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Great Bay Community College, Portsmouth, NH

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Pre-freshman Marc Paltrineri English 110

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Personal Essay

Mettle from Metal

The first love of my life was a 1979 Monte Carlo, Landau Coupe edition, she was yellow with a black vinyl roof, big V8, posi rear end, and wire wheel covers.  The lines of the car flowed perfectly with big exposed fenders front and rear, a long nose, wide stance, and long heavy doors.  That car was beautiful to me, I loved every detail about it.  The sheer size was formidable and the rake made it more aggressive looking.  With the nose slung low and big tires in the rear it really brought the sculpted fender lines to life.  The front lines gave the impression of tensed shoulder muscles while the rear fenders looked like preloaded hindquarters ready to lunge forward.  Between the size, forward canted stance, and burly body lines it made me think of a large jungle cat ready to lunge forward and capture its next meal.  I wished so very much to one day have a car like that.

I remember being very excited, I was 13 years old and had just received word that my biggest wish had come true.  My Dad had just found the exact car that I had been infatuated with for several years and it was in my budget too.  It was only three hours until he finally got home, but the anticipation made my young mind think an eternity had passed.  I must have counted my savings a dozen times just to make certain that it was enough to buy that big beautiful car.  It was almost every penny that I had ever earned up until that day, between chores and working on the farm with my Grandpa.  When my father arrived at home I had already hooked the trailer up to his truck and was badgering him to bring me to get my new car.  He laughed a bit and told me ten more minutes wouldn't kill me, but I thought for sure that they would.  It was a huge relief as we pulled out of the driveway on route toward my dream car, I was almost flying I felt so happy.

We had only been in the truck a short while when it dawned on me where we were headed.  This was the way to the home of the very car which sparked my love for the body style.  I was still reveling in that thought when we pulled down the street it lived on and I saw the car, my car.  After I made my first adult transaction ever, and loaded up my now prized possession, I felt this feeling of pride and accomplishment that was still relatively new to me at such a young age.  Little did I know that my work and journey were only just beginning on that Labor Day weekend back in 1995.

The next few weeks were pretty uneventful, and I became busy with schoolwork and friends, but I always found time to go outside and tinker with my car.  It was in near perfect shape, just the way it was when it rolled off that Detroit assembly line in 1979.  This car was how I first learned to strive for exactly what I wanted, and not to settle for less than that, unless the situation dictated no other choice.  I had several chances to buy cars a year either side of mine but I thought them to be inferior due to some minor differences between model years.  I remember that my biggest hang up was about the tail lights, they wrapped the rear corners on the '79, and did not on the '78.  The headlights were the next thing to cause my draw to the '79, because the tail lights did wrap on the '80 model but it came with composite headlights which I thought really took away from the essence of the car.

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Around October of 1995 I began my true journey with my car, though it was never apparent to me until my later years how important my experience with her really was.  It was that fall when I put her in the garage and proceeded to dig into what made her tick.  It took me three years of blood, sweat, and tears to shape that old girl into the hot rod I had envisioned the first time I saw her.  Among those years was a series of trials and tribulations, along with emotional highs and lows, the likes of which I had never had in my life before.  Through it all that car gave me solace, retained my sanity, and gave me a sense of purpose.  I also reinforced my value in hard work, and dedication to a cause.  New parts don't buy themselves and are quite expensive to a teenage boy, which is part of the reason it took me so long to build the car.  Another bump in the road was the fact that I started the project rather unskilled in car restoration and modification.

While working on that car I learned some valuable life skills that I still use today.  That was when I first found out that research was indeed a required process for certain things, and without teaching myself where to find the information I needed I would never finish the task at hand.  I needed to teach myself, as I was not afforded much help,  neither of my parents finished high school.  I am not downing on them at all,  my Dad would help me with the stuff he knew how to do and did show me quite a lot.  My Mom was always supportive of me spending time working on the car, and never had a problem with the sometimes excessive amount of time my Dad would spend on it as well.  Though that still left me with many technical challenges to conquer, which stirred intellectual growth on my part.  It also showed me problem solving skills, ways to critically think, and that determination and hard work do pay off in the end.  I guess if you get right to it that is why I am in this class today.

It took me until late November 1998 to get that old car on the road and be what I had dreamed about for years.  Over the course of time I spent working on her some personal growth and maturing happened without my knowledge.  I had experienced family deaths, and found a way to cope by using the car as a distraction.  This gave me an understanding of the need for a healthy mechanism to deal with life's lemons.  I had my first girlfriend and got dumped because I spent too much time with my car and not with her.  This taught me time management skills, and informed me that I was not performing them properly. 

        I made my first appearance with my car at school and this gave me my first dose of popularity and high school fame.  When you brought the fastest, loudest, biggest engined beast to my old school, everyone knew who you were.  All of the other guys, and even some of the girls, wanted to try and beat that machine.  Nobody ever did though, I always came out on top, and had no qualms defending my spot as fastest in town.  It made me feel good to win, and proud that I had built the car which brought me all of the "glory" by myself.  I never suspected that this would all turn out to be yet another lesson from my time with that Monte.

 I lived in a small town and this was pretty sensitive subject matter, which due to small

town mentality in America was construed entirely the wrong way.  She was active in the

community as well as a prominent church goer, basically an upstanding member of the town as

far as the masses were concerned.  When news of what she had done to me finally leaked into the

rumor mill that is my home town everything was viewed in reverse.  Entirely because of the ass

backward nature of tiny hick towns in America, that woman was given a pass.  I was labeled as a

home wrecking deviant, and blamed for the misfortune her and her family suffered by my taking

advantage of a woman 24 years my senior.   I still to this day do not understand how that was

treatment in the years following those events. I became targeted and hated in the town I had

called home my whole life.  This baffled and enraged me, I was only eleven years old when the abuse

started, I had to deal with it for nearly five years, and now I was being judged as the bad guy.  I

needed to be back off the radar quick, it was fast becoming a matter of personal and public safety

because I needed to be left alone to try and heal myself.  But everyone knew who I was due to

my car and the spectacle I had created and I could find no place to escape.  The lack of escape

had me on the verge of a vicious psychotic break against all of the scum who were persecuting

        Lesson learned from that was that "fame" and "glory" are not always good things.  I

learned to keep my head down and continue to strive for what I wanted in life, not get everyone

to like me.  I had used my car and all of its power, both actual and social, to bring myself into the

open which lead me to learn another lesson.

Sacrifice, that was what I next learned from my beloved Monte.  I needed so badly to be forgotten by everyone again that I was forced to part with my prized possession.  Unfortunately my car was also how everybody knew who I was wherever I went.  I remember the day I let her go, it was one of the most devastating blows to my pride I had taken yet.  I believed that I was making the right decision for my life at the time, and that I had chosen a suitable care taker for my car.  Even after I let go of my car, which I had sworn to keep forever, people still knew who I was.  I wasn't able to blend back in without my car, it was me the whole time that stuck out, and that crushed me , mostly because I could not evade the town, but doubly that I had given up something that occupied such a large space in my life and had much value to me for so many reasons. 

                                                                                                                                                                                             



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