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I've owned my 90tt for just over a year. Before I bought it, I was a novice DIY maintainer at best. After my first post in the tech forum, an astute observer told me that I was a retard for buying such a complex machine and that if I didn't know $h!t about cars, I should sell it. Since then I've spent hundreds of hours reading posts, learning, and doing all the work on the car myself. I couldn't do it if it weren't for all of you. So a month or so ago I decide I can't stand my wife driving our 82 Mercedes turbodiesel anymore. She deserves better. The trouble is, it's worthless. I'll sell the Z and use the money to buy her a nice new Jetta TDI. After all, when I bought the Z the plan was to only keep it for a few years and then move on to something more practical. It just got a sweet paint job and it's running beautifully, so I figured it was the perfect time to sell. I bought a big white decal for the back window, FOR SALE $11,000 and my phone# (yeah, I know that's probably more than any of you would pay for my car) and took out a big ad at autotrader.com to run til it sold. All my buddies at work made fun of me (not auto enthusiasts) and asked "You really think you can get eleven grand for that thing?" For the first few weeks, there wasn't much interest. I got a few calls and had a couple people stop me at the gas station to look at it, but no one came to drive it or really look it over. I started to wonder if I wasn't going to have to spring for a new decal. Then, last Thursday evening, I get a call from a guy that wants to come see it, in half an hour. I ask if he needs directions, "No, I know where your place is," he says. "Huh," I think to myself, "that's odd." He must have passed the house while I had the car out of the garage or something. Whatever. He ends up calling back to say he's got to go out of town that night and will be back on Saturday to check out the car. I'm skeptical. Saturday morning the phone rings. It's the dude and he says he'll be over in 15 minutes. I'm just finishing wiping the brake dust off my front wheels when this kid in a crappy blue flare-side Chevy pulls up. I'm not joking about the kid part. He's five-foot-nothing and he's never shaved in his life.
He parks his truck and introduces himself. I tell him he can pop the hood and look around while I finish cleaning the wheels. While he's poking around I rattle off all the things that have been recently replaced. He wants to know if anything's been rebuilt or upgraded. Nope, all original, all stock. Do the turbos stick? No- you'll see for yourself. Does it leak? No. After some more chit-chat and the "do all the lights work?" dance, he's ready to go for a drive. He owned a '91 NA sometime since he got his driver's license and says he loves these cars. We back out of the driveway. I'm glad I'd warmed the car up before he got there, because he floors it as we leave my neighborhood and pull out onto a divided street, breaks the back end loose and gets nice and sideways, but manages to keep it on the pavement. "It's been a while since I drove a rear-wheel drive," he says, brimming over with confidence. I don't ask about the front-wheel drive pickup he drove to my house. We pass a gas station and he asks if I use 'high-rate'... "I'm sorry, what was that?" "Do you put regular gas in it?" he asks. "Are you kidding?" He tells me all about how he's got an RX-7 with a Chevy 350 in it and how he gets less tickets since he quit street racing and joined a track. He just moved to town. He's not working. He used to sell cars up north but got run out by some big guy he worked for over a money dispute. He's taking the guy to court for assault. I'm still trying to figure out how old this kid is. He talks like Tommy Tuffnuts, says he knew where I lived because he's banging one of my neighbors. With what? The whole time he's driving my car I'm thinking about all the work I've done on it in the past year, how good it looks, how well it runs, how much it pisses me off to listen to this kid talk and watch him drive my car. Finally, we're back. My wife is waiting in the garage. The kid doesn't make an offer. I'm getting new back tires on Monday and he wants to drive it again after they're on. He takes off. I say to my wife, "That guy is a jackass." She says, "Are you sure you want to sell the Z?" I say, "I'm not selling it to that idiot." She says, "You don't have to sell it to anyone... ever." Music to my ears.
beat army |
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23:34:17 03/12/06
