12/27/2018
After the invention of the Avian maneuver, whereas you position your car between 2 houses to lie in wait like a leopard, other strategies have surfaced to add new excitement to BEATER ownership. The Batman turn involves taking your junker up to freeway speeds on side roads and pulling violently on the emergency brake handle. A quick jerk on the steering wheel while only the rear brakes lock up, a little luck, and a lot of skill will spin your car 180° and off you go in the opposite direction. This may require 2 or 3 BEATERS to perfect. With the advent of streaking, came a new mastery that very few tried: freaking. This involves getting up on the roof of your steel sedan and jumping up and down with your full body weight, trying to create a depression in the roof panel, which was no easy task. Today’s cars, with soda-can-thin sheet metal and space-age plastics that warp in sunlight, would buckle under your kneecap as you attempted to crawl up there. BEATER steel was 18-gauge, battleship tough that took a trampoline’s worth of jumping to kink it in. You then poured REAL gas into the slump you created, lit it on fire, and instantly drove off, spilling the flames down the rear window, onto the trunk lid, and off on the highway. At night, this was spectacular, and it freaked out oncoming drivers. As long as you’re moving, no major damage occurs, and you can continue this feat over and over again (DO NOT attempt this with a ragtop convertible). Foot bridges in parks, along with pedestrian freeway overpasses, were excellent shortcuts and escape routes when being pursued. Your BEATER was going to get a unique pinstriping effect from the chain-link fence that enclosed the structure as you had 1 inch of clearance. After a few years, the city had enough and installed 2 steel posts at both openings to discourage this behavior. After your BEATER years, you then blew over those bridges on your stolen motorcycle, ditching the squad cars in hot pursuit. TO BE CONTINUED……
Torked Truth 