Though at times the bug could perform some of the most amazing feats, at other times it would spring most unpleasant surprises. Steve Mrowiec was riding shotgun with me on I-5 when traffic suddenly stopped. I laid into my brakes and found that they were completely gone. We were seconds away from slamming into the back of a Ford truck and I had the brake pedal pushed all the way to the floor with absolutely no effect.

At sixty miles an hour I veered onto the shoulder and whizzed past the long line of traffic halted in the fast lane to our right. I continued pumping the brakes. Nothing. I pulled the emergency brake. Nothing. Then all of a sudden we were past the slowdown. I veered back into the fast lane and kept going. A couple miles down the road, we got our brakes back.

My Volkswagon played an integral role in some of the difficulties I had during the period where I was crashing at Scottís place. It all started when I was still living with my grandparents, and I made the mistake of letting a woman drive my car. Megan was a cute little brunette I knew, and she wasnít an accomplished driver. I thought that by taking her to Wenberg park she might have a chance to learn the ropes in a slow-paced environment where she couldnít do to much damage.

She panickedÖand when most women panic they lose their brains. She accidentally jammed her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, and we ran into a stump the size of a small house. At the time I didnít think it was too big of a deal. Yeah, the steering was messed up, and I had to take the front bumper home in the back seat, but I didnít give too much thought to it at the time.

As I extricated the bug from the stump, and was wrenching the bumper loose from the prong, where it hung by a scrap of shredded metal, the park ranger pulled up behind us in his truck. He scratched his balding dome, and immediately decided that he should exert whatever minimal authority he had over us. He went back to his truck and produced a ticket pad on which he promptly wrote me a citation for damaging the stump.

He made a few ill-received comments about how I should watch where I was going, and he wondered aloud, how I ever managed to get a driving license. I didnít bother to inform him that my friend, Megan, had been driving the car. I figured that since she was licenseless it would go a little harder on her, if I were to let her fess up and take the heat.

After that, I pretty much put the incident behind me and forgot about it and the ticket. The main difference was that now the bugís steering pulled ferociously to the right, and I was driving with two horns sticking out front of the bug where the bumper should have been. It enhanced the road warrior, street combat qualities of the already battered vehicle, and I thought it looked kind of cool.

So Megan wouldnít get into trouble I made up a story about how I had parked at the top of the hill and my emergency brake had broken. The car, I said, rolled down the hill and ran into a tree. If someone looked really hard maybe they could find a grain or two of truth in my lie. Basically, it was complete fiction. To this day, I still havenít paid for that asinine stump damage ticket, and when Iím laying on my deathbed- Iíll still refuse to pay the idiotic thing.

The two horns on the front of the bug truly did lead to a devilish inspiration. I was out late one night with Shawn Mrowiec and I swung by the Everett Mall. It was about two in the morning and there were a few loose shopping carts hanging around the otherwise barren parking lot. I swung the bug in behind one of the carts and hooked it in one of the prongs where the bumper should have been attached. Shifting rapidly, I got the bug up to about forty miles an