The idea that something that has absolutely no real worth outside of character was never one that came easy for me.

Until I got that car.

Now, my twin brother and myself got a car on our 16th birthday. It was a really nice car, too. Can't remember the make and model, but it had all the works, though it was kinda old. Tape player, cruise control, all that. It was a fairly big car, but not a boat, and looked really nice in any case.

We had that car for about 8 months, constantly battling over who would take it when and whatnot.

In any case, after about 8 months, my brother wrecked that car. It wasn't his fault (he, to this day, drives like an 80-year-old woman), but in any case, we needed a replacement, so we could get to school and whatever.

A little background. Yes, I have a twin brother. A fraternal twin, meaning, essentially, not identical. He is, and always has been, my polar opposite. He is my Evil Twin, and I am his. He is responsible, hard working, incredibly anal retentive, and not particularly socially adept. Hence, he is the one who succeeds.

I, on the other hand, am irresponsible, lazy, an utter slob, and quite personable. Hence, I am here.

In any case, this was all taken into account when my mother purchased the replacement. Or rather, replacementS. Plural.

My brother at the time had a job. I did not. My mother bought for him an older model Ford Taurus, a quite nice car. He was to pay her monthly for it, as he had the means and wherewithal to do so, and my mother fully expected him to be good for it, which, of course, he was.

I, on the other hand, am and always have been an unrequited fuck-up.

So she bought me the cheapest car she could find.

A 1988 Grand Marquis. No frills. Manuel windows, manual locks, no cruise control, no tape player, nothing. She fully expected me to trash it within a month.

I am not a car guy. I can drive, I can pump gas, I can check the oil, and I can sometimes change a tire, and thus ends the list of my motor vehicle knowledge/skills. But let me tell you a little about this vehicle.

For one, as I said, it had no frills. Secondly, however, this car was a fucking giant. 20 feet long, from bumper to bumper. Rear wheel drive with a 5-ton engine in the front, a good 15 feet away. Hence, driving during the winter led to a great many adventures and disasters (after the first winter, I began putting bags of concrete in the trunk to weigh the car down accurately. Worked wonders).

My mother's theory on this was that, as I am so irresponsible and a fuck-up in general, that I would likely get into more than a few accidents, and thus, the bigger the car the better. She described this car as "a tank", which indeed it was. I could get into a head on collision with a VW Bug in this car, and the Bug would simply get lodged in the hood (which was 6 feet long at least) and I could continue driving, yelling requests at the driver of the Bug to look out his rear window and let me know what the status was regarding oncoming traffic.

"Hey man! Any traffic in the other lane?"
"Uhhhhh, no. Can you pull ov…."
"Sweet! Let me pass this truck then, we'll get to a rest stop sooner or later!"

Now, many of my friends were upper middle class, so my car was not what one would call a "status symbol" for me. At first, it was received with more than a few "Holy shit, that piece of shit is HUGE!" comments.

In any case, I never let this bother me. When you are 16 and get a car to yourself, you are FREE. And to tell you the truth, I kinda liked this car. Hell, I fucking loved it.

In any case, the car itself was a horrible shade of color. Somewhere between cream and brownish cream. The same color as the folders you can get en masse at Office Depot.

Thus, one day, I decided to name it.

The Manilla Gorilla.

You see, I have discovered that naming things really lends it a new dimension. I name everything I own, ESPECIALLY cars. I have no idea what that says about my personality, you tell me, but I do know that it really adds personality to otherwise impersonal objects.

I started referring to it around my friends by that name. Then, the more people would laugh at it, the more defensive I would get.

"What do you mean it's a boat? This, my friend, is the motherfuckin' Manilla Gorilla. Chicks DIG this car, man! 20 feet of pure animal magnetism! It only has one gear…sexual drive! This car has CHARACTER, man. Fuck your little Hyundai. My car could eat yours ALIVE!!! I could get a fucking Caligula style orgy in the back seat, that's how big it is. Shit, I have a spare car in the trunk. I'm thinking of putting in a pool." Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

And so I started playing off my car as the Pimpmobile I knew it could be.

What surprised me was that the more I talked it up, the more that people started taking to it. They all drove Escorts and Miatas and other such communist vehicles, I had the biggest fucking gas guzzling travesty of efficiency man had ever created. 3 miles to the gallon. Could turn on a 10 foot diameter dime. Could go from 0 to 60 in about 5 minutes or so (though for some reason could go from 60 to 100 in seconds). Could go over speed bumps while doing 60 and you wouldn't even FEEL it. Could parallel park only by shoving the other cars out of the way. It ran all right, and nothing was visibly really wrong with it (when I got it at least, but I'm getting to that.), though it was not, as you would say, an economy car, nor was it a luxury vehicle by any stretch of the imagination.

This was a few years before the SUV craze, mind you. My car was generally the largest thing on the road.

And it ALWAYS got the right of way.

"Silly Toyota! Do you see how BIG my car is! Get the fuck out of my way, can't you see how LARGE this car is!?! You want a taste of me, bitch?! No, didn't think so. Well fucking get the hell out of my way."

The point is, the more I talked it up, the more people began to see it as THE shit, rather than a piece of it. It went from another crappy car to a cultural icon in my community in a matter of weeks. Soon, I started getting requests from girls to take their senior pictures on the hood of my car. People I didn't know would ASK for rides in it. While the seats were not really seats, but rather, two couches (a front couch and a back couch), that back couch saw more ass than a toilet seat.

The trunk could hold 7 people. That was proven on more than one occasion. And seven LIVE people mind you. I am sure that if they were cadavers, it could have fit at least 11 (that theorem, however, has only been proven up to 3).

There is not a helluva lot to do in Topeka, Kansas when you are 16. Many a weekend, we would decide to go get lost in the Kansas countryside. And every time, my car was the one chosen to take us.

You see, I have a notoriously bad sense of direction. When I was living in Waterville, ME, population of two thousand and change, I couldn't find my way to the gas station, which is quite a feat in a town that size (of course it doesn't help that they paved whatever moose trails they found and called them "roads", but that is neither here nor there). People would give me addresses, and I would just stare at the blankly. I need precise directions or I end up in Utah. I get lost EVERYTIME I set out for anywhere. Sometimes for 5 minutes, sometimes for 5 hours (the record, BTW, was being lost for 36 hours), but it ALWAYS happens.

This, however, has never really bothered me.

The aspect of my personality that I am probably most proud of, that helps me most get through this life and this country and everything in between, is my relaxed nature. I am the quintessential "go with the flow" sort of person.

So when I get lost, I just turn up the radio, gun the accelerator, and head out for….wherever. Of course, when I had someplace to be at a certain time, this could be maddening, but generally I quite enjoyed it. Just heading out, trying to find my way to wherever it was I was going, and usually not succeeded. I have seen a lot of this countryside by doing this. It is actually quite a cathartic release. So much so, that I did it recreationally. Just pick a direction and go go go. I always seem to find my way back eventually, but the destination is never important. It's all about the riiiiiiiiiiide, man.

A lot of adventures in that car. I got it AIRBORNE on more than one occasion (which was QUITE a feat considering the size of the car). I also learned that, when you are doing 90 miles an hour on a dirt road in that car, if you opened the passenger side door (it was a 2-door car, thus the doors were about 8 feet long each), the car would turn sharply left. I even strapped a guy to the roof of it once and took a trip down a dusty and bumpy old road (the guy owed me money).

Speaking of which, another odd side effect of the car is that it was a police MAGNET. I got pulled over 16 times in one year alone, but never got a ticket. My theory on this, besides the fact that I was constantly doing illegal maneuvers, is that pigs going profiling would see the car, figure it must contain 6 or 7 black drug dealers (it just looked like it would), and then pull me over for some bullshit reason. When they would see I was just a 17-year-old white kid, they would check my license (which back then was valid) and send me on my way. Never got a ticket.

Everybody loved that car. It was notorious. It had a spot reserved at my school. Were anybody but me to park there, his or her car would almost always get fucked with (not by me). A fixture of sorts.

But as in all things it passed. My mother HATED that car after the first year, and eventually she and my brother conspired together and told me they were going to get rid of it.

My friends and I decided to plan a Viking funeral for it. I had a contest almost, "how to destroy my car before my mom can sell it to some old lady". There were some great entries. Drive it over a bridge, one guy told me. No no, blow that shit up! Drive it into a lake and see how deep you can get it, suggested my buddy's girl.

In the end, the winner was the suggestion from Carl.

"Dude," he said to me solemnly one night over a case of beer and a bag of weed, "you HAVE to enter that beast in a demolition derby."

There was one coming up, where just regular people could enter their cars and they would gather in a gigantic arena and destroy each other. It sounded marvelous.

So, I went out and got all the papers and everything for the derby, and then came to discover that registering for a demolition derby requires a TON of work. You have to take out the gas tank and do a whole bunch of other shit to ensure that your car does not blow up. Remember, I can SOMETIMES change a tire.

Effort, my friends and neighbors, is the enemy of the drug addict.

In retrospect, I really wish I had done that. It is definitely something I want to do before I die. And my car would have fucking DESTROYED all the other ones.

But alas, I chose to not put in all the work required. And so I compromised instead.

Bright and early one Thursday afternoon, I drove my car into the dead center of my high school parking lot during lunch, so it had about a 30-foot radius area to itself. I went to the trunk, got out a 50 pound sledge and a sign that read "Viking Funeral, 5 bucks a pop!" and placed them both besides my car.

At first the people returning from lunch just gave me a really strange look.

So I decided to grease the jar, so to speak.

I got up on the roof of the Gorilla, raised the sledge over my head, and came down with a massive bash to the windshield, which literally EXPLODED.

That's around the time the crowd started to form.

BAM!!! BAM!!! BAM!!!!

I made almost 500 bucks that day. Not to mention quite a reputation for being stark raving mad. And there was only one injury (for real, why on earth would someone take the sledge to the fucking TIRE!?! Fucking moron). I have to say it was a site to behold. Pure automotive carnage at its finest.

In the end, the Gorilla was unrecognizable and a good 90 people got their rocks off in a way that can only happen with a sledgehammer. God may have made the hammer, but the sledge, that is the work of Satan himself, and I am eternally grateful to Him for that.

There was a bit of aftermath to it that I won't go into (you mean I'm not allowed to just LEAVE my destroyed car in your parking lot? Well why the fuck not?!), not to mention I caught hell from my mother about it, and most of the money went to her (though I threw a helluva Goodbye Manilla Gorilla party that weekend with some of it), but I was going to be damned if I would let her sell the Gorilla to some fucking little old lady. The fact that she was the one who bought it in the first place was irrelevant. That car had HISTORY, man. It had STYLE. It had CHARACTER!!!! It deserved to die like a fucking man.

And that it did.

I ended up with another soulless Ford Taurus like the rest of my family.

The end of an era.

RIP Manilla gorilla.

A few years later I wound up driving Jesus Chrysler, but that is a whole 'nother story.