DELETED STORY - T-Totaller 1976

I posted an excerpt from a book I am working on called My Die-Cast Life a few weeks ago. It is a series of vignettes from my life from 1968 to 1971. The story below is almost entirely made up and oxymoronic, because the car in question did not come out until I was in high school, meaning the conversation below could not have happened. I wrote it as an example of how we talked to each other when playing with these cars. Ultimately, I decided to drop the story altogether. It is presented here because, well, I did write the thing.

My Die-Cast Life releases December 18th.

My mom kept buying Hot Wheels for me well into high school, which was sweet. This was an example of her buying into a brand and never quite understanding that the 10 year old me loved cars that could literally fly down the orange track I would set up in the living room.

But, I was never going to be the one to spoil her fun. Buying hot wheels lasted well into her being a grandmother and it was something that brought her a great deal of joy. Her life was marred by long periods of unhappiness so buying Hot Wheels was maybe cathartic for her. All it meant to me was MORE HOT WHEELS!

This is, well, a truck and while I am listing it as used, I never played with it, mainly because it had come to me well past my Hot Wheels racing days. This looked like a truck version of a Model T car and one you would see moonshiners using to run whiskey in old movies, which I guess is why the thing is called a T-Totaller since a Teetotaler is someone who does not drink alcohol and it looks like Mattel went out of their way to say that this particular truck was not being used to haul moonshine. 

When you think about it, though, that’s EXACTLY how you would label a truck that you were smuggling booze in during prohibition, you would not drive around in a vehicle that said CONTRABAND, would you? This had some HUGE exhaust pipes coming out the back so it had perhaps a more modern engine. Proudly labeled as being manufactured in Hong Kong, the T-Totaler featured a shiny gold base.Why someone would deck out a delivery truck in gold is beyond me unless they were making a ton of money running rotgut.

While it was never raced on a Sunday afternoon I could see that had this truck come along a few years earlier it might have become the subject of discussion.

“What’s a T-Totaller?”

“This one doesn’t have redlines on the tires, so maybe it’s code for this car sucks.”

“Maybe it’s because it is a total T.”

“I think maybe it’s code, for stuff people do with tea. Once I heard my dad say that Petra’s family were a bunch of teetotals or something because they didn’t drink wine and only drank tea.”

Something like that, it was a conversation like this that swirled through the living room while I was setting up the orange track in a straight drag race configuration. Sometimes these conversations would last until my mom brought us lunch or snacks. Most times not, this was certainly not one of them, as it was quickly decided that it was not worth the distraction from our lunch.