Messenger Puppet

Spot light? Check. Radar detector? Check. Mirror alligator? Check

April 1981 photography by Chevelle

Despite $1.30 to 1.40 for a gallon of gas and astronomical insurance rates… Some of these cars are used solely for transportation to work or school.  Other common uses are for mobile parties and for activities prohibited by a recent Supreme Court decision.  One individual’s “beast,” as he called it, looked like a combination para-military mobile command post (replete with numerous clubs, a Fuzzbuster, and a notorious spotlight), and a mobile party store.  Such blatantly obscene law-ignoring vehicles were, fortunately, very, very rare…

–Some idiot, a million years ago in an irrelevant puff piece

Oh. for some extra cash in 2001

Yes, it rained cocaine in the 1970s

from 1977-78
ca. 1973-1977

After they were cool; before they became cool again.

• first year for unleaded gas
• 400 V-8
  • gas consumption like a 440
  • performance like a 225 slant 6
  • reliability like one of these
• seat belt interlock
• copper with black vinyl roof

What sucks about the car? Everything above, plus, i never drove it. So, no playing policeman.

Also, road trips in it.

Dad: *screams irrationally* next time spill your Sprite on yourself, not on my seats.

Guess we know where i get it from…

1971 VW 411

1973 Plymouth Fury I

I was sliding down a hill on black ice until I hit a pole.

Ahh, sweet nostalgia…

Mopar? Yes

Actual 8 barrel? Basically

Plymouth Fury? God’s own

Late ‘60s? buzz. Take off 10 years. 1957

413 cid? N.F.C. Here is a ‘58 with a 318 and dual quads

Fat Drunk and stupid at Faber College (sort of).

It’s time to visit 8 Barrel, Phid (and Jack Dova even) in Ann Arbor. Crash in the dorms so you can pretend to be a student (except for the cranial firepower and rich ass parents parts).

Also not part of the experience? Going to class. (You don’t do that often at your own school, do you, Bluto?)

Valuable lessons are waiting for you:

a. Your friends have coined the phrase “mo’ fugly”  [motherfuckingugly] long before the invention of the interweb. This guy, across the hall from Phid, inspired the legend.

b. Play quarter bounce in mofugly’s room. Use rum instead of beer. You’re in college. You can handle it. Meet Birdy, who cannot help but be impressed with you. Or at least impressed with the fact that someone hasn’t thrown your drunk ass out a window yet. Especially her.

c. Progressive parties rock. Holy fucking shit! And that’s just from what 8 told you.

d. Bring cases of PBR or Old Milwaukee with you. Wisconsin pisswater is perfect for swilling while watching the Illinois game on a snowy 13 inch b/w TV. It’s White Trash week at the dorms and you are the guest of honor.

e. There’s a still in Phid’s closet.

f. Ride the Greyhound for the full poor white trash effect. Repeat whenever you can afford beer or gas, but not both.

g. It’s 2 am. You’re out of smokes. And cash. Hmm, cigarette vending machine; empty dorm hallway. How could you possibly bridge the gap between you and Joe Camel? Hmmm.

h. The health center is not open 24 hours so treating any “mysterious” scrapes, dislocations or other acquisitional injuries is up to you. Good thing alcohol kills pain. (The health center does carry penicillin. Remember this later on.)

i. Lunch trays. Snow. Hill. You’ll figure this one out too. Try not to die at the end of the run. Man, if there was just some big ass Ford wagon to skeech, you could be a 9 year old all over again.

j. Underground service corridors. Motion detectors. Security guards. Run. No, the other way.

k. 8 barrel (or his pissy roomie Edsel) has a stereo. Nothing promotes academic achievement like a 4 foot speaker cranked to 11. Dig the avant garde, eclectic alternative music available in big time universities. Bands that no one in Rogainetown has ever heard of [in 1982] like “the Clash” and Duran Duran. Rock out over and over. And over. And over.  Especially Rock the Casbah, because you can’t hear “wild” music like this back at home.

l. Ann Arbor parking police. Those fuckers don’t screw around. Even if you offer to bang the meter maid to get out of a ticket.

m. That big metal ‘M’ in the middle of the diag? Stepping on it means you’ll fail your next blue book exam. Because you go to a directional school, you have no idea what a blue book is. So just go ahead and jump all over that thing. Nobody will think you’re a dork or a weirdo. Unless they’re looking at you.

n. Possibly you’re out of your depth, little minnow.

o. In an unrelated development, University records show that 1337 students, believed to be dorks or weirdos, will be academically disqualified after failing mid-term bluebook exams which fall the week after one of your visits.

2. Somewhere in the midst of this Big 10 adventure, a spark of a post high school personality will ignite, which someday may grow into a full blown asshat. For now, indulge and nurture your inner proto-Penis Lord of Scum by drinking as much as possible. Then go looking for babes, because god knows, there is a shortage of horny little pricks roaming Bursley Lewis, even with all your HS buddies on the prowl.

3. You know what dorm girls dig above all else? Drunk fuckwads on holiday from Rogainetown goosing them in an otherwise empty hallway. (Like they’re not gonna figure out who did it. Moron.) Take credit later for doing this even if you didn’t actually have the cojones to commit a class 1 misdemeanor at crunch time.

4. Next most popular thing? Go troll the “girl floor” for dates. Doesn’t matter which one, because Girls Gone Wild has shown you that crazy hot horny chicks are everywhere on campus. Opening lines like, “well, I needed to piss” will work wonders when the RA busts you using the girls’ bathroom because you were too fucked up to know what floor you were on. Well, they won’t “work wonders” in a “let’s have conjugal relations like monkeys” way, but in an “it is so not worth calling campus security now that I’ve seen your puny junk” way.

5. Get your First Taste of Dorm Food (!), using the time tested, “aww, I forgot my meal card” method. Everyone else on the entire campus is relieved that you have not seen the Animal House cafeteria scene beforehand, so they don’t have to relive your lame ass recreation of the stunt Mike Rowgo pulled in 7th grade.

6. 8’s roomie Edsel is a neat-freak. Perform an intervention to disabuse him of this by crashing on his mattress. With the beer sweats. He’ll thank you, in a “who the fuck is that bastard who slept in my goddamn bed. I oughta beat the shit out of 8 for letting him do that” conversation you inadvertently hear in the shower stall next to him, while trying to wash away a hangover.

7. If free range hooters roaming your girlfriend’s summer apartment don’t blot out the continuing grief of three short months of WTF Were You Thinking, Sleeping With THAT Chick?, there’s always “Blazing Zippers” at the State Theater. (No, it is not an anthology of Mel Brooks comedies). But don’t yell “you suck” at the actress (even though you’re dying to, Shecky) and don’t yell “you asshole” at this guy in the normal people theater downstairs on the way out – it’s been done.