Nacho’s Dark Past

We’ve owned Nacho for two years.  Sometimes we forget that he was manufactured in 1984; the same year Sheena was manufactured.  The odometer reads 276,000 miles.  We were responsible for a few of those, but what about all the rest?  Our Nacho plied the roads for a quarter of a million miles before he joined us.  It got me thinking about Nacho’s past, so I did some digging.  By digging, I mean I looked at all of the previous titles that were in the glove box when we purchased the van in Hollywood two years ago.  As it turns out, we had some pretty big shoes to fill.

The earliest owner that we could track down was a gentleman named The Song Wizard.  Mr. Wizard is a Hollywood-based children’s songwriter and performer.  You may recognize him from such timeless hits as Dunce Cap Kelley, Daring Dewey, and Fun-A-Rooey.  While ripping out Nacho’s cabinets we found a copy of one of the Wizard’s CDs, so I listened to it.  Entertainment Weekly gave the album two stars out of five, but I would have easily given it two and a half.  If I hadn’t misplaced the damned thing we might have jammed to it as we roam the globe.  Maybe slip it to a border guard to grease the skids as we pass into China.  Sometimes when the mechanical issues seem too much to tackle, I imagine Nacho in his youth pulling up to a gig, engine ticking away like a nicely oiled hamster wheel, and I happily get back to the work at hand.

Soon enough, The Song Wizard tired of Nacho and put him up for sale.  Before long, another gentleman named Lucky Star picked up the reins.  Yes, the name on the title was actually “Lucky Star”.  Mr. Star is a self-proclaimed world renowned astrologer and spiritual scientist, and has been called “The Nostradamus of our time”.  We tried to contact Lucky for an astrological reading to find out if Nacho would stand up to the rigors of a trip around the world, but were unsuccessful in reaching the “dedicated seeker of truth”.  Well hell.  I’ve never been a gambling man.

Despite what I’m sure were several years of dedicated service, Lucky Star eventually found a new mode of transport and rid himself of Nacho.  The next branch of the family tree sprouted when Nacho was purchased by a guy named Michael (sorry, no fancy name).  Michael, despite his modest name, assured that Nacho would remain among the ranks of Hollywood A-Listers.  Michael was the Production Assistant for the Pamela Anderson film Barb Wire.  He later moved into location scouting, and was the Location Scout for Ally McBeal and the timeless classic Couples Retreat.  Yeah Vince Vaughn, that hippy bus you saw driving around Bora Bora has a name.  And it’s Nacho.