Automobile suite: The young person's guide to cars
by Joe Palmer
[ places - december 02 ]
We are ready for any unforeseen event which may or may not happen. - Tom Ridge
Suite: a modern [..] composition in several movements of different character
Approach all automobiles as you would a loaded gun, mindfully, with humility, fear and knowledge. Beware their seductive allure, their indispensable utility and dazzling charm, for they are in actuality, beneath the fascination and beauty, truly costly, dangerous, and even lethal. They can be hazardous to your health, crippling to your bank account and financial eudaemonia, and perilous to your composure and peace of mind. They can maim and kill and send you to debtor's prison. And they nearly did me. People don't impoverish; cars do.
I want to tell you what I learned about cars so that you can imagine yourself behind the steering wheel of my memories, and see what can happen if you keep an automobile, drive one, or know someone who does.
If possible an automobile should be kept like a mistress, pampered and secluded, polished and waiting for only the occasional Sunday drive. It's best to live downtown in the city without keeping an automobile, using taxis, rented cars, and public transportation instead of becoming an indentured slave to financial institutions as the 'owner' of a car. As long as you owe money for it you do not own a car, house, or business. It is "somebody's else", as my old English professor Joseph Schleuter Schick used to say back in Indiana. He invariably entered the classroom shaken by the vehicular traffic at the edge of the campus, muttering "May God damn inverted bathtubs, carbon- monoxide-exuding V-8s."
My father, who moved through dooms of love, taught me to steer at the wheel of an old truck, sitting on his lap, with me keeping the hood ornament lined up on the edge of the road. We did not own a car when I was a boy. When I worked in the orchards then, I drove a surplus WWII Willis Jeep, hauling wagons full of peaches and apples to the packing sheds.
Away at school, I borrowed a friend's old car to take my new girlfriend home to meet my father. The motor exploded on the highway, throwing a piston through the side of the engine block, not a minor event in the life of that 1939 Dodge automobile. I had to telephone my father and ask him to come and get us, not the last time he would fetch me home from a broken car.
When I was finally graduated from college, my mother-in-law got me a job in upstate New York, and my father-in-law gave me his car so we could get around. It was time to trade in his Ford as usual, anyway. He regularly bought a new one every two years. In the 1950s a car might last two years before it started falling apart, its obsolescence carefully planned by highly paid engineers. After a tumultuous year in New York, we decided to move to Florida, and so we rented a U-Haul trailer, hitched it on to the little Ford sedan, and drove to Indiana to visit with relatives on our way south. There my father had the car serviced, inspected, lubricated and blessed. "Change the oil a lot," was his advice.
We drove for several days, sleeping in tourist cabins and eating in village restaurants, in the time before interstate highways and fast food, discarding dirty diapers and warming bottles of milk for the two babies, envying Gypsies. Later that summer in Coconut Grove, a suburb of Miami, we gave up our search for a home in Florida and decided to go back to Indiana to seek our fortune among our own kind.
Okefenokee
The little Ford four-door sedan started to make whining noises just as we crossed the Georgia-Florida line on our way north that sunny morning. It was so hot inside the car that I didn't notice the floorboards getting hot too. We were not far from the Suwannee River in the Okefenokee Swamp when the car stopped running. So I guided the car full of babies, and the U-Haul trailer, onto the narrow shoulder of the road, and I thought about how we had got to where we were.
Lowell had given us his two-year-old Ford Fordor, instead of trading it in on a new one as he usually did. Back in those days, people who could afford to do it traded in their cars every two years, because cars were made as shoddily as every other consumer item. American commercial products, from candy bars to houses, were made out of the cheapest available material, briefly functioning stuff. American chocolate, for example, used to taste like corn syrup and sorghum, the cheapest sweeteners. Cars were built to last just long enough to be paid for. Houses were made with "balloon" frames, sticks and cardboard, called "ticky-tacky."
"Planned obsolescence" is what they called this practice. It meant that everything looked good but fell apart soon, so people who had a steady income, the ones who were buying houses from the banks, traded their cars in on new ones, and consequently poor people who needed cars had to spend a lot of time and money keeping the older used cars running, the ones they could afford to buy. It was a system that made a lot of jobs for the poor, and a lot of money for those who already had money, the ones who loaned money to poor people so they could buy the cars and houses made by the people who loaned them the money.
In those days, every driver, even girls, knew how to change a flat tire, because tires often failed, falling apart after a little use, and so you had to know the procedures of repairing a punctured tire and changing to a spare tire. All cars, even the expensive ones, were cheaply made. Wheel bearings wore out. The steering gear, transmissions, clutch springs, headlights, wiper motors, starters, and especially the old carbureted engines stopped functioning irregularly. We called cars "buckets of bolts." They rusted quickly, and so car painters were as common as dry cleaners. You had to have your car re-painted every two or three years. If you didn't, the body fell apart and off the car. American cars were tinsel and unreliable before the Japanese sent their good cars to us. Then people stopped buying the inferior cars, except for the proud, patriotic and stubborn Americans, until the American manufacturers were forced to make better cars in order to save their business. But that's another, ongoing story.
We had driven north up old Highway # 1 from Miami that first day, stopping in Fruit Cove for the night. The next morning we went to a truck stop, a combination filling station and restaurant, where I asked the attendant, a polite, smiling young man, whether he could change the oil and service the car while we fed the babies and ate some breakfast. We went inside the restaurant, and he took the keys, detached the U-Haul trailer, and put the car in the garage. After a few minutes he brought the keys to me and pointed to the car and trailer waiting outside. He gave me a bill for a few dollars, and I paid him.
Then a scowling, older man came to me and asked whether I had given money to the attendant. I showed him the receipt. He asked me please to wait a few minutes, not to leave. I asked why. He said I'd see. He went to the telephone.
A sheriff's deputy drove up and parked, and he came in and spoke to the older man. Then he asked me to repeat the story about paying the attendant. He went out, put handcuffs on the attendant, who had not changed the oil, and put him in his patrol car. He didn't read the young man his rights. In those days the courts had not yet gone soft on criminals. He came back inside and thanked me, and then I had to repeat the story to several people who wanted to know the details. We were delayed starting that leg of the trip back to Indiana. We didn't feel like waiting around to get the oil changed.
That afternoon on old Highway #23 between Jacksonville and Waycross in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp, the floorboards got hot and the Ford died. I pulled the car off the road at the edge of the swamp, weeping in frustration.
Then along came Henry Stutz, a retired miller from Milwaukee, who was living with his wife in a trailer park in a nearby town, Swamp Park. He took Jane and the babies there to his wife, and he took me to King Brothers' Ford in Waycross. Billy King, the proprietor, sent his mechanic Jeff out to tow the dead car to the shop, where he put it up on a hoist and pronounced that "This here's a salt-water car." And furthermore, "The bearin's is burnt out. Ain't nothing we can do 'bout it."
"Tell you what I'll do," Billy King said. He would take the old car as a down payment on a new one, and finance it through the Ford Company, itself, so we could drive the new one away and go wherever we wished, no hassle, tomorrow, if we wanted to. Mr Stutz drove back to his trailer and brought the others to a motel down the street from King Brothers' Ford and Garage. While Mrs Stutz stayed with the babies, we talked to Billy King, and he asked us to pick out whatever model and color we wanted, and if he didn't have it he could get it right away, and all we had to do after he checked the figures was to come up with five hundred dollars in cash so that the finance company would agree to sell to someone from out of state and all. Jane picked out a red and white four-door sedan from the pictures in the catalog.
I phoned my father in Indiana that evening and asked him for the money. He sent it to me next morning by Western Union. We told Billy King, and went to pick up the new car. And there it was, a brand new, light green, two-door coupe. We balked, and Billy King said that if we could wait a few days he would call up his brother over in Savannah and maybe they could find the one we were talking about, but you know this one's a lot cheaper, and did you know that there is brand of charcoal on the market, Kingsford Charcoal, and people always ask if that is one of the King Brothers' company businesses, and, you know, it isn't, but the name sounds the same..." So I signed the papers, too tired to think straight, and we drove away, pulling our rented Sisyphian U-Haul trailer behind our new car.
Two weeks later, after consulting a fortune-teller, I answered an advertisement in the Indianapolis Star. The principal of a high school in Michigan flew to Indianapolis and gave me a teaching contract while we ate a sandwich at the airport. We packed up another U-Haul trailer and drove to Romeo, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where we found an apartment in a cornfield at the edge of town. When I told the Okefenokee story to my new colleagues at the high school, car-wise Michiganders, they demanded to see the contract I had signed to pay for the new car. I learned that, in the parlance of the day, it had been "packed," that is, falsified such that the cost to me would be twice what the car was worth.
It was not illegal in those days to rob people with a fountain pen. Today it is an illegal but common practice. The next payment on the car would be twice my monthly income. I phoned the Ford credit office in Detroit. They sent two agents to look at the papers. Deploring what Billy King had done to me, they advised me to sign the car over to them. They would ship it back to Georgia at Billy King's expense, and I would owe them no more money. So I had lost the new car, my father-in-law's car, my father's five hundred dollars, and all my savings.
I had to get to work, and go to the grocery, like everybody. One of the teachers had a brother-in-law who was a plumber and a volunteer fireman, who drove a decrepit old "junker, a "beater," a car that otherwise would have been sold for scrap, except that it still ran. He wanted to sell it and get a more reliable car. It was a 1946, formerly maroon-colored, Chrysler coupe. There was a corroded, non-functioning, chrome-plated siren mounted on the roof. The windows were stuck shut. There were large holes in the rotted floor, but air in the tires. I bought it for $35.
My work at the school began in September. The following December at Christmas time, my father-in-law, fearing no doubt for the safety of his daughter and grandchildren, gave me another Ford car, his personal car as before. I could have told him that I didn't have much luck with cars, but he knew that. I sold the Chrysler for $39 to a high school student. He never drove it to school because the other kids laughed at it.
It was not the habit to remove keys from the ignition switches of cars in those days, or to lock the doors of houses. One morning the next May, as I went out to drive to work. I found that there was no car. It had been stolen by one of my high school students, but not by the kid I had sold the old Chrysler to. The FBI telephoned me when the Ford was found in a ditch in Arkansas. Not knowing that the car was irreparable, I flew to Arkansas from Michigan to drive it home, but there I had to sell its remains at a junkyard, and then I flew home. Such activities cost money not in the budget.
It was at that point in my career that my father-in-law stopped giving me his old Ford. I suppose he thought that like a wino on the street I would probably waste it on drink or lose it. Giving me cars was like pounding sand down a rat hole.
"Man must have wheels or he will die," Kurt Weill might have written in 'Moon of Alabama'. I had to get a car. I went to the local Chevrolet dealer to try out the new "Corvair", a car that General Motors hoped would save its small car market from the competition, the German Volkswagen, then new to the American market, the French Renault Dauphine and the Ford Falcon, all "economy cars", that is, cheap to make, dangerous to drive fast, and often a waste of money. The social activist Ralph Nader made his reputation decrying the safety of the Corvair, and even I, the world's least-competent car user, could see that the Corvair was shoddy, a rear-engine folly constructed in part of cardboard, and as ugly as a camel.
I told my students about my problem. The father of one of them was a used car dealer and justice of the peace. He sold me a beige-colored, four-year-old, four-door Ford sedan. It looked like new, its paint shiny. When I drove over the bump at the railroad tracks on Main Street both headlights fell out. They had been hastily repaired, the gaps filled in with a plastic compound, as had the fenders, doors, hood, and trunk. The body, made of inferior steel, had rusted out and fallen apart at all the edges. In a body shop the rusted metal had been replaced with molded fiberglass glue, and then the whole car was repainted, a practice typical of the time. The used car dealer, my student's father and justice of the peace, gave me my money back after I threatened to tell the whole world from my pulpit at the high school about his crooked business. He offered to allow me to accompany him to the used car auction where he would let me use his credentials to purchase any discarded car I fancied. Increasingly becoming aware of my ignorance, I declined his kind offer.
Mi tocayo
With the money recovered from the fiberglass lemon, I made the down payment on a Pontiac Tempest, a small car with a novel engine. General Motors did not have a small, lucrative four-cylinder car in those days, so in order to make the tiny Tempest [in a teapot] they cut an eight-cylinder engine in half, and connected it to the rear drive-wheels by means of a bent spring-steel rod, instead of a rigid drive shaft. The rod curved beneath the floor of the car, thus leaving room for the feet. It worked, and they sold the car for a while, but the cost of manufacturing carefully machined parts for it killed the Tempest. If a car is not eventually hugely profitable, General Motors stops making it.
We used the little Tempest for years without incident. Perhaps its ludicrous name frightened ill fortune away. In truth, it was too good to be true. It proved that American companies can make good cars.
Then I took a job in East Africa, and so we sold, stored and shipped our excess possessions in order to be able to move to Somalia. I needed to get rid of the Tempest. One of my friends, a student at the University of Michigan bought it. He was a good buddy, a pilgrim traveler in the regions of Middle English dialects, an English teacher at the University of Puerto Rico, a small fellow who shared my first name, mi tocayo José Arana, of such a slight build that we had to get wooden blocks fastened to the pedals so that he could reach all the controls to drive the car.
José drove the car to Fort Lauderdale, and then shipped it to San Juan. Years later when we were in Thailand, José wrote to me from his hospital bed in Manhattan, telling me that his mother was still using the Tempest in Puerto Rico. He had gone to Columbia University on a grant to complete his doctoral dissertation. There, in an elevator he had been mugged and stabbed. One of his sisters wrote to me later to tell me that he died of his wounds.
NTEC
The National Teacher Education Center was twelve miles by paved road from the capital city of Mogadiscio, Somalia. The commodities available to us at the center, a high school for teachers, were water saturated with Epsom salts from the well, which had to be filtered in a huge ceramic device to remove the noxious living things from it, and eggs that the egg lady gathered in the bush and delivered to us occasionally, shouting "OKUN", the Somali word for egg, through our bedroom window, startling us awake. That's all. Sometimes the Italian farmers would bring large stalks of bananas from the river valley and give them to us because they felt sorry for us. Everything else had to be fetched from the commissary and shops of the city. The commissary had imported luxury items like powdered milk and other packaged groceries from the United States. There were no grocery stores, only shops that had a few Italian items, like pasta and oil.
There was but one paved road in Somalia in those days. The Italians had built it so that they could move soldiers to protect the capital city in case the British invaded from Kenya during WWII. A pillbox gun emplacement stood near the campus on the blacktop road. We could drive to the city using the pavement. The most common vehicles, aside from the old trucks that served for public transportation for well-to-do Somalis, were four-wheel-drive Land Rovers and Jeeps that could traverse the sand tracks that served as highways. Small, practical private cars were the Fiats, Renault Deux Chevaux, and VW Beetles. They were light and economical. When they got stuck you could lift them out of the mud or sand and go on your way. Before arriving in Somalia, by means of the diplomatic pouch I had bought a VW that belonged to a staff member who was leaving the project at NTEC. In Somalia Americans mailed their letters at the American Embassy, not at the Post Office. There were no government services.
Our Volkswagen, one of the people's cars, was sand colored and only two years old. It had been kept alive by Italian mechanics in the city. They regularly and frequently changed the oil and cleaned the spark plugs - every one thousand kilometers. Driving in extremely dusty conditions worn the machines out quickly. Thorns and stones damaged the tires. The car had been shipped to the port of Mombasa in Kenya, and then sent by barge to Mogadiscio. Such a car was appropriately primitive, like the roads and facilities there. The car I bought sight unseen needed two new tires, because the previous owner had sold two of its second set of tires to a friend, leaving two soon-to-be-useless tires on the car, because, I was told, the only way to get new tires was to order them from the States and wait many months for them to arrive, and the owner's friend had needed tires, so he stuck me with the old ones. I asked the boss, the chief of party, why people didn't go the store in the city and buy their tires. They bought sugar and salt. Why not tires? He said that nobody at the school spoke Italian, the language of the colonizers, the shopkeepers. All the Americans were afraid of foreigners, as if speaking another language were an unthinkable act. The taboo against others, the xenophobia, was so strong among the Americans that they would be deprived of essentials rather than have to do with foreigners. The Italian shopkeepers were as strange to the Americans as the elephant and lion of the bush, among the outer ring of animals, the ones we do not eat or keep as pets.
Sometimes it is hard to show respect to one's superiors. We had just spent the summer living in Rome at the motherhouse of a Canadian order of nuns, with many students. We had made friends there. Once we had borrowed a priest's old car, a Fiat 1300 that had only three working cylinders, and drove to the beach at Ostia Antica, with the kids pushing the car up the hills and then coasting down. It was ok on the flat. My friend from Michigan Jim Champion had brought his wife from Barcelona to Rome on a Vespa motor scooter, where he was teaching English to Romanian Jewish refugees. We had lived with them and the Italians.
So I went slowly on my bald tires to the shop of the Fratelli Ceri where I purchased two brand-spanking-new Pirelli tires. When the chief saw the new tires, he asked me in amazement where I had got them. "Santa Claus," I replied. That guy spoke only one word of Somali, and he pronounced it wrong. The next year, at my urging, they sent two fearless Italian-American teachers to the college from the United States.
There was little traffic but no Automobile Association, and the single highway was dangerous. Animals on the road were a constant hazard. Killing a cow or camel involved litigation and personal danger from irate herdsmen. Like most of the Europeans, and like many Americans today, I kept a Beretta 9mm pistol in the glove box for protection. Somalis were known to go berserk and kill after traffic accidents. I never had to use it.
We always told someone where we were going and when, so that they could check up on us, good advice for anyone driving a car at any time. One night a young British soccer mom with a car full of kids slammed into the back of a truck parked on the highway with no lights. She and one child died. The other three were airlifted out to the American military hospital in Asmara, Ethiopia. An American collided with a cow, killing it. He fled for his life, pursued by herdsmen on foot. The American consul paid indemnity to the owner of the cow after a hearing. A cow was worth an old camel. A human was worth one hundred camels. What will you have to pay if you are negligent or unlucky in driving? Driving in Canada, my wife hit a deer. The deer died in the passenger seat, wrecking the car. A friend of mine hit a pedestrian in Bangkok, sending him to the hospital and my friend to jail. I knew a woman who got stuck in the car with her two daughters on a railroad crossing. A train killed them.
The circumstances change, but the certainty of eventual trouble for drivers does not. Speed kills, and so do alcohol, stupidity, and bad luck.
Car and driver
Perhaps the best way to operate an automobile, from the point of view of safety and convenience, is to hire a car and driver, particularly if you do not wish to have to do with the local people, as was the case when I lived in Somalia, Thailand, and Egypt.
There were no cars for hire in Somalia, but in Thailand we were given a car and a chauffeur as perquisites of the job. Whenever a driver had an accident there, if it was serious he always ran away to avoid punishment, and then we simply had to get another. There were many minor "fender benders", Thais being terrible drivers. The drivers took care of the cars, washed and polished them, and had them serviced. The Foundation paid all the expenses. That is the preferred way. It is better to splurge on a hired limousine and driver than to waste your substance on owning and running a car.
But, alas, sometimes we have to have a car every day. When I lived in Cairo, I used taxis. Keeping a locally made Fiat, called a Nasser, was too much trouble, and unnecessary. When I saw the Egyptian traffic following unwritten and unknowable rules, I decided not to get a car. During morning rush hours in Cairo, cars going into the city fill both sides of the boulevards going in one direction. There is no opposite traffic until the rush is over. It is a free for all, a bump-a-car carnival ride.
Even though we lived in suburban Ma'adi, south of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile, I took a taxi every day to the university down town. I could take the commuter train, and I did a few times, but when I got home, I had to get undressed standing on an old bed sheet and shake the fleas out of my clothes.
On returning to America after my travels, I owned a succession of cars that broke down and would not run properly. I bought a new sort of VW, a station wagon. I sold it to a rabbi because it was in the garage every Saturday under warranty anyway. A Volvo I bought in New York at La Guardia Airport. I drove it to Michigan, where it decided to become a convalescent, taking the air only in clement weather. Then I bought a big Mercury sedan from a lawyer who knew that the oil crunch of 1972 was coming and didn't want to pay for the gasoline it consumed. I drove it for ten years, "fixing or repairing it daily", as they say — FORD. It ate tires and gobbled exhaust systems, drinking gasoline like beer. But it usually ran and carried the kids safely.
When the old Mercury was ready for euthanasia, when the gas tank leaked and the ball joints were gone, we sold it for scrap. My wife wept when the junkman smashed the windshield with a sledgehammer to get at the registration tag. We had named it "Mattoon", after the middle name of the socialist, perennial presidential candidate Norman Thomas. The name is also Québecois for "female tomcat."
Mattoon had Firestone tires. The tires wore out the way tires were supposed to wear out. The tread rubbed off or separated from the body of the tire. They were easily punctured and scuffed. In those days you were used to changing tires. People took pride in their skill at changing a tire by the roadside. It was a mark of chivalry to stop by the roadside and assist a damsel in distress, or anyone with a flat tire. Tires were a pain in the ass.
After we moved to Beaconsfield, a suburb of Montreal named after Benjamin Disraeli, the local Firestone shop had a special sale. I bought four new tires for Mattoon. Driving from New York one day, I felt the roadway change to gravel, I thought, but it wasn't gravel causing the shudder. The steering began to pull to one side and the other, and a grinding, flapping noise grew softer as I pulled the car onto the shoulder of the highway. All four tattered tires were falling apart simultaneously. I limped home slowly on side roads by way of the Firestone garage, where the tires were replaced, with many apologies and lies about such a thing never happening before. Like the deacon's one-hoss shay, the tires had fallen apart when their brief time was up.
"It was written," my friends in Egypt would have said.
To replace the Mercury I bought a car new to the Canadian market that was not sold in the States, a Russian Lada, which was an Italian Fiat made in Togliattigrad, Russia, and assembled in Nova Scotia.
An Italian car made in Russia? With assistance of the leader of the Italian Communist Party Palmiro Togliatti, the Russians had built an automobile factory to produce a version of the Fiat 124 in the city of Stavropol', in Samara Oblast. When we lived with the nuns in Rome in 1966 there was a huge banner spanning the street outside our apartment. It read: "Vota Communista"
Now known as Tol'yatti in Samaraskaya, the city has a soccer team called "Futbol'nyy Klub Lada." Lada means girl.
In those days the Russkis were the bad guys. All things Russian were banned and shunned, except music. Nobody in North America did business with them, except the Canadians and Cubans. The Canadians would do business with the Devil, hard-hearted British merchants that they are. The Cubans were beggars. So they set up an assembly plant in Halifax, and put together cheap cars, imitation Fiat 124s, little four-door sedans, out of the crummy parts shipped from Russia. The car was boxy, cumbersome, and shoddily built of run-of-the-mill parts, but I thought that my buying the product of our mortal enemy was good juju, a way to make a statement about how selfishly the world was arranged. Why should we not buy from the Russians and they from us? I was ahead of my time by about twenty-five years.
The Lada was an antiquated, simple, basic car, ill-suited to North American interstate highways. It cost only $3,800. It came with a complete, do-it-yourself tool kit that included a hand crank so that one could start it anywhere without a battery. There were few garages in Russia in those days.
Needless to say, few Americans had ever seen a Lada when we drove to Indiana in ours, except in Eastern European newsreels. We went to Indiana in our second Lada, having traded in the original on another new one after one year because a windshield wiper motor had burned out while I was driving in a blizzard. Maybe it snowed more gently in Russia. When I went to get it repaired, the owner of the Lada/Saab garage talked me into trading the car for a newer, "improved" model, which was even shoddier than the first.
We had had a remarkably pleasant time with our friend Bob Kost on his yacht on Lake St Clair, Michigan, on the first leg of our summer holiday. Bob had miraculously survived the wreck of his Jaguar XKE convertible coupe years before when we were neighbors in Romeo. He used to drive his powerful sports car with great skill to his office in Detroit every day. Once he avoided a collision by driving between the trucks of wheels of a big semi-trailer when forced over by the oncoming traffic. Once he didn't, and for weeks we took his wife Vonnie to visit him in the hospital in Mt Clemens. They didn't expect him to survive his multiple fractures and contusions. Today, at age ninety, he drives a Lincoln Town Car.
On that trip no one yet had mentioned the fact that we were driving a foreign car. People in Michigan hate foreign cars and the competition they represent, so they pretend that such cars don't exist. It would be rude to speak of a visitor's foreign car to him. And in those days during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, it was unthinkable to own a Russian foreign car. The Lada was a swastika tattoo, a hammer and sickle hidden under an Italian shirt.
One evening, driving back from the lake to Bob and Vonnie's home in Romeo, there was a loud bang from the front end of the Lada. I thought it had thrown a stone. The next morning we left our friends to go to my father's home in Indiana in the Russian car, an act similar to going to a Ku Klux Klan meeting in blackface, wearing a mask. The people in Indiana are so Libertarian they do not keep a common clock; if it is noon in Indianapolis, it might be two in the afternoon in Knox County. They are so xenophobic they are strangers to each other.
Humming down Interstate 69 just north of Anderson, Indiana, the car started stumbling and jerking. It would speed up and then slow down, of its own accord. Then it died. I got it to the shoulder of the highway. I checked the radiator. It was hot and full. After a few minutes the car started again. Haltingly I drove it to the next interchange where there was a Sunoco gas station and a motel.
The first thing next morning the manager of the gas station, Bigger Bobe, towed the Lada into the garage and put it up on the hoist. "What kind of car is this'un? He asked. I told him it was a Fiat. "One of them foreign cars?" he asked. It was eight o'clock in the morning.
"We'll getcha fixed up here in no time," he assured me.
Most cars were carbureted in those days, that is, they had complex chambers where gasoline and air mixed together before burning. The carburetor was often a source of trouble. Mr. Bobe decided after a few minutes that the trouble must reside there. He disassembled the carburetor, looking for the malfunction.
He had used a steel rod as a stethoscope, with one end in his ear, with the other end probing the innards of the growling and coughing motor, finding no recognizable etiology.
At noon Bigger was still at it, the carburetor reassembled, musing with long sighs and hand wringing. He said he had to go home and eat some dinner to try and calm his rage and frustration at his inability to find out what was wrong with the car, and he would be back at one o'clock. "God damn me," he said, "if I know what the fuck's going on here!" I was to learn again from him that vulgar language is an important tool for the automobile mechanic to use.
When our first Lada was still new, I had taken it to the garage for its first inspection and adjustment. There I heard the opinion from the mechanic Carmine that "These fuckin' cars make fuckin' mechanics look fuckin' stupid!" To break in a Lada meant to prepare it for repair.
On his return, with clean face and hands Bigger approached the patient.
"I'm missin' somethin'," he said, as he looked again at every part of the motor, checking off the possibilities.
"O, fuck!" he said. "Look." He pointed to a metal nut the size of a fist. It was there on the floor pan under the radiator. The big perforated nut that held the crankshaft tight in the block of the motor had come unscrewed and had dropped off, making the sharp noise we had heard in Michigan.
"Damn me," Bigger said, as he screwed the part back on the shaft and tightened it. The car then ran like a sewing machine.
Bigger started castigating himself, blaming his stupidity, his upbringing, lack of imagination and training, general incompetence, his sloth and bad luck for taking hours to solve a simple problem. He used mechanics' colorful cant to apologize for keeping us all morning and into the afternoon.
"How much I owe you?" I asked.
"Minimum," he grumbled. "One hour minimum I got to charge you. Ain't your fault. Twenty-nine dollars."
Several days later on our way back to Canada, in gratitude I took a trunk full of the finest, fragrant, half-slip cantaloupe melons to Bigger from the fruitful fields of Knox County.
The opposite of a Lada was a Saab. The Saab was made in Sweden by guys who in their day jobs designed jet fighter planes, notably the Viggen, and heavy trucks. It was engineered to the limits of execution. The Lada, on the other hand, was made by accident, not design. The comparison is, of course, unfair. The Lada was like a Volkswagen made by ants. It was run of the mill, ordinary, an Italian ocarina [It dial., dim. Of oca goose] with no quality control. The Saab was a hawk of a car, a Stradivarius tuned for performance, a powerful, nimble, exhilarating machine.
In order to drive the Lada you had to beat it with a stick; the Saab anticipated your desires. How two such cars could be sold by the same dealer puzzled me because they were the alpha and omega of cars. The Lada was the cheapest car on the market, while the Saab cost four times as much. The dealer Bob Barrell explained that the concessions for all the ordinary cars were taken. He sold whatever he could get. He also sold Honda motorcycles and lawn mowers.
The Saab was a revelation. I did not know that driving could be fun, and more than fun, invigorating and life affirming, a sort of Eucharist, a favor and grace that makes the driver grateful, a selvage in the bias of driving, a tool so good you become part of it. And it was safe and comfortable and made of Swedish steel, a Mont Blanc pen, not a Stylo Bic. It was not a game of Russian roulette like the Lada.
I kept the Saab the way you keep a fine saddle horse at an expensive stable, taking it regularly to the exclusive farrier for grooming because it required special parts and tuning to maintain its allure and effectiveness. In the city of Montreal there was only one competent, trained Saab mechanic, and he worked at Barrell's garage, a pit stop necessary to feeding the Saab addiction.
"How you gonna keep'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?" No other car had the savor of a Saab. I was of an age when a sports car had become more exciting than sex.
Barrell's garage was the only Saab garage in Quebec. Saab cars require Saab parts and they need clever, trained mechanics. When we moved to the country, to the mountains ninety miles from Barrell's garage, the nearest mechanics that pretended to be able to service and repair the car were at an all-purpose "European garage." At that garage two old brothers from Malta, who spoke only an Arabic/Italian/French Creole, serviced Porsches, BMWs, and Saabs. They had to order the parts for the Saab from Barrell, adding to the cost, or they jury-rigged the repairs. I felt that allowing them to work on my car was doing an injustice to it, so I tried to find a real Saab garage in nearby Vermont, in the United States not far from our country house.
In the suburbs of Burlington, Vermont, I found Billy's Unauthorized Saab Garage, as we called it.
Billy Cody serviced and repaired Saabs in his father George's garage in northern Vermont, in the Green Mountains where Saabs are popular and numerous, perhaps because the weather there resembles that of Sweden where the cars are made. Billy did a modest business, competing with authorized Saab dealers for customers in his suburban shop.
Billy's Saab garage was there in the village of Essex Junction because his father Georges Coté had inherited an entire section of land, 640 acres, from his Franco-American family, before he Americanized his name. The old family farm was situated a morning's ride up the river from the falls at Winooski near Lake Champlain, where the road forks. One fork follows the river; the other climbs to the mountains. IBM built a large factory down the road there in 1956, and dozens of ancillary businesses had sprung up, increasing the value of the land. George sold most of his land and built houses with the money.
Billy finished high school and even went to Johnson State College for a term, but the vaccination didn't take. Billy still loved tinkering with cars, driving fast, and chasing girls. George let him use one of the buildings as a machine shop where he pursued his hobby of repairing and modifying cars. Of all the affordable sports cars, Billy loved the Saab best. His enthusiasm led him to become the leader of a group of Saab lovers, of aficionados who spent their free time at the garage among their own kind, getting Billy to do the more difficult work on their cars, or using Billy's tools and equipment with his help and approval when they tinkered with their own cars.
Billy's Garage was a clubhouse, a messy, happy place. I liked to go there when the Saab needed attention, to hang out and swap stories with Billy's friends and customers. The garage looked like a junkyard with a half-dozen dead cars parked outside, an old warehouse in a field beside a strip mall, the low building full of junk and tires and tools left wherever they fell, an office room littered with boxes and papers, a Coke machine, partly dismantled cars, a comfortable place for guys. It was an informal club for worshipping Saabs, with camaraderie, boozing and occasional cannabis smoking.
Billy borrowed a large pickup truck from one of his cronies, Buddy Bear, in order "to run some errands." A week later Billy had not returned the truck, nor could he be found. His friend Buddy was furious. Then Billy appeared, towing a Saab 900 Turbo Sport behind the truck. The Saab had a broken transmission, and so Billy had bought it for a song — in Texas. Still furious, Buddy was mollified when he saw the four expensive new tires for the pickup that Billy presented to him, with his apologies for the delay and imposition. The next month Buddy's credit card bill was a thousand dollars higher than he expected. He had left his credit card in the glove box of the pickup, and Billy had used it to buy the tires.
Over the years I grew fond of Billy. I learned about his older brother and two younger sisters, their spouses, their jobs at IBM, and George's eight grandchildren. His father, George, was my age, a cautious, demanding landlord and paterfamilias. All of his sons and daughters and their families lived with him there in four of the several houses that he owned. For his own amusement, George also drove a Jerr-Dann flatbed truck for hauling disabled cars to local garages.
When the electrical wiring in my Saab decided to self-destruct, when it spontaneously caught fire at the ignition switch on the floor near the gearshift lever, and burned up, George and Billy came with the big truck to Canada and hauled the Saab to Vermont where Billy installed a new wiring harness.
Billy teased and joked that it was my fast driving that had heated the wires to the point of ignition. He himself loved to drive like the Devil was chasing him. The stately procession of my conduct of the Saab down the road seemed funny to him. "You're a fuckin' pépère," he would tell me, an old fart, a cautious, deliberate driver. Billy was a short, muscular, intense man in his late twenties, with a permanent smile on his handsome Latin face, the sort of guy you forgave anything because everything he did was fun.
Nearly every time I saw Billy he was drinking - beer, or rum, or vodka mixed with orange juice, especially while he worked and joked with his friends in the garage. When he started using cocaine in addition to alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, I thought that was pretty foolish. I asked George whether he had spoken to Billy about the danger of using the popular, expensive, and illegal drug. Billy kept it in a silver snuffbox in his pocket, disappearing for private moments in the office room.
"I don't know nothin' about that," George told me.
I felt that I had to talk to Billy about such excess and foolishness. As an older friend, I owed him a word of caution. He had kept my precious car in good repair at reasonable cost to me, and he had sometimes confided in me. I was always an English teacher in those days, spreading non-directive counseling and gratuitous advice wherever I went. I had learned that Billy still lived at home with his father, even though he was married and had a son. While we were sharing a pizza one day at Zachary's Pizzeria, and talking about his cocaine habit, which had grown to the use of two grams a day, I had asked him why he still lived with his daddy, and so he told me this story about his wife and child, Faith and Peter:
Faith Lee nearly dropped the telephone she was holding. She couldn't believe what Billy had just said to her. She sat down hard on the floor where she was standing next to the stove, her legs folding under her. The windows rattled from the impact of her steatopygous butt on the linoleum.
"After all these years? You're not serious!"
"Yeah, I want to make a deal with you," Billy said.
"But getting married? Why? You can have it for free just as long as you want it, just like always."
"I'll come over and explain it to you," Billy said.
Faith Lee was a typical Vermont farm girl, fat and muscular, over-fed and sturdy, dark and plain, who dressed like a man with plaid shirts and jeans, and heavy boots against the cow shit and snow. She kept the cows at her uncle's dairy farm, thirty head, getting up every morning at five o'clock to milk and feed the cows and muck out the stalls every day of the week. She lived with her widowed sister-in-law, and she had been Billy's friend and lover, his occasional squeeze at lunch time since they were in high school together.
What Billy proposed was marriage, a marriage of convenience to him. If Dawn would marry him and take care of his son, he would provide her with a house and a salary. He needed to be married in order to adopt a child, his son Peter Dean.
Billy had always and only been attracted to young girls, to teenaged girls. In fact, he became obsessed in the presence of pretty little girls. He first saw Dianna Dean, blond and nubile, cute, vain, and ignorant, when she was a cheerleader at a football game at Winooski High School, and he pursued her in every way possible to him. First he imposed himself at a high school mixer, but found that the young people laughed at him because at age twenty-nine he was much too old to be hanging around with any of them. He had mutual friends talk to her about his interest in her. He sent her flowers. Her mother found out and had a hysterical fit. She forbade Dianna to have anything to do with Billy. Dianna's father, Doctor Dean, was a hematologist in Burlington; her mother's family owned department stores. They would not allow their only child to have to do with hoi polloi. Mrs. Dean enrolled Dianna in Miss Cramp's School in Montreal and sent her away. Billy was a drunk and not even a ne'er-do-well. He had never tried to do anything honorable, in the eyes of Dianna's parents. And he was a grown man.
Dianna came home from Westmount on weekends occasionally, and then she was sometimes able to sneak out to be with Billy, but their happiest, most comfortable trysts were held at the Best Western Motel in Longueuil near the end of the Metro line, the subway train that runs from Montreal beneath the Saint Lawrence River. It was two hours from Billy's Garage by car, or an hour and a half the way Billy drove, and fifteen minutes by train from Miss Cramp's School in Westmount.
When Dianna's pregnancy was discovered, her mother and father put her away with the Grey Nuns on Dorchester Street until she came to term. Then they brought her home to Burlington where the baby, a boy, was born. They shipped Dianna off to school in Virginia on the day they put the baby up for adoption. The birth certificate read "father unknown."
Faith and Billy were married privately by the Reverend Paula Scott at the Congregational chapel, and George gave them, as a wedding present, a two-story cottage across the street from his own home. As soon as he had the necessary marriage certificate, Billy petitioned to adopt his son Peter Dean. He had friends in the Office of Social Services who abetted his plans, and by the time Peter was six months old, he was living with his stepmother and playing with his father every day in their home. Peter's father Billy lived across the street with his father George. Peter Dean Cody was Billy's delight.
When we had finished eating the pizza, I didn't notice that Billy had not answered my question about his living with his father.
A month or so later when I drove down to Billy's to get snow tires put on the car, he was in a manic state, a frantic mood, shouting and cursing, telling his helper and best friend Buddy to telephone everyone he could think of who owed him anything. He had to raise money, he said.
Billy was red in the face, stumbling around, dropping things. He asked me to drive down to the liquor store and get a bottle of Captain Morgan rum for him, to use his car, while he and Buddy changed the tires on mine.
"Cocksucker!" he shouted at a wheel, banging on the rim with a tire iron. He started coughing, doubling over with a hack, gasping for breath. I told him I would take him to the emergency room or to a local doctor because obviously he was in no condition to be working.
"Fuck it!" he shouted. Then, smiling at me, he asked me again to go and get him another bottle of rum. "I'm OK," he said. 'I just got to get these cars out and talk to some people, and I got a cough..."
When I returned with the rum, Billy drank three fingers of it, and then he sat down in a corner on an old bucket seat, and wept.
"I'm up shit creek," he told me, coughing so hard that little specks of blood stained his shirtsleeve.
"Let me drive you home, and I'll get a doctor," I said.
"No. Fuck it. I'll be all right." He blew blood from his nose onto a paper towel. He tried to stand up but fell on his side on the greasy floor.
I told Buddy to fetch George. He did and we took Billy home, to George's house just around the corner, and George put him to bed upstairs as always, and tucked him in, with Billy protesting between bouts of coughing that he would be all right as soon as he got some sleep.
"Look, George," I said. "You've got to get him to a doctor or to the hospital. He's got a high fever and sweating at the same time."
"He's a big boy," George said. "I told him about fuckin' around with that shit. He's got no more sense than his mother had."
When Buddy went upstairs late the next morning to wake Billy, he was dead.
