It had a high idle. Without pressing the gas pedal, left to reach its top speed on a straight away it would top out at just over 40 mph. I drove it to high school my senior year in Dallas. We didn't have an open campus but during my 35 minute lunch period I would sneak off campus in the Maverick and hit the buffet at Pizza Inn. I had a soft schedule my senior year, arrived late, after the parking restrictions expired on the street and therefore was able to park out front instead of in the guarded lot. The vice-principal, who's office faced the street and who I visited infrequently for minor infractions, asked me one day, Louis, are you leaving campus for lunch? Yessir I am. That is against school policy, he told me. I did not know that, I said, while looking through his drawer of confiscated weapons, before the days of guns in schools. We got along pretty well me and the vice-principal. He didn't see me as a serious threat and I didn't see him as one.
Several years later my father sold me the Maverick. He said, make me an offer. I said 600. He said 400. He was hoping, I think, that if I had a car I would stop hitchhiking. The car did slow down my hitchhiking some.
In 87 a friend in Austin wanted me to take him and his suitcase to California. We drove the Maverick from Austin to San Jose and there I left him. I scooted over to the coast freeway and took it up to the middle of Oregon and then back west to the Interstate and up north to Seattle and somewhere west of Seattle is where I decided I probably wouldn't spend the rest of my days in Texas. I called my employer at some point and told him this. During this leg of the trip I stopped in San Francisco but my friend was not home so I continued on and in Eureka I considered staying because there seemed to be a groove going on but I couldn't stop. I picked up some cool rocks on the beach at a place called Humboldt Lagoon.
I forgot, in Portland I had an adventure with a street person and sometime during this adventure the brakes went out. I couldn't stop then either (no pun) so I continued on with just the handbrake and would use that for braking all the way across country to New York and then down to DC.
I picked up a few pebbles at Custer's Battlefield to go with my beach rocks and then over to Minneapolis to visit the grandmother of my ex-girlfriend and then I had a brainstorm to go visit my friend in St. Louis. Had a good time there and then in Indiana I saw two girls hitchhiking, a French Canadian and a Parisian, so I picked them up and took them to Chicago. They didn't really want to have anything to do with me though so I spent my one night in Chicago at Kingston Mines, a blues club. And then to NY where I picked up Edgar and Helen and Bill and down to Great Falls, VA where Mr. BC was being a bachelor. We had a 4th of July party. My friend from St. Louis flew out, he almost had a romance with Mr. BC's ex-girlfriend.
And some other stuff, some adventures, some of them illicit but I'm not bragging.
Anyway, these are the things I thought about, seeing it dragged from the shed and then winched onto the trailer of the guy my neighbor hooked up.
It was a four door, not the sporty 2-door Grabber, but it had lines (and people think I'm kidding), that seen from just the right angle, were almost elegant.