Corvette: (n) brand name for a type of sports car made by Chevrolet

I think the correct term for it is “urban legend,” although, since I grew up in a town of only fifteen hundred people, it may be a rural legend.

When I was a boy there was a man-made lake near our town which had several back roads along the banks, which were often impassable
because they were covered with water if the lake was particularly bloated by rains.

I was familiar with the roads because sometimes it was fun to go down them to park with your lady, or to scare your girlfriend because it was so spooky at night. (Everyone knows that teenage lasses who are frightened are much more susceptible to romance.)

On one of these roads, a gentleman took his 1969 bright-red Corvette Stingray, parked it, took out a shotgun and blew his head off.

It did no physical damage to the car whatsoever, so after he was removed and the remaining parts of him were cleaned out, his family tried to sell the car. The problem was, it was nearly a week before anyone found the body in the car, so the stench of the corpse had settled into the upholstery, and it was necessary to pull out all the seats, the dashboard, and start from scratch. They did this, figuring it would still be cost-effective to sell the automobile.

But even after all the fastidious effort, the smell of the dead man’s remains lingered—because a Corvette is made of fiberglass and is much more porous than metal. Therefore, it retained the stench.

Try as they would to deodorize, they were unable to get the odor out of that beautiful red Corvette.

It had to be junked.

I was present for this event, but I would understand if you wanted to question the authenticity or validity of the tale, and I do realize that at this point I should come up with a moral for the story or a clever closing for this essay, to make you yearn to come back for more.

But the best I can muster is, if you’re going to kill yourself, don’t do it in an expensive sports car, because no one will be able to “vette” your stink.

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