Every once in a while, I just can’t pass up the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt. I suppose that’s the point. Now, I wonder how many people felt the same way about this one. But I’d be willing to bet not very many can match this…

Despite the fact this sounds like the opening to a 6th-grade “what I did on my summer vacation” paper, the best car I ever owned was a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle. It was “competition orange” with black trim. Even though it looked like a Jack O’Lantern with too much mascara, for 700 bucks it was all mine. All I wanted a was a decent little car to get me through college, but little did I know that four-wheeled, four-speed, four-cylindered chunk of 40’s German technology would end up carrying such a truckload of stories.

First and foremost, it was a fucking great car. My college years were spent in North Dakota; the jewel of the northern plains. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the climate of “The Peace Garden State,” it can literally go from “fry an egg on the sidewalk hot” to “car won’t start without jumper cables” cold in a matter of days. That’s why the first thing I did to that VW was install an electric engine block heater.

Now if you ever owned an old-school VW “Bug,” and you did so in a sub-arctic clime, I really hope you knew of the miracle that was the gas-powered heater under the driver’s side dash. If you didn’t have that heater, then you knew winter transformed those VW seats into “genital flash-freezers.” Perhaps this explains why a state as vast as North Dakota is so sparsely-populated.

Taint freezers aside, this car could handle anything North Dakota had to offer. A rainstorm that flooded every underpass in town was no problem. Thanks to the VW’s belly-plate, it could float for a moderate distance. That very same belly-plate allowed ia “Bug” to be a big bobsled sliding its way over the top of snow drifts…provided you hit the bottom at said drift at a sufficient rate of speed. After all, there’s a reason why the guts of a VW Beetle made for one of the world’s greatest “dune buggies.”

Speaking of speed, a “Bug” would top out at only about 85 miles per hour, but in the hands of a driver who knew how to handle it’s four-speed manual transmission, it didn’t take long to get there. That was plenty fast to draw the attention of the highway patrol in the I Can’t Drive 55 1980s. While outrunning “Johnny Law” on the open road certainly was not an option, the short wheel base and bottom-heavy nature of the “Bug” meant it could easily out-corner the standard “rolling sofa” four-door cop-mobile.

Maintenance of such a vehicle was a snap. All you needed for a tune-up was a set of plug wires, four spark plugs, and a set of distributor points. You could get all that stuff from the J.C. Whitney catalog for about ten bucks. To get the engine timing right, all you needed was a friend with a timing light and to be strong enough to man-handle the crankshaft pulley. That was the true beauty in the simplicity of Dr. Porsche’s air-cooled, flat-four 1600 cc engine.

But for me, two things needed to happen. The first was an upgrade to the sound system. When I bought this car, it still only had the original AM radio. Now, if that was your only option in 1980s North Dakota, besides the farm report, you got the expected twang-ball country music, or a painful understanding that this was the last place on earth where Neil Sedaka records were still played on the radio.

Avoiding Laughter in the Rain in 1987 meant a tape deck, an equalizer, an amp, and a home-built speaker rack constructed largely from a pair of cannibalized Kenwood cabinet speakers. In other words, I could drown out any Camaro-based Def Leppard with 150 watts-per-channel of my beloved Rush. It goes without saying that since I was a college kid, this all had to done on the cheap…hence the re-purposed home speakers.

Not to mention, I needed to save some nickels for the pièce de résistance. Great tunes are only a part of the complete “party” experience; any college kid worth his salt knows how to get to the cheapest booze-up possible…keg beer.

Even if you never owned a “Bug,” you likely know one of its distinguishing features was it’s rear-mounted engine. Now, I would like to think that given Dr. Porsche’s German heritage combined with the Deutschlander’s love of beer that the following design feature wasn’t an accident. In a “Bug” there was a well in the nose where the engine would normally be. The proper use of this space was for the stowing of a spare tire. But with a little bit of hammering and a slight alteration to the plug used to drain any water out of that space, it could easily hold an 8-gallon “pony keg” with just enough ice to keep it cold.

You would think that would be enough to draw the cops’ attention…but wait…there’s more.. In place of the standard keg tap, we rigged a device that ran a line from the keg to the glove compartment where there was a spigot on a “sink-sprayer” style hose powered by a electric pump controlled by a toggle switch. It was easy to divert a bit of power from the sound system to operate the pump since it was all in roughly the same spot. All you had to do was open the glove box, pull out the hose, flip the switch and voilà…tap beer in the comfort of your own car.

At least until the cops found it…

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