The Saga of Sunburn Revisited

The last time we heard from Sunburn, we were going over his heritage: born in Mexico of German parents at an assembly plant in Mexico City. It took 10 hours to cast all his engine parts, debus them, and assemble his 2.0-litre incline 4 engine made of German steel.

Sunburn was born in April of 1995 on a Wednesday. He is a Wednesday’s car. He is 18 years old, with 255,000 miles on his odometer. Needless to say, he has been to college and gone around the world 6 times. 18 years old for a commuter car is quite old, and he would be considered a Senior in a human lifetime.

This past week Sunburn wasn’t feeling so well. He called me on his telepathic new Alpine receiver, and I listened to what he had to say. He said, “Master, I’m not as fast as I once was, but I’m fast. My exhaust system has cancer, and I have a hole in my heart. My instrument cluster is only half working. My reply was “OK. Would you like to go to the old muffler shop in Fairfield? He blinked his headlights, “Yes.” So I got on the Internet, and low-and-behold, Dick’s Muffler and Hitches shop was still in business on North Texas Street. I called Rich, who has been working there 33 years, and made an appointment.

I told Rich I was in my second childhood, and that Sunburn wanted an exhaust with an attitude. This German kid was getting tired of being smoked by the rice burners. So Rich went to work and tore out both the old mufflers, installed a blue streak straight through the glass pack, and fixed the hole in his large intestine.

On the way home, Sunburn was a new man, looking for a rice rocket to devour. We were on North Texas Street, and pulled up beside a twin-turbo VTEC Honda with racing stripes all over it. Quite a formidable machine. His driver called us an “ugly piece of shit crout car.” Sunburn blinked at me through his half-lit instrument cluster, and I nodded my head, “Yes.” We told the Jap Honda that the Germans won the war, and we challenged him to a drag race to the freeway.

As the light turned green, we both put the pedal to the metal. Sunburn pulled ahead in third gear at 5200 RPM on the Tach. We (Sunburn and I) hit the freeway in the fast lane. I have his head at 85 MPH with the radar detector set at 360 degrees. The black knight Honda VTEC was never seen again.

Moral to the story: Never insult a sleeping Golf III; he might wax you with a “hole in one”.