Betting On Black: My First Car was my Dream and my Nightmare!

One of the greatest joys in life is getting your driver's license. You finally feel like an adult and don’t have to rely on your parents to drive you places. With a license, becomes a great responsibility but also a great burden on your parents. I know my parents were terrified when my brother and I got our licenses. My brother got his license in an era where a beeper was the only “communication” you had when you were outside of your parents' house. My parents had to buy him a calling card so he could use a pay phone to call home for free.

I got my license in 2002, and cell phones were just starting to be an everyday thing. I can’t even tell you how many calls my mom made to that darn Nokia I had. This is when we worried about how many minutes we had left on the phone. Mom didn’t care because she was paying the bill. I didn’t turn 17 years old until the end of November during my senior year of high school. Everyone, even juniors, had their license before me, so I had to hitch a ride to school with my buddy DJ. November 26th, 2002, came, and it was my 17th birthday.

I have to preface this with the movie Fast and the Furious had come out a year prior, and my buddies and I ate it all up. We needed to have one of those cars. Street racing cars were super cool to us, and anything else was not an option. I forgot about one thing. Money. My parents weren’t rich, and even if they were, they were not buying me a car that was out of their price range. Luckily for me, I had been working as a busboy at General’s Quarters Restaurant at the Trenton Mercer Airport since I was 14 years old, and had a “ton” of money saved.

Let’s talk about my dream car. It was sitting right in front of a dealership on Olden Avenue. Whenever one of my friends who had a license would drive to Wendy’s, we would see this red car just staring at me. It was a Mitsubishi 3000GT parked in a small lot right next to the Boston Market. A guy in my neighborhood had the same car in green, and I fell in love with it. I couldn’t have been more than 8 years old, and it became my dream car! I was turning 17 in a month, and this Red Mitsubishi 3000GT was still on that Olden Avenue lot, and it was in my “price range.” Dream car acquired!

I was still 16, so I couldn’t even drive the car off the lot. It had to be a month that the car sat in the driveway without me being able to drive it. My brother came home from college during Thanksgiving break and begged to drive it. Request denied!

The day came when I was getting my license, and I was sick with Mono. I was out of commission and out of school for like 3 weeks. I took the driver's test in my mother’s 2000 Toyota Corolla, sick as a dog. I passed the test, but had been out of school for 3 weeks, so I wasn’t driving anywhere. I finally got better and was finally in the driver's seat of my dream car. Music blasting, windows down, I thought I was the coolest dude in Ewing with the coolest car. This red shiny Mitsubishi 3000GT and I were inseparable. I had a 4-minute drive to high school, and I made sure those 4 minutes were full of flaunting this car. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but a few years ago, a girl who was 2 grades younger told me that all the girls she knew wanted to be a passenger in that car. My ego was larger than life when I was in this car!

Unfortunately, you wake up from a dream. That beautiful dream car was not a dream as I thought it was. It lived on a tow truck with more engine/mechanical problems than you could ever imagine. Here is my teaching point. Looks are deceiving. Do some research before you spend all the money you saved as a teenager. I ask myself, “Was it worth spending all the money I saved?” Hell yeah! Why? Because the girls liked it!