I don’t remember Tom being around for what happened next…
I was sitting in Geometry class in about late April or early May – it was the first class after lunch and it was up in the second story of one of the buildings (a converted barn), and all the windows were open. There was an older kid in my class named Matt Glick. Matt had just gotten his license a few months earlier, and drove an MGB – of course, I didn’t know that at the time – to me, it was just a “small green convertible”…
Matt was talking with some other guys about this car shop he worked at after school, and all of the cool cars they have there. He’s rambling off all of these fancy sounding car names that I’ve never heard of, and I eventually heard him say, “Yeah, and my boss owns a bunch of XKE’s too.”
Now, I’m a pretty chatty guy, and I knew these guys from being in class with them all year, and so in an attempt to look cooler than I was, I said, “Oh yeah – XKE’s are cool…” – because my father had said they were and that was all I needed to know – and as it turns out, all I DID know about them…
“Hey – he’s looking to sell some – you should come down and check them out.”
It was a Tuesday…
