A Little Love for the Pinto

I remember when my family first got our hatchback Pinto. It was light blue and had a kind of shimmering glamour to it when my dad pulled into the driveway with it for the first time. This was in the days before Pintos became something of a joke, before the whole scandal of them exploding if rear-ended or whatever story of malfunction it was that later dogged them came out. This was when one of the characters in Charlie’s Angels—the one played by Cheryl Ladd, I think—actually drove a white Pinto in the show, and it looked cool and normal and not dated. Anyway, my dad bought this blue Pinto with its silver trim and navy blue interior, and we all came out in the driveway and circled it like tourists at an exhibition, ooohing and aaahhing before taking turns climbing into it. Seeing as there were six of us in total and this was a hatchback Pinto, we had to take turns. It was our “second car,” mainly for my dad to drive to work, and he parked it on the right side of the driveway so that our “family car,” the burgundy, boat-like Chevy Impala that my mother drove and used to shuttle us to swimming and piano lessons, could back out of the garage. I remember delicately fingering the shiny silver emblem of the horse galloping on the back of the car, thinking that that made the car even more special and beautiful—they decorated it with a horse! Kind of like the way I would put stickers of my favorite animals and cartoon characters on things I owned as a way to spruce them up, only fancier. It wasn’t until a number of years later that I actually made the connection between the silver horse and the fact that the car was a Pinto. Up until then, that was just another interesting and nonsensical word to me, like all car names were. Of course, I felt a little stupid when I learned that a pinto was a type of horse and that an impala was a horned animal that lived in Africa, but how was I supposed to know? I lived in Southern California suburbia and was still learning addition and subtraction when that car came into our lives.

Anyways, that Pinto was great, and we loved it like it was a new member of the family. We’d help my dad wash it on the weekends, all of us dipping our sponges into buckets of soapy water and vigorously scrubbing whatever section we had been assigned to. Because I was the youngest (and smallest), I ended up with the lower parts of the car—everything below the silver trim. As I squatted down, looking up occasionally to cry out against an older sibling for dripping on me, there was such a satisfaction in sudsing away the layer of dirt splatter kicked up by the wheels and seeing the pearly light blue emerge like new again.

But the best thing about the Pinto was the hatchback area—the open space behind the cramped back seats with the scratchy navy carpet material stretched over the bump of the spare tire nestled underneath. If we bent our legs (our kneecaps making faint smudges as they rubbed the glass), two of us—maybe even three if it was me and my equally tiny girlfriends—could lie on our backs in that space while my dad drove us around. We’d stare up through the glass, with its thin orange defroster lines running across it, and watch the clouds and blue sky and the sudden appearance of leafy trees or telephone lines pass over us like it was some kind of magic show put on specifically for our benefit. And whenever we’d happen upon an empty residential street, my dad would weave the car back and forth, back and forth, in sudden swinging turns that would fling us from side to side, and we’d roll and bump against each other, shrieking with laughter.

That same Pinto became something of an embarrassment in my teen years. The shine had begun to dull, Charlie’s Angels was no longer on the air, and it was just this car that my family had had for a million years (my economizing parents tended to keep all of their cars long past the decade mark) and that had been demoted to the car my siblings learned to drive in and were allowed to use for local outings and errands. My last clear memory of riding in it was on a hot summer day when I was in high school. I don’t remember what the occasion was, but for some reason I needed to go up to the Fullerton/Brea area and my brother had to drive me. And I remember that I had to be dressed up, which made the heat of the day even more miserable, as dressed up in those days meant a slip and nylons. Driving on the freeway was no longer an option in the Pinto, so my brother drove us on city streets, the main one to our destination being State College Boulevard. We did all right with all the short stop and go sections, but there is a stretch of State College that is just one giant hill, where everyone revs up and just goes for it. My brother pulled over to the far right lane and switched off the air-conditioning, but that didn’t do much good. The engine strained and huffed like some ancient beast dragging a load of rocks, and the car shook and shuddered, but even with all of that, we were only going about 24 miles an hour. Cars in the other lanes zoomed past us, and the ones in our own lane edged up to our bumper aggressively before losing patience and accelerating around us. “Can’t you go any faster?” I snapped at my brother, mortified. “I’m already pressing the gas pedal as far as it goes,” my brother snapped back. We watched a few more cars zoom past us, taking in their drivers’ dirty looks, and suddenly, out of nowhere, we were laughing like a couple of lunatics. Our slow, sweaty chug up that endless hill on Sate College in our poor, wheezing Pinto had become the funniest thing ever.

The Pinto didn’t last much longer after that ride. Wanting something more reliable (and freeway-viable) for his work commute, my father went out and bought a new type of car called a Toyota Camry. We had the oohing and aahing session in the driveway once again, while the Pinto skulked under the tree on the street in front of our house. My father sold the Pinto to some guy for a few hundred dollars shortly afterwards, most likely for parts. And while it’s probably silly to get sentimental about that old car, I wish I’d given it a pat goodbye. It sure was a good little pony, and it sure gave us some good times.