Buick and Vega

My father, James, was a mechanic in the big war and could fix about anything. He worked hard but had four kids and money was stretched thin much of the time, so if he could find an engine for $50 or better yet a car for $100, it would land at our place, either in our driveway if it ran or in the back yard (for parts) if it didn’t. My mother, Dottie Jean, had another place in mind for those vehicles and found it, too, but that’s another story. My dad’s more reliable pals for this kind of thing were a junk man named Jiggs Ray and a fellow named Viv Hoth, the local tow-truck guy. A gathering of my dad and either of those two soon meant there’d be even less room in the backyard to play.

Folks walking past my house could usually find my dad tinkering on any one of our cars — an arm sticking out from under the hood; a worn, unlaced Navy shoe protruding from a front tire and constant curly qs of thin blue smoke from a cigarette. A handsome man, my father was eternally tan and could hold a cigarette as if it was meant to be there. A white T-shirt and a few beads a sweat and it was a wonder I didn’t have 10 siblings. He wore his cap with the bill flipped up. He told me it helped him run faster. I ran around like that for years.

We lived in a town of 600 that was stuck in time, but in a good way, very self-sufficient. It had three restaurants, a drugstore, two grocery stores, two auto dealerships, two or three service stations, a lumberyard, library, a department store, even a doctor’s office and a generous bank that was right out of good old Bedford Falls. It had everything it needed. Danville, the county seat was 20 miles to the south and east near the Indiana line and trips there just weren’t necessary. But then came the highway and the K-Mart that drew the business away and with it eventually the lifeblood of my hometown. After that, we had to drive there.

Before the gas crisis of the mid-70s hit, my dad would scout for Buicks. Our driveway and backyard, filled with five or six of these things, resembled a mafia gathering or a maybe funeral parlor. James felt with his four kids, at the time age 16 to 22, one of us — especially if any drove like my daredevil sister Jane — would get in a wreck and if that were the case he wanted to surround us with as much solid steel as possible. The ’64 Electra 225 — the deuce and a quarter — was his car of choice, or maybe simply the ones available. They were all black except for mine, which was powder blue. My “Baby” had all the options. Power steering, power seats, power windows, an electric eye that dimmed the headlights as cars approached. I coached a little league team one summer and every one of those boys could fit into the thing. We didn’t win much but we had a ball — the boys all horsing around, bouncing in the back seat like popcorn. No seatbelts, no nothin. Four in the front, eight or nine in the back. Unimagineable these days.

That Buick came with an unexpected feature. It helped me make friends with blacks when I didn’t have any. I didn’t have any because I didn’t know any. Like most midwest towns of size, race relations fit the stereotypes. The quickest way across Danville to reach the junior college I attended went through the black section. With my wild sort-of afro hair and after picking up on the Detroit lean, not only did I feel comfortable driving through, but I cfound myself offering my new friends rides home, even being invited in after dropping them off. That 225 helped me get over fears and prejudices. I was able to gain an insight I probably would never have had until much later, if ever.

And those guys made a lot of offers for it. But I couldn’t sell it. There’s just something about a first car. And so my adventures with it lasted as long as the car did.

I was 20 and a journalism student doing part-time shit detail at a bureau office of the newspaper in Danville. Obits, hospital lists, lunch menus, petty-crime reports. My boss’s name was Diane Ross. NOT Diana, like the Supremes singer. Nearly everyone called her Diana though. She hated it but learned to let it go. Odd as it seems, she sort of resembled Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden, even using his mannerisms. Diane was a sharp, savvy reporter whose ambition was to cover the state house but her career was stuck for the time being — in Hoopeston, the sweet corn capital of America. An English major, she knew her Shakespeare and was helping me study for a final I was to have the next day. Her little Toyota was in the shop and she was borrowing the ambulance/hearse of the friendly undertaker. This town was that small.

Just as I was out the door, the staticky police scanner was reporting a small-plane crash in a field about 30 miles north. Showing up in a hearse at a plane crash is not the greatest professional entrance a reporter can make. She’d need more time explaining her story than it would take to get the straight dope on the crash. So, she pled her case: Look, she said, I’ll grill you on the Shakespeare, you just drive me to the site and back. That worked fine for about 10 miles and then BAM! We looked at each other. “What the hell was that?” A spark plug had blown out of the engine making it sound as if we were sitting next to an airplane engine. I pulled into the last and actually the only service station around. The worker seemed trustworthy and assured me the car would still run fine. “You just won’t be able to hear yourself think!” he shouted into my ear.

So off we went, Diane leaning in, screaming Shakespeare at me, and me screaming back answers. The absurdity did not escape us, but we still had a long way to go. Eventually we found the field and the small craft embedded in the mud. One firetruck had already gotten stuck. Another was idling along on a firmer part of the field that was some distance away. The firefighters got the gurney to the plane, loaded the pilot onto it and wrestled it back all with great care and even more difficulty. Diane was shaped like Babe Ruth, having a large round figure and teeny feet. Her clothes did not fit the occasion. She managed to track down the fire captain, eventually, lifting one foot from the muck and then the other. Finally she had gotten the notes she needed down on her pad and was making her way back when the muck didn’t give. She lost her shoe, then her balance and then everything else. Splat. Right into a large puddle. Dress, hair, glasses all plastered and splattered in mud. Trying to get up only made things worse. A firefighter lifted her out of this Illinois LaBrea. Her notes soaked and useless. Gathering herself, she half-turned to the fire chief, waving her ruined notes in the air and cried out a good-natured, “I’ll call ya.” “You do that,” the fire chief chuckled back.

Again, steadying herself, Diane tried to clean her glasses, by habit reaching for the first lense, which had been the clean one but not now, as she streaked mud across both and now left with nothing left to clean either. She paused, bent at the waist for a moment and as she stood she burst into a shout of laughter. She laughed, and I laughed. And we both laughed all the way back to my 225 and then all the way home as we screamed Shakespeare at each other over the roar of the motor.

When I got home, my dad fixed my Buick in about two minutes. Diane returned the hearse and got her Toyota back. She filed her story, but it was nothing like ours. And the test? I think I got an A.

Two years later I was a interning at the same paper and my city editor tossed a death notice on my desk. “Look into this, kid, see if there’s anything to it.” I recognized the name, although it took a moment. It was the pilot. A pilot grounded for good and in the worst way. The crash had left him paralyzed. He lived in a town near mine that was even smaller and had nothing for him. Bored and depressed beyond the breaking point, he had taken his life.

The Buick and I had other adventures, wee-hour middle-of-nowhere flat tires and mean farm dogs; cops mistaking me for some black guy, sending 5 menacing squad cars for a tail light that was out; a broadside accident that demolished an orange Vega that had a ridiculous racing stripe along its side. The Buick? Not a dent.

The gas crisis continued. Arlo Guthrie wrote a lyric about having “15 cars but can’t afford the gas.” That was us. We got rid of the Buicks. I was told that my Baby had made the final in a demolition derby at a nearby county fair. God, I was proud of that.

Now’s the part about the Vegas. My dad switched to having us drive them. He could find them for $100, too, so they were in his price range. Even at that, these Vegas provided a personal meaning to planned obsolesence. We had quite a colorful collection. My dad could fit twice as many Vegas into the driveway as Buicks. He did, too. I had a red one, but he kept Jiggs busy for Dad also got a black one, a brown one, a copper one, a silver one and a green one. We had automatics, a 3-speed, a 4-speed, even a 5- speed, although the 5th gear was, well, any speed approaching 60 mph and the car would rattle you deaf. You didn’t need it. I had to keep a pencil stashed in mine at all times. I needed one to stick into the carburetor to get my Vega to start. I’d warn any riders that whatever you do, don’t use my pencil.

My dad found oversized tires for it and hot damn, it’d get 30+MPG. Each weekend off I’d pack up Red and make the long, midnight-to-dawn drive from East St. Louis, where I landed a job after graduating from Illinois, to see my girlfriend in Chicago. Everytime along the way a few vehicles stranded along the roadside would catch my eye and heighten my anxiety. Another dead Vega. “C’mon, Red, just a little bit further.” How I coaxed this car past many a dark and dismal mile.

Finally in the city. I loved Chicago. And it loved me, I think. For it was not long before I got pulled over by a city cop, at the six-point at Belmont, Clark and Halsted. It was my first experience with a six point and it was confusing. It was around 3 a.m. My girlfriend, noting the time had suggested we swing left and over to the local Jewel grocer to pick up some milk for tea at her flat. Sounded great to me, especially since I had spent my small wad and had just enough.

At the six-point I could made a soft left onto Clark or a hard left onto Belmont — not noticing any of the six or so signs that indicated I couldn’t make a left at all. So a few moments after turning left, a squad car pulled me over. In those days, you left the car and met the patrolman at the rear. The policemen seemed nice, and, well, kind of hungry. “You know you made an illegal left turn back there, but we noticed you had a pretty girl with you, and, uh, wasn’t she pretty? And so being my partner here and I were just thinking about getting somthing to eat and then we saw you, and we didn’t really want to bust ya — we just want to grab a little something, ya know?”

That “ya know?” was what got through to my bumpkin brain where this was heading. “Oh!” I exclaimed. “Gee fellows, I don’t have anything,” I said while fishing out a crinkled dollar. “You really don’t have money, do ya,” one of them sort of dejectedly surmised. By then my concerned girlfriend, the confrontational type, got out and was approaching. The officer handed my license back and told me to beat it. I’d always heard about these shakedowns. Now I could tell about one.

The drive back to Southern Illinois I could make 90% of the way before coming to this steep hill outside Collinsville about 30 minutes from home. Sometimes Red would make it but sometimes peter out. It was always late and never another car around. When it would give out, I could go back down the hill in reverse and back up where I’d started and try to get enough momentum to make it up the other side. I never understood why I didn’t have this problem outbound. Only coming home.

I talked my way onto a suburban newspaper on Chicago’s NW side, and wound up finding an apartment in the same Belmont area. That section of town gave me a real-life lesson in supply and demand that no classroom ever approached. The ‘hood was quickly turning gay and in a big way. As the gays moved in, the female prostitutes were moving out. A few stragglers would come out of the alley or the shadows. This was all new to me.

One late night/early morning on the sidewalk near my flat a woman approached and whispered out the side of her mouth: “Wanna date?”
“What?” I said, not sure what I heard.

“Ya wanna date!?” this time more forceful.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked. She threw up her hands, rolled her eyes and griped out an “Ah, Jesus, YOU WANNA DATE?” and tromped off.

A few nights later, a panther type sprang out of the alley and leaped right in front of my car. The other one must have told her about me for she spread her long legs, pulled up her skirt, exposed her breasts, pointed one finger here and another one there and did everything but hold up a sign:
FUCK ME NOW. I’LL SHOW YOU HOW.

Only when she was convinced that I knew what she was and what she wanted did she let me pass. But the streetwalkers were soon gone. All these hot 18–40 year-old men had moved in and not one interested in their game. Econ 101 could keep its widgits. The lessons of the street can be more embarrassing, but far more interesting.

Red and I maneuvered around my first Chicago winter. No matter what you’ve heard or read, no one has truly experienced the cold of a Chicago winter night unless you’ve hurriedly opened the door to an old Vega, rushed in for refuge from the icy wind only to sense all the heat of your body draining right though the frozen seat as you feel and hear the vinyl crackle beneath you. I’d flip on the heat, and much like Godot, wait for a tinge of warmth that wouldn’t come. It actually did eventually heat up. It’d be May, but it’d heat up.

A Vega and a Chicago winter forced creative solutions to a mess of peculiar troubles. What I know about cars I could put in my eye, but I had two tools at the ready. I still had my pencil, and a long flat-head screwdriver that I needed to put the car in reverse, which my car had stopped doing. I discovered I could lift the rubber boot of the floor stick, work the plates to the transmission into alignment and then back my car up. Then I had to do this to engage first gear, but after that it was usually smooth sailing.

Another thing about the bitter cold and an old Vega is I’d have to undo the battery and lug it up to my 3rd-floor flat. Otherwise by morning the battery would die and I’d need a jump. And good luck getting that. The closest parking spot was seldom nearer than 4 blocks. The nearby spots were gone by the time I’d get home from my night job in the suburbs. Eight blocks to a Chicago mile. Every night I’d lug this 20-lb battery a half mile and then up 3 flights of steps. Try that on a date.

That first winter I also learned about “lake effect” snowstorms. Major storms would blow in but along the lake the snow just wouldn’t stop. Snowplows would clear all the main drags and pile the snow along the side streets where I’d have to park — the mound could reach the hood of my car. To nestle Red into an always tight parking space, I’d have to floor it. Imagine going 60 mph for about 12 feet and somehow brake, steer and fishtail the car in place, then lift the stupid boot, and in pitch black try to find the screwdriver which went flying upon impact, click the plates into reverse and then sort of rock it back and forth and sideways the few inches I needed to safely get it into place. Then there was the battery thing.

Red met its demise in Uptown, an area most folks white or black would describe as iffy. After leaving a local store, the right front caliper had seized, meaning the wheel would no longer roll. It would scream, and leave a smokey, stinky black rubber stripe of tread as I willed the car along safer side streets. People flocked to the sidewalks to check out the commotion, point, shout and surely must’ve thought, “Will you just look at that? There’s a white man worse off then we are!”

My father came to the rescue, snipping this and closing that and brought the red Vega home. What happened then? Well, then I got the green one.