The Great Raisin

Before Penelope came in to my life I had another love: The Great Raisin.

The Great Raisin was my first car. He was an '88 Pontiac Bonneville. He was beautiful.

TGR originally belonged to Grammy. I remember riding in him as a kid in my little carseat...back when the tape player still worked. She retired him in 2004 when she bought a minivan because her increasing number of grandkids didn't really fit in TGR anymore.

I acquired TGR when I was 16. I practiced my sick driving skillz in him and generally wrecked havoc on the road and other drivers since I insisted upon driving exactly the speed limit. It drives Kelly and Mike crazy, but I assert that they both have lead foots and drive like maniacs. I've never gotten a speeding ticket, thankyouverymuch.

Anyway, TGR is named The Great Raisin because he was literally wrinkly. See, in the early millennium TGR had a peeling paint problem. So Grandad went to get him repainted. But before he took TGR in for a repainting he got him waxed. I'm not sure what prompted this. Probably a brain fart by Steve. What ended up happening is that all of the paint from the top of the car squished down the sides a little bit, creating a duct tape like texture to make my car actually wrinkly. It also didn't help that TGR was elephant gray. 

This is me in front of The Great Raisin back in the day. 

Before I go blasting TGR was all his faults, I have to say that for an '88 he was pretty technologically advanced. He had power steering, electric locks and windows, ABS brakes, a sunroof, a light-up car diagram that let you know when something was left open, preprogrammed radio station buttons, steering wheel radio controls, and a compass the size of a velveeta cheese slice. Pretty good for being built before Gameboys were invented.

On the other hand, by the time I got ahold of TGR in 2006, he had been around the block a time or two.
1. The AC was broken.
2. The tape player broke in late 90s
3. One of the back doors had a broken lock that had to be manually locked. The rest of the locks worked but you had to press the lock button multiple times.
4. Only 3 out 4 windows actually lowered, another one used to get stuck in the down position.
5. The fabric covering the interior roof was no longer connected to the interior roof. I had to use a push pin to keep it in place or I couldn't see out the back window.
6. The heater worked but it took so long to actually blow warm air that most of the time I just gave up on it and wore winter gear while driving.
7. It ran best on Supreme gas. At the height of the gas price explosion, it cost me $70 to fill up my tank and it probably only got between 10 and 15 miles to the gallon.
8. All of the padding between the doors and the car was pretty much eroded so it used to make a whistling noise when driving down the highway.
9. Sometimes the starter would just be a bitch and TGR wouldn't start.
10. The sunroof leaked like a mofo.
11. The windshield wipers squealed really bad.

The first time I ever got to drive it my Dad was in the passenger seat. As soon as I started backing out of the driveway a huge torrent of rust-stained rainwater gushed from the sunroof opening all over my Dad. The seal of the sunroof was basically shot and there really wasn't much I could do about it. My solution was to stock my car with a box of industrial automotive paper towel things and shove them all around the inside perimeter of the sunroof to soak up as much water as I could. This worked most of the time, but occasionally after huge storms there would be so much water inside the roof of the car that water would dribble out of my front seat light buttons.

Toward the end of my relationship with TGR, he developed some sort of connection shortage in the steering column. Such that he would make the dinging problem noise all the time. Driving in the rain sucked because between the loud DING DING DING DING of the steering column and the SQWUURCH SQWUURCH of the wipers it was like driving in a one woman calliope.

What finally prompted my parents to allow me to get a new car was that TGR liked to just randomly die on me. Occasionally when I was stopped somewhere, the RPM gauge would rev a couple of times and the indicator would bounce up and down, and then the engine would die and every single problem light in the car would blink on. It did this to me multiple times, most often when I was stopped at stoplights. Most the time I could jam it into Park and restart it, but sometimes TGR just wanted to be a little bitch and make people hate me. Other drivers go nuts on you when you don't move at a green light immediately, and it's not like it's MY goddamn fault that my car is is acting like a jackass. It used to be incredibly frustrating.

Probably the best thing about TGR was that it was seriously like driving a tank. This car was made in the mentality of Bigger is Better and I can attest to it being seriously hard to damage. The same guy that I pranked senior year also accidentally hit me in the parking lot one time. He drove a green Toyota Corolla and one time he failed to check behind him before reversing (I actually think he was texting) and scraped the left flank of his car against the front of TGR. His car looks like it had decided to caress a cheese grater. TGR only had a cracked license plate cover. Like I said, I used to drive a tank.