Hot Rods and Spring Break in Panama City Beach (long)

Growing up I was friends with a couple of brothers whose father owned a couple of car garages. And they had a huge car barn where we built hot rods and worked on our own cars. The coolest part about building these hot rods was that we got to drive them from time to time. You want to talk about feeling like a bad ass, be in high school and roll up to the school in a blown 23 T-Bucket or a 32 Ford Coupe with a chopped top and suicide doors, shaved door handles and exhaust loud enough to set off ever alarm in the parking lot.

A little before spring break one year, one of the brothers and I was talking about going to Panama City Beach for spring break. Of course moolah was the biggest concern. We were in high school after all. My friend mentioned that his parents were going down and that we could stay with them. This guys parents where cool as hell, what time we came and went was absolutely no concern, knowing his parents they were going to stay in a nice place (bonus). Then he laid the deal maker down on me, if I went we got to take the T-Bucket and the 32. Can we leave now!

Think about it, a young guy with sweet hot rods at the biggest spring break spot, I was in heaven. Spring break couldn’t get there fast enough.

The day of the trip comes and we are both smiling like a couple of rats eating cheese, even though it was a bit cool (probably in the 50’s). In typical fashion we make a quick check to make sure that we have everything before we head out and then go to fill up before we head out. Since these where hand made cars we stopped every now and then just to make sure that they were running fine and so on. At one point my friends dad had decided that the cars where fine and that we didn’t have to stop any more.

There we are heading down the highway being the center of attention to everyone going in both directions. My friend’s parents in the lead in the 32 with my friend and I following in the Bucket. For those of you who might not know what a 23 T-Bucket looks like mash here and if you don’t know what a 32 Ford coupe looks like mash here. Damn we were cool …and cold, but we were cool. Damn it was cold. Very shortly after the trip started we both opted for leather jackets. Not long after that we looked like freaking bank robbers, ski masks, gloves, two jackets, sun glasses and scarves. But we were cool. Shivering like a Chihuahua trying to shit out a peach seed, but we were cool.

Smelling that salt air when we finally got there made it all worth while. The girls in bikinis didn’t hurt either. It was awesome, we were damn near famous. We check in and couldn’t wait to get out and cruise. But we had to play it cool and not geek out. So we went and got something to eat with the parental units and put our plan together. We hopped in the 23 and scoped out the area, made sure to cruise by the beach to make our very loud presence know and so on. That night we decided to cruise the strip and look for tail… I mean see how everyone was doing. It didn’t take us long to realize that this car, which had about the same horsepower as the space shuttle, was not made to cruise in barely moving strip traffic. It was so powerful and geared so low that when we were stopping I had to pull up on the steering wheel to hold the brake pedal down. It didn’t take long to decide that when we were not moving to put it in park. Oh, one thing about that, this car had a slap shifter in it, but was put in backwards on purpose (long story, don’t ask), so instead of park being at the top of the column it was at the bottom. It can be a little confusing. So there we are with the car in park being too cool for everyone around us when traffic finally starts to move, I put the car in what I thought was drive but apparently it was reverse. I figured this out when I pushed down the gas pedal and we went backwards. You know that saying “frozen in fear”, that was the girl behind us in the little Honda Civic that we damn near plowed into. Fortunately I was able to stop the car from changing the aerodynamics of her Civic. I get it in drive and off we go, in the right direction this time.

Ironically I had just told my friend that I bet that car would cause a wreck that week because of people not paying attention, I know, I am good!

After cruising for a bit we needed some petrol and pulled into a gas station. Just as an FYI, if you accidentally put diesel into a blown 23 T-Bucket because you were looking at chicks, when the diesel gets to the cylinders and ignites it will shoot a big ass flame out of the blower. So we had to call the dad and he had to get a bucket from the maintenance guy at the condos so that we could drain the 8 gallons of diesel that some brainchild put into this car. Even as we were sitting there with draining the diesel out we were still cool. After making us feel like complete dumbasses his dad went back to the condo and we went back to cruising the strip for a bit. Remember how I was telling you about how powerful this car was and how it was not built for all of the cruising, well there is another reason this is true. The engine on this car gets hot, damn hot. It didn’t take us long to realize that we needed to get some air blowing over the radiator or we were going to have a problem. So we pull off of the strip to go hit some of the back roads for a bit. No sooner had we pulled off had I decided that to get air blowing on the radiator that we had to get moving so I punched it. If you looked at the pictures in the links above you realize that there isn’t much to this car, so the simple math of light weight car + extremely strong motor + dumbass standing on the gas pedal = the front wheels launching off the ground and two idiots screaming (literally) down a side road while doing a wheelie in a car. Thankfully my cat like reflexes told me to get off the gas pretty quickly. After repeating “holy shit” about 50,000 times each we both did a quick “are we dead” check and decided that we survived.

But we still had to get the car cooled off and we didn’t want to wait on it to cool on its own. As we are making our way to one of the back roads so we can haul ass and get the temps down some jackass in a mustang is trying to race us, yeah we smoked his ass and he suddenly decided that he had to turn, pussy. So we get the car cooled off and head back to the strip. After another hour or so of bumper to bumper, barely moving traffic the temps go up again. But this time we were at a prime place to actually pull over and let the car cool off, right in the middle of the strip. We pull off the road right by the beach (nice breeze blowing, I am a smart cookie) and proceed to hang out on the car watching the traffic. It was great, we were getting cat calls and invited to parties like it was going out of style. It was like the girls where coming out of the sand they were everywhere, life was great. A couple of girls pulled over behind us and where chatting with us for a bit when I noticed that there was no more traffic on the road in the direction that we were facing. The last car was right beside where we pulled over and then nothing as far as we could see. It was weird. Right after I noticed that I kept hearing this noise, this sort of winding noise. I checked and the fan on the car wasn’t running, the fuel pump wasn’t running but I could not figure out what this little noise was and it was getting louder. About this time I see a little light flickering in the distance. It was some guy on a scooter and he was hauling ass (for a scooter). As he got closer we could tell that he was not paying attention to the traffic but was looking at us. Then BAM he slammed at full speed into the car that was beside our car. He flew over their car and crashed face first into the back windshield car in front of them. His little red scooter literally broke into pieces. But it was like something from the circus, the guy rockets himself head first into the back glass of this car, lands on his feet does a 360 looking around and then collapses on the street. A complete WTF moment. Out of instinct we start to pick up the pieces of his scooter and someone went to go call the medics. When we realized that this guy was going to probably be ok was the exact same time that we realized that we had been drinking and that we need to bounce! We were out of there, slinging sand all along the way. Sorry, but I am not going to jail because of the human crash test dummy.

Some time later we were back on the strip and happened to be in the area where the human spitwad tried to carpool at 50 MPH when a cop motions us over. F’ing great, we are going to jail and there are so many reasons why: no seat belts; I have no idea if this car is street legal; the tail lights had this blue piece on them that made them light up purple which I heard was illegal; minor intox; no catalytic converter; being loud as fuck; DUI; oh and that hauling ass after that dude went X-games with that scooter. We pull over and shut the car off and I start to go for my wallet when the cop starts to ask me all of these questions, none of which were can I see your licenses. He says that he has seen us around and then proceeds to ask if the blower is really hooked up to which my friend interjected “You damn right it is!” Thanks jackass. So the cop just keeps asking questions like how many horses does it have, what size is the motor, this and that. Which I am sure is going to be used against us in a court of law. And then he ask us if we can fire it up and let him hear it. Sure, why not, if I’m going to the pokey might as well make it a good one right. So I crank the car and the cop says “rev it up” and I give it this little baby rev. The cops says “no man, get on it” and grabs the fucking throttle and opens that bitch up. People all around jumped, car alarms are going off, people are coming out of their hotel rooms to see what was going on. Turns out he is just a gear head too. So now we are playing this to our advantage we got a cop buddy. Man we let him sit in it, rev it like a drunken hells angel, take pictures and anything else he wanted. After about 20 minutes or smoozing with local law enforcement he ask us if it would spin the tires (33 inch Mickey Thompsons) we told him no because there is just too much traction and not enough weight. He doesn’t believe us and says he wants us to get on it to see. So he stops traffic and lets the traffic on the road get a good ways down the road. Then he tells us to “get on it but don’t half ass it”. So we pull out onto the road, I tell my friend to hang on and we punch it again. We pulled the wheels off the ground about two to three feet or so and got off of it long enough for the tires to touch the ground again and kept on keeping on. When we circled back around this cop was waving and giving us a big thumbs up. I just knew we were going to jail. It was getting late and we had enough fun for one night so we decided to head back to the condo.

I don’t know what we did but for some reason my friend’s dad was really happy the next day and let us carry the 32 out that night. We loved that car. It was totally pimp with a TV, cell phone (this was almost 20 years ago) and the most important thing heat/ac.

After the 8,372,623 time we heard “hey, ZZ Top” it started to get a bit annoying and people started seeing the back of our middle fingers. The car was red just like the car on the cover of “Eliminator” but we also realized that it looked like that car, even way back when we made it. So we didn’t need every geek on the strip to remind us. That car was sweet and so much fun to drive and you would be surprised how many girls you can cram into a car like that. After scoring some brew we wanted to head to a place where we wouldn’t get so much attention so we headed to this steak house and parked out back to drink for a bit. One of the kitchen staff guys came out to have a smoke and saw the car, we thought we were busted but he was cool and wanted to check out the car. Then he went and got some of his buddies and they will all kinds of excited and wanted to take pictures with the car and so on. Being the jackass that I am, I told them if they could score me and my friend a couple steak dinners we would let them take all the pictures that they wanted and I will be damned if they didn’t hook us up. Snap away fellas. Even the manager came out to get his picture taken with it. We just wanted to drink beer without getting busted by the cops, like I said we were still in high school.

After the free meal we decided to see just how lucky we were, off to the bars Batman! We roll into the parking lot of one of the biggest clubs on the beach, La Vela, and just ask the door guy if there was a place we could park where no one would mess with the car. The guy moves some cones so that we could park right by the door and he welcomes us in. We realized that something about those cars made door guys forget to id us. Advantage us! And since those were the only two cars we had with us we had to take one of them every time we went somewhere. Not getting carded makes up for all of the other hi-jinks.

Don’t get dead