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*riiiiiips bong* so I get the vibe that some of y'all enjoy my stories, so let's get down to it
alright kiddos, gather round for the riveting tale of my life surrounding this car
which I like to call The Toyota Pizza Wagon

Do me a solid tho, don't copy or share this anywhere - I may wanna use this at a storytelling gig. 



Part 1 - and I swear on Jane Fondas long and fruitful career, that this is the stone cold truth.

Let's travel back in time, to 2015 - I'm a junior in college and I've just moved out of the dormitories and into my first house, my family lives 212 miles away, I'm on my own, drinking too much, experimenting with drugs, and making really hilariously stupid choices regarding men.  Now is the time for housewarming parties, throwing down, rippin' it up, hundreds of people in and out of my house who I may or may not even know (wow, pre-covid times sound wild now). Sabrina, my roommate at the time has a June birthday, so that is when we plan our real housewarming party. She warns me, "really weird or bad things always happen on my birthday." Weird and bad? I'm fuckin' sold, let's do this thing.

Our town is dry, meaning you cannot get alcohol here, so Sabrina leaves to go on a liquor run with her friends, who I did not know the names of. I take my first hot shower in my new house (you see, the dormitory we previously lived in always had cold showers, so this was a treat). I get out of the shower, put my overalls on halfway, and I open the house up big to air it out (we had no AC) and dry my hair off outside.

Almost as soon as I get outside, this shitbox van pulls up and an older man gets out (he was 48 at the time, but I swear he looked closer to 60). He walks up to me and says, "Hey man....can I park my van here?" bruh who are you?? but yeah sure, go ahead. Upon realizing I had no fucking idea who he was, he asks me, "isn't this where Jamaicas birthday party is tonight?" who the fuck is Jamaica? I literally had no clue. But there was a birthday party there that night... And it was in that moment I realized who he was, old hippie dude, creepy van, burnt out and confused, expecting me to just know him? We'd never officially met but I'd definitely heard stories about Bob! (I later learned that Jamaica was the friend who took Sabrina to the liquor store, and it was indeed her birthday too! Also, Bob ended up living in that van in the driveway for a long ass time, he paid parking rent in acid)

Later that night when the party was raging and Sabrina was good and drunk, not only did we realize we'd inherited a party house, based on several guests we didn't know telling us about how they'd partied there for the past ten years, but Sabrina also realized she'd been in that house at those parties, we signed a whole ass lease on a whole ass house without her ever realizing that she'd been in it before.

Part two coming up in my next comment

Have a snack and a chat while you wait

As the party rages on, I hear the front door open, and who else could it be but my ex boyfriend, Sean, and his buddy, John, who were members of a local David Bowie themed moped gang. Okay, okay I know this is about when you're gonna be like, "what? no, this is ridiculous - there are no such thing as moped gangs, especially not David Bowie themed moped gangs" but I swear on my gardeners handbook that I'm telling the truth, two members of a David Bowie themed moped gang rolled up on my party. The gang had matching shirts and tattoos, rented a big garage, the whole nine yards.

Sean comes up to me and goes, "oh this is your party? you live here now!? that's awesome! I've been partying here for years!" Full confirmation that we'd truly inherited a party house. My ex and I hadn't really split on bad terms, and it'd been a while, so they stayed, we partied, and they were totally disrespectful. They got so fucked up that they broke into my neighbors 1957 Studebaker and hotboxed it (which I actually didn't find out until like, a month later) they were just colossal assholes, but when you throw big parties, you just kinda roll with the punches, you can't reason with drunk people.

It gets later, we're still partying, haven't seen Sean or John in a while. It gets even later, and we hear the front door bust open again, Sean walks in bleeding, and goes, "John totaled my fucking Camry." 

Have you ever been super fucked up and something happens that just sobers you up immediately? That's only happened to me twice in my life, the time 911 called me (lol) and this moment, right here.

We all run out front, and Seans Toyota Camry is completely shredded on one side. What the fuck happened? Sean proceeds to tell me that he and John decided to drift it through the tunnel at the end of my street - the tunnel that leads to private property, they hit an electrical pole, and the pole won. The boys were technically fine, they had a college kid in the car with him (Who ended up breaking his arm the following week in a routine skateboard accident, which is only funny because he came out unscratched from a whole ass car wreck), and another college kid outside the car, filming it (which it was too dark for anyways), and he was not hit.

John is absolutely belligerently drunk, trying to get back in his Toyota 4Runner and drive home.  He will not take no for an answer, Sabrina comes outside with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat, and she says, "John you are not driving, even if I have to knock you unconscious to prevent it"  But thankfully it didn't come to that. Another college kid managed to convince him to walk home, and they walked together.

Remember Bob? The guy I literally just met a few hours ago? He's outside with us now. Bob looks at the car, he looks at me, he looks at the car, he looks at Sean - "...Did this just happen? did this just happen right now?" and Sean drunkenly whines, "Yeah, in the tunnel, just now" - I hadn't learned how much of a little shit Bob was yet, considering I'd just met him. He looks at Sean, who he'd known since Sean was a child, and then he looks at me with the most stone cold serious face and goes, "Cece...we have to call the police..."

WHAT? WHY? POLICE? I'm shocked, about to cry, Sean and Bob look at each and bust out into uncontrollable laughter. He was kidding, Bob never calls the cops. He asks Sean if there's anything in the car he should get out just in case the police do show up. "My backpack, weed, moonshine, and there's a revolver in the glove compartment, and a box of shells in the console." Jesus Christ Sean, why do you break so many laws at once? Remember, I was still a little baby, new-ish to Kentucky, truly away from home for the first time, this was a huge shock to me. 

Part three coming up in my next comment
take a potty break

Sean gets washed off in our bathroom, the party has obviously died off after the accident. Sabrina goes to bed, and everyone leaves. I'm in my room, winding down, processing what happened. Now, remember, Sean is my ex boyfriend at this time.  He comes into my room, truly distraught looking and asks if he can sleep in my bed with me. Absolutely fucking not. "Okay, fair" Sean laughs, and goes to the air mattress.

When I wake up the next day he's already left, folded the blankets and air mattress. Sabrina and her boyfriend are still asleep, so I have the house to myself. I make myself some coffee, and go to the front porch to smoke a cigarette and read. I was reading Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, I still remember this moment vividly because this is the moment when the fucking police roll up to my house. 

Heart racing, I'm stoned, the cops park on the street, two cars. They walk up to me with their obnoxiously wannabe intimidating attitudes and ask me, "Ma'am, are you the one who called with the noise complaint?" What? Noise complaint? Called you? What are you talking about? Turns out, two doors down they called in a noise complaint about my other neighbors working on diesel engines. What assholes call the cops for noise at 10am on a Sunday rather than talking to their neighbors? They weren't even there about the accident, it was just a big coincidence. The cops leave and once I recover from the goddamned anxiety of the whole situation, Sabrina and her boyfriend are up now making breakfast.

We eat breakfast and pop in a VHS tape of The Matrix and start reflecting on that night. We agree that Sean and John are no longer welcome in our home. I never want to see either of their stupid fucking faces again.  Not even ten seconds after their names rolled off our lips, Johns Toyota 4Runner rolls up, loud as fuck because it had no muffler, and those boys get out of the vehicle carrying a white cardboard box. We let them in.

They give us a half-assed apology for the night before, and open the box. Through some bizarre chain of redneck trades, Sean had acquired a storage unit full of homemade wine. "We have a lot of this, about half of it is bad, turned to vinegar, so I figured out of a case you'd get a few good bottles - again, sorry about last night." Y'all, Sean apologized to me for drunk driving by bringing us bootleg alcohol, which by the way, ended up being gross. Every bottle had the same label, it just said "CCC" - there's an entire chain of stories that go along with the storage unit full of bootleg wine, maybe we'll get there, maybe we won't.

Part four coming up in my next comment
smoke ye a fatty while waitin'

Just to remind you, parts 1-3 took place in about an 18 hour period. That's it.

That party was the beginning of what we all liked to call The Best Worst Summer. I could write for days about my best worst summer, but I'll keep it cut to the parts that lead up to me reuniting with Sean and The Toyota Pizza Wagon, cuz remember, that's what this whole story is about. 

The name The Best Worst Summer was dubbed by our neighbor (who is now my best friend on earth), Tyler. Tyler got dumped that summer, like brutally dumped, his long-term girlfriend who he lived with left him for his manager, a hipster asshole who collected old cameras but couldn't use them, vintage lamps but couldn't fix them, and old Volvo station wagons.  I remember one time I got a Facebook message from this hipster asshole, I didn't know who he was but I responded, saying I don't think we've ever met? and his response was "I work at the [name removed] Gallery, I always see you staring at me through the window." Buddy, that window is a mirror, I'm lookin' at my goddamned self. Tail between his legs, he blocked me. 

Tyler and I bonded that summer, we wanted him not to hurt, so we drank together, partied together, shared meals, I even gave him a key to the party house. But The Best Worst Summer truly began when Eric showed up - an old friend of Tyler and Sabrina, he'd been teaching in Taiwan for several years and was coming to visit, he was going to take turns staying between the two houses for several weeks.

Eric was a really stand-up guy, I liked him a lot he was loads of fun, and he always wanted to "do redneck shit!" so one night, out comes the PBR and the BB guns, we're drunk, smoking cigarettes and shootin' at bottles, and he goes, "Do you have any other friends who would be into getting drunk and shooting BB guns?" and y'all this is where I start to question the sanity of 22 year old me because I fucking called Sean. 

It had been a few months since the accident, so I figured why not let him have another chance to be a part of this friend group, after all, he was friends with Eric too, and Eric wasn't going to be in the US for long. We had a blast , he didn't overdo it, and we all enjoyed target practice, getting drunk, and having a more lowkey get together. But of course, I ended up fucking my ex that night - goddammit. I was a fucking moped gang groupie again.

Part five coming up in my next comment
Don't join moped gangs, y'all.

Summer turns into fall, fall turns into winter - of course now I'm now dating Sean, I haven't for been long, but it's definitely a thing. What the fuck is wrong with me? Oh, you might be thinking, "hey, we haven't read jack shit about The Toyota Pizza Wagon in a while..." well kiddies, here it is - it's winter, and he's still driving this car, with plexiglass and tape over the busted out windows, drivers side door doesn't work so he jumps thru the window like he's in Dukes of Hazard, the car has "JOHN RULEZ" spray painted on one side, a big "01" spray painted on the other side to make it look like a derby car. I even put my own touches on it from time to time, by sitting on the hood with a bottle of wine and metallic sharpies, drunkenly doodling 'til my heart was content. I'm still pretty mad that he wouldn't let us paint Pussy Wagon on it. 

But like I said, it's winter, it's getting cold, and the tape on the windows just isn't cutting it anymore, the car is cold, broken, expired tags and uninsured. Naturally the most important thing to Sean was to fix the window, not tag or insure the fucking car. And dumbass me is going along with it. I just wanna express right here that when I call y'all out for sticking with your shitty mediocre loser boyfriends, you can refer back to this to see why I won't ever lay the fuck off y'all.

Sean spent the summer living in this apartment across town with like fifteen other naked hippies and no air conditioning. Sex in front of each other and sharing showers to save hot water was just par for the course in this house. It was infested with bedbugs and fucking gross, no one knew who was paying the rent there were so many people squatting. But summer ended, most of them were college kids and they'd gone back to school, back to the dormitories. So it was just Sean and another couple left in the apartment - no wait, it was actually a few doors down because their old apartment got so disgusting and infested with bed bugs and roaches that they had to be relocated.

 This apartment complex they lived in didn't have any laundry facilities because someone kept busting up the washers to steal the quarters, so the landlord locked it off.  Luckily, Sean worked for an HVAC shop that for whatever reason had a washer and dryer in it, and that is where he did his laundry.  He texts me one night "Hey I'm about to go to the HVAC shop to do laundry and fix my window, wanna come?" sure, fuck it, why not, this is when my grades started slipping because I was definitely putting off homework to get into shenanigan's. 

So we're at the HVAC shop, drinking some of the aforementioned "CCC" wine, doing laundry, and Sean is prying some metal from the door to wedge the new window into the car. Oh, that window, by the way? it was an actual literal fucking house window, like, from a house.

Clearly, I was dating a winner. 

Part six coming up in my next comment
I hope y'all are enjoying this because ima feel so silly if no one cares

Fast forward from winter to summer. Sabrina is getting ready to move to Alabama for a job. Sean's roommates are about to have a baby and he can't afford his apartment on his own. I'm still in college so I need a roommate to make rent. So I ask him to move in. Holy fucking shit what was I thinking? But anyways, Sean and The Toyota Pizza Wagon move from that shitty apartment, to my shitty house, I move into Sabrina's old bedroom, and my old bedroom gets turned into a mini-moped garage. The whole house smelled like fucking 2-Stroke oil all the goddamned time.

I'm just gonna skip over the part where we found out we had bed bugs and had to sleep on an air mattress for months, because perhaps I'll write out my bed bug horror stories another time. 

We lived together for a few months before we found a better, cheaper house, just down the street - right next to Tyler! And boy is there a great story to go along with how that happened, but the stories starts in The Best Worst Summer so it's probably best left to its own post, but it does involve a hunchbacked church lady with one leg longer than the other, if you need incentive to keep reading my stories.

We pack up (which was pretty easy, because we were still mostly packed from the bedbug treatment) and we move down the street to the other house. We moved with a van, another moped gang members truck, and of course, The Toyota Pizza Wagon. As we're packing up the last few loads of our stuff to move, down the street we see a cop car, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then a K-9 unit, and then a firetruck, and then a state trooper, and then another state trooper...Oh shit, what's going on? Nosy neighbor mode: activated.

They police were down in that tunnel where Sean and John totaled the Camry the previous summer. Apparently, people lived down there at the time (when they drove down there, they genuinely believed it to be uninhabited). The Camry, parked on the road in front of our new house. We didn't figure out until a few days later what had happened, it turns out that a man and his family were held hostage at gunpoint in their own home, the family got somehow out, while the man had a gun held to them, the family called the authorities, and before the cops got there, the man had realized he was being held hostage with his own gun, which he had no ammunition for in the house - it was definitely unloaded. So the homeowner knocks the guy out and restrains him - the entirety of all emergency services for my town was on my street, retrieving a restrained man. Now, this retelling of what happened in the tunnel that day has always been a bit suspect to me. The news reported the wrong date, and the wrong street name, but my neighbor George assured me it's the same story the cops gave him when he pulled his "I'm an old man and I don't give a fuck" card and walked up to the cops in the middle of the arrest.

So we're fully moved into our new house, despite the traumatic welcome-wagon of police. And it wasn't too long before Sean's old DUI (I really picked a fucking winner, didn't I?) was cleared from his record, and the insurance company the HVAC shop he worked at allowed him back on the insurance to drive the work truck, his bosses let him drive it full time, even for personal use - so it was time to sell the Camry. But naturally, not before it got spray painted by a rival moped gang, at a moped rally. Sorry I just have to throw that part in there because...well, if you dated a moped gang member for years wouldn't you use that experience to enhance all your stories?

Part seven (the last part!) coming up in my next post
I don't even think anyone is reading this but I'm just stubbornly committed to finish my story at this point. 

Finally, this is how The Toyota Pizza Wagon became The Toyota Pizza Wagon.

We had this friend named Lucy, Lucy was absolutely fucking wild in the most mellow ways. Lucy and I were actually there the night that the Camry was vandalized at the moped rally. Now that I think about it, the moped rally happened before Sean and I lived together - but hey, if you were as colossally fucked up as often as I was, you'd get your timeline jacked up too.

But anyways, when Lucy and I left the moped rally early, after Sean was being a drunken asshole. We hopped into her little Honda Civic with a blown head gasket that we had to stop and add coolant to every 30 miles, and drove to what I can only describe as a drug festival with music, not a music festival with drugs. All I remember was old dead-heads, gel-tab acid, and a man in a bunny suit playing the accordion.

When we left the next day, Lucy fell asleep at the wheel twice, but we did eventually make it home safely. As time went on Lucy developed a pretty bad habit of falling asleep at the wheel, in fact, it's how she finally totaled her Honda Civic. But with a totaled Civic, Lucy needed another car to deliver pizzas in, and hey, we happened to have one, and we were selling it - CHEAP!

So Sean sold Lucy The Toyota Pizza Wagon, well, it was just a regular Camry shit box until Lucy got her hands on it. Lucy added tons of pizza-themed graffiti, magnets, and of course, kept her Papa John's car topper on at all times. Lucy delivered pizzas in the nearest city with it for several years. She always told me she got better tips when she drove a shitty car. 

Lucy also had a habit of just dropping everything in her life and moving without really telling anyone. And one day, this man she met in Ireland moved to Kentucky to be with her, they got in The Toyota Pizza Wagon, drove to St. Petersburg, Florida, and opened a tattoo shop. He fucked her over, and she moved back home, but she left The Toyota Pizza Wagon in St. Petersburg - where I hear it still lives to this day, I truly hope someone is delivering pizzas in it, and making bad, but really fun, choices.


- The End -

Moral of the story?

Don't! Ignore! The! Red! Flags!
(but if you do, make sure to get good stories from it)