There she was, the love of my life. From her big, aggressive body, to her late 60s class. Actually, I should start from the beginning...
My name is Ryker Pierce. I'm 19, and the "love of my life" that I was referring to is a little project of mine.
My father was a total deadbeat. But he was a deadbeat with rich, loving parents, and in 1968, said parents bought him a brand new Torino red Dodge Charger, fresh off the production line, with a 318 package. In 1972, however, the braindead brat found water in the radiator. Ridiculous! How DARE this water cool flood his engine! Thankfully, he fixed it, and drained the liquid from the radiator. Not much later, the motor blew up. Unbelievable, I know. His father asked him what happened and he claimed the engine was fine before, and that it blew without warning. No, his physical input on a perfectly okay powertrain could NOT have messed it up, surely not. The engine just died. No one's fault. He begged Papa Pierce to swap the motor but his father wouldn't agree to it. Eventually though, after jumping up and down and begging like a five-year-old, my father got his wish. His beautifully mistreated '68 got its powertrain swap.
One day, however, good ol' Martin Pierce left home. He was 22. He left because his folks grounded him from his Mopar for showing up to a party that he was told not to go to. So he took off in his filth-covered Charger, which he never bothered to clean. The funny thing about it is that even though he stole a car from his parents (It was kinda stealing, because his parents, whom he lived under the same roof of, gave him strict orders not to touch the car) he didn't steal a dime from his mother and father. His RICH mother and father, I might add. He had a nickel in his pocket, cruising down the streets in his Charger, and never looked back.
He met my mother in 1975. You know how the stories always go: empty promises, fake love, blah, blah, blah. Long story short: They got married in 1976... unfortunately. In '77, I became a thing, and his Charger sat in a garage for fifteen years. Why? Well, my mother, Amy (Anderson) Pierce, had talked him into buying an AMC Pacer station wagon: effectively the minivan of the 70s.
When I was 15, after the long foreseen divorce of my parents, my father forgot to take the Charger from the garage, and my mom and I kept the house. My mother told me I couldn't touch it and that she would put it up for sale. But I made a deal with her: If I couldn't get it running, driving, and looking decent before I was 20, we would sell it. If not, I would get to keep it. Did I mention that the motor that was swapped into the '68 was a 440 Magnum out of a '71 Challenger? Because it is. The 440 was supposedly ruined when they found the Challenger in the junkyard but all it needed was a new battery, a new fuel pump, and some starter fluid. You know, for the Golden Age of muscle cars, you would think the people around in the 60s and 70s would know things about the muscle cars they drove everywhere but apparently a good few didn't.
I quickly found out my dad treated his cars the same way as his kids: crap. The Charger had numerous issues. For one, the grille was nowhere in sight. For another, the motor didn't run after years of sitting idle. Since a '68 Charger grille is so hard to find in mint condition, I actually cut steel mesh to the appropriate dimensions to replace the grille. Even though some would argue that the hideaway lights on the Gen 2 B-body Chargers are what makes them what they are, I didn't have the means of obtaining any. However, in my opinion, the headlamps I'd placed behind the grille, which shine through it and have their light seperated on account of the mesh, grant it a real mean look.
Life went on like that for a while: fix this, fix that, replace that, paint this, custom build that... For that long time I was building the Charger, I had to drive my mother's '85 Charger to work. Yeah. I drove that dinky front-wheel-drive disgrace to the Mopar name to work and back, everyday, and used every paycheck I got on my precious, actually worth while Dodge.
By the time I was 18, The whole car was fully restored, save the paintwork. It ran and drove perfectly, and was actually decently reliable. As for the paint, I finished it just before my 19th birthday, and my present to myself: a completed project car. Well, a project car is never complete really, but it was... uhh... "done" I gue- I don't know. As for the color combo, it was satin midnight black with a turquoise R/T strip wrapping around the tail end. I did the black on my own, but didn't trust myself for the stripe and had that done at a paint shop.
One day, as I was admiring it, my mother burst into the two car garage, excited, and handed me a small slip of paper: a ticket.