My first car was a ’63 Chevy Impala. My dad took me to Red’s Used Car Lot when I was 16 and had saved up a little money, and I imagined cruising around town with my friends, maybe putting in an eight-track tape deck, and attracting the attention of pretty girls.
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The car was something of a bomb. It burned two quarts of oil with every tank of gas, and the floorboards were rusted out so you could see the street underneath.
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We lacked in those days the convenience of the sorts of online shopping for auto body paint equipment that I use today to touch up scratches on my car (still a Chevy), so my 16-year-old self made do with a rough equivalent of touch-up spray paint from the auto parts store and some Bondo, a few parts from the junkyard, and some plain sheet metal which we used to patch the holes in the floorboard. Today every scratch my shiny new Cruze sustains is like a dagger in my heart.
As early as high school, your car is your power. Your chi. Your very self. When we were in my car, the world was on the outside and my friends and I, we were kings.
We took pride in our cars, old and beat-up though they may have been. Doing repairs to your car is more than just touching up a scratch. It feels the same as combing your hair just right so it hangs strategically past your collar, but still shows off the single earring you just bought.
I was in my car with my friends, when a busty girl named Mary offered to pierce my ear. High school me relished her attention so much I didn’t mind when she suggested sticking a safety pin (sterilized by holding it in a cigarette lighter flame) through my earlobe, which was held in place by a cold potato. I allowed her to do so, and it hurt more than she said it would. Then we went out in my car and celebrated, empowered by the big machine I was driving and the music of Black Sabbath and KISS blaring from my speakers, Mary’s smile, and the eight-pack of Little Kings we had with us. The car was everything. It was Life. Love. Existence itself.
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How many stories from your youth involve cars? Probably most of them.
In the ‘70s, the LaSalle High School parking lot was full of junky cars and it smelled delightfully of fuel and cigarette smoke. I was friends with an attractive black girl named Angie, and I would pick her up in the morning and drive her home and we loved talking about everything and anything, and we enjoyed each other’s company at a time in history when that was really a bigger thing than it ought to have been. I would have to stop around the corner from her house so her parents and big brother wouldn’t see her in a car with a white boy.
During my college years, I had a beautiful white ‘71 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, a monstrosity of a gas-guzzler that certainly made a bold statement at the time. Unfortunately, that statement seemed to give the wrong impression to people, since at the time, the image of a long-haired hippie wearing a huge earring in one ear and driving a Cadillac down the streets of Berkeley and San Francisco screamed “drug dealer,” and on more than one occasion I had people walk up to my car window, cash in hand, only to be disappointed once they learned I was not in the business they thought I was in.
When I got married and moved to the Haight-Ashbury, we didn’t have a car. We couldn’t afford it, and it was too hard to park, anyway. Grocery shopping meant walking down Haight Street with a shopping cart full of groceries, which while practical, was emasculating, and I resented my wife for it and I missed my Cadillac. Where I was from in the Midwest, you drove your car to the grocery store. Back home, the only people I had ever seen walking down the sidewalk with a personal shopping cart were old ladies.
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Sometimes it leads to aggression, but when I lived in Bangkok, I saw something quite different. If you’re in a traffic jam in Los Angeles and you accidentally cut someone off, you may well get shot at, or at the very least, cursed at. I
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Our cars are our identities. Practicality aside, we buy and drive cars which reflect ourselves. We are in our own world, and our power and our presence increases when we are driving. Sometimes it leads to aggression, but when I lived in Bangkok, I saw something quite different. If you’re in a traffic jam in Los Angeles and you accidentally cut someone off, you may well get shot at, or at the very least, cursed at. In Bangkok, where traffic is among the worst in the world, traffic jams are a reality of life. When it’s backed up and you can’t move, and you’re stuck in the middle of the intersection blocking traffic, you (as well as the people you’re blocking) just roll down your windows, motion for a street vendor to come over and bring you some mangos, and you say “Mai bpen rai” (It’s okay).
A car isn’t just a car, it takes on a life of its own. It becomes its own character. Even in television and the movies, there are cars like Herbie which become faithful friends with their owners, and the Dodge Charger named “General Lee” on the Dukes of Hazzard – which held equal status to the human actors on the show. We liked the General Lee not because it was a cool car – which it was – but because it so empowered the Duke boys and enabled their misadventures.
When my dad’s health declined and we had to take away the keys to his prized Mercury, I remembered every car he had ever owned and how we would take family trips, go to the drive-in where the carhop would bring us our burgers and shakes and we would eat in the car. I remembered the Packard he had before I was even in Kindergarten, and the ’59 Lincoln he had after that, and how he and my uncles would stand around the car with the hood open, looking inside and commenting on the big engine while they smoked cigarettes and said things in Polish that I couldn’t quite understand and I looked on in appreciation.
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