DAY 47: Tuesday, November 24, 2009: Candle companies buy you food as an investment. They want your fat.
Okay, so it’s a theme from “Fight Club”, what the hell do you expect, 365 brand spankin’ new jokes from a burned-out husk of a human being?
Story Time! I have two cars that are complete opposites, sending very mixed signals. The commuting days are over now, the younger mob having sealed my fate with a corporate decision, but the commuter car is still ticking along, just in case I find work down the highway. It’s a light blue Hyundai Accent with four doors and four cylinders that cries “grandmother of ten”. You have to rev the hamster wheel hard to hear if it’s running, and hope for a long downhill run to pass anything larger than a salad crouton.
It sits outside in the driveway, a solid tribute to core values and responsible travel. It’s cuter than a button, and twice as slow. You just want to hug it like a baby, and it’s not hard to catch.
Every morning I used to dutifully warm it up and get into ultra conservative mode, whispering along at 35 mpg, moving aside for anything faster than Dutch Elm disease. I was doing my part, taking tiny sips from the well as supplies diminished, and being frugal as hell. Shame on you dastardly heathens, cruising along in gas guzzling luxury wrapped with leather and surrounded by polished teak wood, but hey — thanks for a drafting wind break. I’m not tailgating that space shuttle; I’m just being sucked along by a giant vacuum vortex.
I even dressed differently driving my little car, opting for soft summer colors with a shot of L.L. Bean or Wal Mart runway selections. Coffee was upgraded to tea, and the song stylings of Jose Feliciano could be heard on my tape player, or perhaps Linda Ronstadt singing Spanish opera. I was almost in the earth day zone of my English Lit professor, who could be seen riding a funky bicycle to class every day, suit jacket flapping like wings as he pedaled to another Shakespeare lecture.
The other car damns me to hell forever. It’s a dark gray 1986 Z 28 Camaro with black highlights, stuffed with a 520-horsepower NASCAR engine and a suspension built for launching John Glen. It can surpass 200 miles per hour, and people move over from the approaching sound. It has an old school mentality with some new school technology, and like Frankenstein, is always a work in progress. The shifter sports a “pistol grip” ala Hemi Cuda, but it’s dialed-into an exotic polygraphite suspension, with some kind of Edelbrock stabilizers in back. A low profile open air cleaner barely prevents that freakish motor from pushing through hood vents, and if the carburetor ever becomes exposed, small birds will be sucked down its yawning throat.
I’m going with a black leather jacket and matching tee if it’s not too warm, and sometimes if it is. Shaving is optional on Camaro Days, and black jeans or chinos complete the image of a complete loser trying to be cool. Shades are required, and the music coming out of there is classic rock or blues, from Led Zep to Leadbelly. It would be great to hear it over the engine, which drowns out anything short of nuclear war.
It’s registered in Maine because Connecticut put an emissions facility in lock down after their computer screamed, “BURN THIS CAR AND KILL THE OWNER.”
So what does all this say about me?
Schizophrenia? Physically insecure?
Final stages of Rabies?
I’m thinking the two cars say, “Frugal and understated yet muscle bound and nostalgic. Mary Tyler Moore meets Speed Racer in a Korean health bar, then goes out for shots and beer, before fancy coffees and a quick peck on the cheek, with a later return for wild sex involving colorful toys from Amsterdam.”
“I really hate that race car,” my wife likes to say. “Every time you take it out, the house shakes and I say a rosary. State police keep creeping by the house and setting speed traps on every dusty road in the area, way out here in farm country. They’re spreading thin just for a chance at that thing.”
“I drive it pretty slow,” I retort. “Mostly, anyway. Once a week during the summer, weather permitting.”
She smiles or smirks; hard to tell these days. “More reasons to sell it.”
“Lots of jealousy there,” I tell her. “Their pathetic Ford Interceptors are no match for the BEAST THAT HUNKERS BENEATH THIS HOUSE. Also . . . the radar detector and signal scrambler RENDERS THEIR SILLY SPEED TRAPS UTTERLY USELESS AGAINST MY RAW AWSOMEESS.”
She kicks a tire and stalks off. “My car needs an oil change,” she mumbles. “And you’re polishing chrome.”
I ignore another blatant metaphor and retrieve the oil filter wrench. How did things get so crazy? Where is the justification for such a beast? Who the hell am I?
CAUTION: ENTERING DEMENTED GEAR HEAD TERRITORY. ENTER AT OWN RISK OF CAR GUY LANGUAGE AND THINGS THAT NORMAL FOLKS EAGERLY AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE:[1]
- “But I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for license . . . this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had made discovery.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde
I guess it started in high school during the mid-seventies, a very opportune time for gear heads pumping gas and saving money for used muscle cars, which were cheap and readily available. I had two friends and a nerdy math teacher with Shelby Cobra Mustangs.
Mr. B had all the makings of a kid who got wedgied in half during his early formative years. Fittingly enough, he taught algebra and geometry. He was a very slight fellow with frizzy black hair, and a peace button during the Nixon administration. I also seem to remember a green-striped, environmental flag patch, which would put him in serious peacenik territory, but man oh man; when that gun metal ’68 Shelby Cobra GT350 rolled into the parking lot, we were brutally humbled.
It was like Steve McQueen in Bullitt with his ’68 fastback, but with more extreme opposites at play. Mr. B may have put me to sleep with blackboard equations during the day, but where did he rumble and roar at night in that gun metal Shelby? Where did he clean his claws? What bouncers at what crazy clubs mumbled, “There’s the man,” when Mr. B came in like an F-16 throttling down?
My best friend Mark the Shark had a white ‘69 Charger with a black vinyl top, one year off from Bullitt’s nemesis. It was long and sleek and added to Mark’s nickname, but had a 318 engine and automatic tranny, which attracted criticism from the gear heads. Still, Mark added a nice dual exhaust, and the overall effect was pretty cool. Carl Young’s brother had a ’69 Charger R/T, and the 440 made it almost exactly what Bullitt chased through the streets of San Francisco.
The infamous Barsano brothers ran a ’57 Chevy powered by a crazy-built 396, until one of them decided to pull a wheelie in front of the high school, and his right front tire wheelied right off the car during a crashing front end landing. He was okay but embarrassed, and it was great lunchtime entertainment. Eventually they dumped that motor into a ’68 Camaro, and one day during another wheelie, the drive shaft shot out and almost destroyed a door on the fire station in town. They were kind of using a “trial and error” approach.
Hemi Harrington had a Road Runner and was legendary. One day he ran the police, and they finally caught him by following a twin trail of burnout marks, leading from a stop sign on Main Street to where he was parked, in the town’s only supermarket lot. One afternoon he test-drove a Pantera and lost control on Nobscot Mountain, launching it into the woods. What a fun guy! Nesto had an incredible dark blue ’72 Olds 4-4-2 that he bought off a racecar driver. We could only guess at the horsepower, but that thing had a 455 built to the gills, and all the bells and whistles. Frank Panetta had an older version 4-4-2 from the sixties, with a stunning medieval knight mural on the hood and several show trophies.
Little Steve was a certified psycho, who thought running the cops was equivalent to playing backyard football. When they caught his SS Chevelle one day (after involving two towns), he switched to a ’68 AMX, and was undefeated in this deadly little game. Needless to say, we never got into that thing for a ride, and would rather walk ten miles than ride shotgun at over a hundred, with flashing lights in the rearview mirror.
Neilbo had the sweetest ride of all, a bone-white, dual-quad 427 AC Cobra. He turned a wrench in the Shell station where I worked after school and on weekends, and one day he roared out pretty fast, with a state police car witnessing the tire smoke and pulling him over.
“Flip the hood,” the officer said. “I just want to see that glorious engine.”
Neilbo’s beater was a black primer ’69 Mach 1 Mustang, with a stroker 390 that was over 430 cubic inches. One day he needed parts fast, and told me to take the beater, using some of the most cherished words I’ve ever heard:
“Let the horses run, Danny. I want to see some serious smoke.”
I really underestimated the power of that thing, and almost lost control shredding tires as I rocketed west on Route 30. There was lots of rubber in all four gears, and keeping the nose straight was the funniest thing on earth, wrangling that steering wheel like a thrashing snake.
In retrospect, I should’ve been beaten and shot. Tire smoke marked my trail for two blocks, and the shocked expressions of witnesses would have put me to shame these days, but hey; youth can be a different perspective, and totally self-absorbed.
Coming back to the station, I noticed the owner’s caddy parked in his slot, and started to fear for my job.
“Gerry’s wife was at the intersection when you simulated acres of burning forest with my rear tires,” Neilbo said, looking grim. “She wants to see you.”
I will always be indebted to Neilbo; who must have told her I had been given free reign to be stupid, because she had a little smile on her face like Mrs. Robinson, watching me squirm and sweat.
“Never again,” she said. “For customer’s sake.”
I really need help. I am still a demented soul who thinks there is nothing better than to have your entire body pressed back into a hard bucket seat by brutal G forces, to the machine-gun staccato of a race engine pounding rear tires into hard pavement, as a scooped hood rises high and DROPS for each gear shift. The smell is better than any perfume imaginable; raw gas getting sucked, burned and blasted out back. I have no reason why this is great; not a damn clue.
I’m not one for show cars, though. Don’t want to stand in front of an open hood to display chrome and inner workings. I appreciate collectables, but my back alley red-headed step-child can blow the doors off your stock SS, R/T, GT, or special whatever, without even straining. I have no idea why this matters, but I’ve got these cool black decals on the front quarters, above three angled stripes just behind the tires. It reads, 500 HORSEPOWER, and beneath that, COPO INTERCEPTOR. It looks factory, and collectors always ask about it.
I usually feign a kind of nonchalant, ignorant attitude, explaining that yes, it is actually over five-hundred horses, and no, I don’t know the exact details of its rare heritage.
“Apparently they made five of these for the long desert stretch between Vegas and L.A.,” I mumble. “To catch crazies and drug-runners, blasting through in exotic cars, but it’s just a vague rumor. There’s no records available.”
They probably rush home to look it up on the net, and come up empty-handed, which adds another hundred grand to the asking price of a farm field beater with extreme sleeper upgrades.
It isn’t collectable art to be towed around, and it sure won’t be in a small town parade. It may, however, destroy the planet at light speed, all for the distant beat of nostalgia and occasional rocket runs on big empty highways, during the hours all decent folks are sound asleep.
Where was I? Massachusetts! Neilbo’s friend Chris had my own personal favorite, a tequila orange ’68 Shelby Cobra GT350 with a Paxton supercharger, pushing close to 600 horses with a little 289. It was usually in the shop after a piston went through the hood, or a drive shaft went through somebody’s picket fence, but when everything hit right, it could pace a damn Daytona car. Whenever he pulled into the station, you could actually feel the ground vibrating beneath your feet.
One day a mechanic drove in with a white ’67 Mustang GTA fastback, and I saw my future. He was an ex-con with greasy black hair and questionable side incomes, and had done a sloppy job converting the automatic tranny to a hearst four-speed, but I was blind to such trivia. When he said a thousand dollars would drive that beast away, I started working overtime. Instant Steve McQueen; hello chicks, bye-bye college.[2]
I had it less than a day when disaster struck, driving to the insurance company behind my father in a thunderstorm. Two kids flew through an intersection at close to 70, and t-boned me right on the passenger door. The kids were driving a rear engine Corvair, so their front end vaporized upon impact, giving them severe facial damage. I was knocked out into the street, and came back to reality in Emerson Hospital, shaken but otherwise undamaged. The Mustang was actually saved, but the unibody construct was seriously compromised, and one rear tire stuck out more than the other. I sold it shortly thereafter.
Yet another classic Mustang was given to a very good friend from his brother, who had a few tours of Vietnam. He had bought the ’69 Mach I while on leave, and tucked it into his parent’s garage for safe keeping, until he was out.
The fighting over there had been mind altering, and when he returned, the car was like any other inanimate object, so it was handed off to his brother, Kevin.
“I’m selling it for college money,” Kevin said, putting us all into terminal shock. “It’s worth a lot of money, and I’m putting it to good use.”
He would be the rare one among us, with good grades and common sense, who was going on to much bigger things. We laughed when a super nerd named Arty opted-out with a VW bug, but now he’s a multi-millionaire. In retrospect, my wife had a very valid point with the Camaro, lurking down there in its lair. Also, our carbon footprints humbled the Grand Canyon. Paleontologists built a museum around them.
But there were times my friends, there were times: Bruce Springsteen was singing “Thunder Road” on a hissing 8-track, the girl and sun were both hot, the Mustang was running sweet, and Officer Dudley looked dashing in reflective shades, explaining how one more ticket would get me an army gig down in Fort Benning, where most sport vehicles had 50-caliber guns attached. Ha-ha! What a great dude!
There was a small parade of muscle cars sucking paychecks after that little Mustang, starting with a gold ’71 Challenger R/T, going to a bright orange ’68 AMX, then a black ’68 Charger 440, and an almost new ’86 Camaro, and now — the king of all — the ’86 Z 28 Camaro, with a motor built to outrun small planes.
Each car had a lot of fun miles, but I have to come clean and confess that — like Little Steve — I reached for new levels of stupidity by running the cops; once with the 383 Magnum Challenger R/T in the mountains of Vermont, and twice with the black 440 Charger in Massachusetts, with speeds surpassing 160 mph. All three were at night, with a big lead and empty or quiet roads. They quit early and probably called ahead; I was long gone and never close enough for a plate description. Again, beaten and shot comes to mind, and I regret every minute, putting innocent lives at risk for a quick rush. In the top ten list of totally stupid and careless acts, those three runs are pretty high up there.
And please take note: Nostalgia is a very funny lens to look through. All those years of missing college and working for speeding tickets are long forgotten. All those stupid and dangerous driving stunts, late night breakdowns, and untold bills are pushed aside by hot babes and late night runs to fun destinations. And now there are plenty of wealthy old playboys out there bidding six figures for rides we took for granted, so we must have known something, with a small streak of good taste in our twisted little brains. You may even call us deeply prophetic, or perhaps pathetic, but like Chevy parts or Harley Davidson motorcycles, it’s all somewhat interchangeable.
These days I’ve got special rules for the racecar. I’m into the middle lane cruise, like parting the seas for HIS RUMBLING BEASTINESS. Absolutely no tailgating, no cowboy moves without signal lights, and under no circumstances do I take a challenge from kids, drunks, or worst of all, soccer moms running late. Rumble along, growl like a wolf, part the seas.
These days a boring ride is often a very good thing, and if I’m driving my little daughter, the only excitement I want is on the radio. But hey, go ahead and giggle when the wind pushes my little Hyundai around, and discarded cigarette butts knock it off course. I’m doing my part here, moving over as you smirk and bull rush the tiny rear bumper. Go ahead and have your brief moment of gas guzzling testosterone, because on the day you chuckle on by, I’m doing the right thing and paying homage to my smart friends back in the day. I’m being safe, and slightly dismayed at your insolence.
Tomorrow, I may rumble up the middle lane as a fuel hungry predator cruising schools of helpless guppies, and ye shall tremble! Ye shall know me by the sound of sick and brutal horsepower! Amen, brothers and sisters, pay homage to the rebirth of a terrible thundering dinosaur, and quiver upon my passing!
What’s that? My wife just got home? Ha-ha! Excuse me while I go do some dishes and . . . er . . . vacuum. Hey! Have I told you about the two vacuums in our house? One is a regular old Hoover Runabout . . .[3]
I blame all of this on years of surveying. That ink blot is a Camaro. Now it’s a Hyundai . . . Camaro! Hyundai! Cougar! JESUS! IT’S JESUS! SELL IT ON eBay!!!
1] A word that rhymes with a small town in Bolivia. [2] Minor detail: Upon close inspection of the fiberglass Shelby hood, Neilbo discovered it was from a car he used to own, that was stolen. He let me keep the hood, but things did not go well with the other mechanic after that.
[3] Author’s note: Last summer I was driving on the Charter Oak Bridge going into Hartford, and saw an early Corvette being hauled by someone who obviously wanted to hear the Camaro’s engine roar, so I quickly obliged by blowing transmission parts all over Hartford and parts of Canada. Perfect. The local tranny shop scolded me for having “sick horsepower” and a “small penis”, quoting prices just short of the national deficit. The car is now being employed as a very successful mouse condominium. My wife still kicks the tires. There’s another metaphor.
Extreme Opposites
Scattered Memories
