Buddy, You Can Buy My Car

I had no experience selling a used car. This was the mid-1980s, and there was no online marketplace. You either traded in your vehicle for an upgrade, donated it for a charity write-off, or you put an ad in the local newspaper and took your chances.

An 1974 orange Volkswagen Beetle

I’d been driving my father’s orange Volkswagen Beetle — think Herbie the Love Bug, but in a more nauseating color. During its tenure with our family, the car had been through the mill. When I was 16, my younger Brother E, at 14 years old a full head taller than me, took it for a ride with a friend one weekday afternoon.

All was going well until they were rear-ended at a Stop sign. The other driver saw how freaked out these two teenagers were, realized Brother E had no driver’s license or documentation for the Beetle, saw no damage to his own car, and promptly left the scene. All’s well that ends well, until you consider that a Beetle’s engine is in the trunk. If he’d hit them with any significant force, that car would have been toast right then and there.

I drove the Beetle for my first few years of college, but there were always issues. The oil pan leaked, which meant constantly cleaning the garage floor with sand and rags. Plus the latch to the trunk had been damaged in the collision, so it never locked properly. My local service station rigged a way to securely keep it closed, earning my eternal…