Radioactive

All About The Cars

On the radio: Fast Car: Tracy Chapman
In my bloodstream: nada

Today I am a little worn down by how slowly it is taking this scalp wound to heal.   I have an appointment on Friday with my dermatologist, and I am bordering on canceling.  I need to gird myself for another onslaught of biopsies and surgeries, and truthfully,  I am not quite ready.
Each one limits my daily activities, and will further contribute to the ongoing seepage of blood and body fluids.  Not often, but sometimes,  I require relief.  Like my computer,  I need a re-boot.

So, I have decided to tell a couple of stories concerning my luck and fascination with cars.  Today I am going to ignore cancer.  I can do this.  I am the boss of my story.  So, we are going back to a time before Kath, and take a peek at other survival tales.  We have previously talked about several life or death situations in my youth.  This time I get behind the wheel of a car.

I have always loved cars.  Some of the cars I have owned were spectacular, in my mind, and others not so much.  Some treated me well, and others tried to destroy me.  Before cancer became my nemesis, one or two cars tried their best to do me in.  I thought it might be enlightening to reminisce about a slice of my time before melanoma.  Just a sliver of my motorized past.

The owner of The Shamrock Inn, the business that my parents ran, knew how many hours I had worked, and was impressed at my commitment to his, and my parents' success.   I accepted, sometimes reluctantly, every necessary and menial task I was given.  I helped in the restaurant, pumped gas after school and all summer, cleared snow in the winter and cut grass in the summer.   I was almost sixteen and I had depended on the school bus or hitch-hiking, if I wanted to see friends in town.

Our benefactor  knew that I had already been driving for almost two years.  In fact, I had regularly used our Range Rover and its attached plow to clean snow from the expansive parking lot.   He also knew that I received little in the way of salary from my dad, who was in charge of the books.  Financial success of the business took priority.

One day, the owner, who was making one of his infrequent visits, asked if I had a dollar.  I gave it to him.  He thanked me and explained to me that a dollar was needed to legitimize a contract.  I had no clue what he was doing.  He said that I was the new owner of an Austin 850 (now called a Mini).  It had been the company runabout car, and now it was mine.  My first car.  Manual gearshift.  Four on the floor.  One dollar.

About a year later I was driving it home, at night, on a highway, coming towards a red light.  I took my foot off the gas pedal and started to gear down, planning, obviously, to stop at the light.  The car would not slow down.  The mechanical link for the gas pedal had become stuck, leaving the engine screaming, revving ridiculously high, and still traveling nearly 70 mph, the car's maximum speed.  No amount of kicking could un-freeze that pedal.  I was quickly coming to a bad place, if another car crossed the highway at the intersection.  I knew it was not a good thing to shut down the engine at that speed, but it seemed my only choice.  I shoved the shift into neutral, hammered the brake pedal and turned the ignition off.  And then I pulled up on the emergency brake.  And I pulled the car onto the shoulder, and stopped.  Off the road, I got out of the car, and on my hands and knees.  I jerked and pulled on the linkage, and with time and luck, was able to, cautiously, get home.  I got our mechanic to fix the problem the next day, and sold that little piece of crap as soon as I could.

That was my first run-in with British technology and automobiles.

Much later, it was the summer of '68.  I was driving from Orillia to Montreal with two girls, on a two lane highway in a 1959 Impala convertible .  It was a big old car with a huge rear deck, spacious enough to lie on, banked by magnificent tail fins.  When you put the top up, you could lean back against the rear window, with a blanket beneath you and a pillow under your head.  Why would anyone want to do that?  Because, then you could park backward at a drive-in theater and watch the movie, outside, under the stars.  That, my friends, was living large, for a young man my age.

The car was more than a few years old and not altogether in great shape.  Or even good shape.  It required almost equal parts gas and oil to operate , but I had only paid $400 for it.  It might well have suffered some real damage to the engine in an earlier life, but it did get me around, mostly from my home and jobs.   It looked "snazzy", as we would say in those days.  It had a black rag top, two tone paint job, mostly light blue, touched off by white trim and serious chrome.  The tires were at least third generation.  If you looked closely, there was a trace of tread.  Good enough for me.

My preference of car had mostly tended toward small, and sporty, and cheap.  So this car was well off my wish list, but it was, at least, cheap.  With its ponderous weight and questionable shock absorbers, it really did “float” along.   Slushy.  Boat-like, without a doubt.  Corrective steering kept me busy, as there was about a quarter-turn of slack in the steering wheel.  Basically pretty good looking on the outside. The mechanics, however, were the real reason for the low price.

We were off for a long weekend, with no real plans other than to see this old, and apparently, I had been told, very beautiful city.  The decision was, without a doubt, impetuous.  Spur of the moment.  What youth does best.

It was a sunny, clear day and I was driving with a girlfriend in the front seat and her sister in the back.  We cleverly had no plans or reservations.  We all had three days off, and a trip to anywhere seemed like a good way to use our time.

We were no more than half an hour into the drive, doing around 60mph, when a car pulled out from a gas station on the right side of the highway, turning left, and bound to hit us.  I could not motivate the car to move fast enough to beat the collision, and it was not nimble enough to avoid the imminent crash.  They smacked the back right side of my car.  I felt the the impact.  Heard the crushing of metal.  The back end of the car moved hard to the left from the jolt.  I tried to steer right to regain the road, and went into a spectacular drift to the left, the car having decided that it had no interest in holding the road anymore.  We were still doing about 60 mph, heading sideways, and then we departed the highway altogether.  The left side of the car finally dug in to the soft shoulder and we rolled over twice. I remember still, thinking: “This is not going to end well”.

We settled, finally, upside down.  We might have had lap belts on.  I don’t remember. There was no mandatory seat belt law and shoulder straps were nonexistent.  My first thought was: “What the hell was that guy thinking?”  I wanted to get to him, and not to exchange pleasantries.  However, we were trapped upside down, with about 4 tons of metal on our heads.  This, after all, was a convertible.
I asked the girls if they were OK, and they responded they were, sobbing and crying.  We could not get out.  We started out with the top down and the blue sky above.  Now we were compressed into the dirt and mud with no sign of daylight. We were pinned solidly to the ground.

I started digging with my hands at a soft part of the dirt, trying to get some air and find a way out.  This was a rural area with not much civilization around.  I wondered if the driver of the car who caused this had left us or had he gone for help.  I hoped the garage owner had witnessed it all and would call for help or come, himself, to examine our condition.  The scene had to look horrible.

It was now about fifteen or twenty minutes since we had flipped and I was not making any headway with my digging.  I started wondering if we were far enough off the road that no one would see us.  We were pancake flat on the ground.   The girls seemed alright, but no one was sure.  We were still in some level of shock and I was worried that one or both might have been hurt but were not aware of their true condition.  I started to worry that the car might catch fire or blow up.  We needed to get out of there.

A man’s voice yelled: “Are you alive?”  "Alive?"  What kind of question was that?
“Yes.”
“I’ll get help.”
“Please hurry!”

A man with a shovel dug through to us and we crawled out.  A policeman was just arriving and there were two or three other onlookers.  We were all fine, other than some scrapes and a little blood.  Our trip had come to an end.   The flashy body of the car had gone the way of its failed innards.  My old car was dead.  But we were not.  The police officer already knew what had happened.  An elderly couple had not seen us as they exited a gas station, turning left.  They had stepped on the gas and then it was too late.  They just drove right into us.  I was still angry and asked why they had not come over to help.  They were reportedly in shock and the officer had called for medical help for them.  They had not gotten out of their car.  I suddenly felt very badly for them.  They thought they had killed us.  We were OK and they were not.  The cop said it was a miracle that we were alive.  I looked back at the boat of a car - upside down - no top - bald tires, like an overturned turtle, taking in the rays of summer - wrecked.  I sucked air in and breathed out hard.  The policeman was right.  Another escape.  An $850 insurance check to get another crappy car.  Another opportunity at life.  Maybe not miracle-worthy, but certainly overly lucky.


I will not tell you the details in how I parked a Sunbeam Alpine on the way home from football practice.  It was almost dark.  I was on a side street, traveling about 20mph, in a sudden downpour, and the windshield quickly fogged over.   I slowed and turned slightly right to get off the road.  Unfortunately, a large truck had already taken that spot.   Forty stitches from eyebrow to eyebrow from putting my head through the window, and 3 stitches on my broken nose.  Overnight in hospital.   No more Alpine.  There's more, but why go on?

I eventually bought a '64 Mustang convertible, which, like the other cars of my youth, I could not really afford - even with the salary from my first real job with CIL.  I used my first vacation as a chance to drive to Huntington Beach, California, to visit Diane, a friend of mine, who had recently married and settled near the beach.  I had grown up water skiing and skateboarding and believed this to be a great opportunity to see her and try my hand at surfing.  It was a remarkable trip down Route 66.  Saw America from my car at 70 MPH.

Stopped in Death Valley on the way down and saw a couple of guys playing golf under the hottest sun I could ever imagine.  I thought they were crazy.  (I did not know what the future held for me.)  It was miles and miles of desert and nothing but the flattest land I had ever seen.  And then, all of a sudden LA appeared.  It was a remarkable sight.  A massive city shrouded in a yellow fog.  It really did take my breath away.

I visited and was well looked after.  It was the perfect mooch vacation.  I did not have much money, but never really needed to reach into my pocket.  Her husband Bob was a great guy and had his own furniture import business.  They provided everything.  I met some guys on the beach who offered to teach me how to surf, so I rented a board from a surf shop and headed out.  The surfers explained and apologized that the surf wasn't forming well, but we would go anyway.  I did get a couple of weak trips in and then got smashed by a wave and after a long tumble under water, surfaced to find my rental board broken in two.  Now I had to go back to the shop and settle up.  I was panicky about having to pay for a new board.  The owner told me there was no problem, and back to Diane's I went.  I was a happy boy.

The trip home was mostly uneventful.  I did stop in Vegas and literally lost my last nickel in a bathroom slot machine.  All I had left to pay for anything was a gas company credit card.  It was good only at gas stations.  Things have changed - thankfully.  So, I slept in the car and ate crap from the gas stations all the way back to the Detroit border.  Canada, and home, were just across the bridge.

The fee to cross was 50 cents.  I did not take that into account on my drive home.   I did not have the forethought to keep some small stash hidden.  I was broke.  There were no cell phones and I had no way to get home.  I might have to keep on driving forever, until I die.  I  finally raised enough nerve to get into the line to cross. And then I stopped to talk to the attendant.  I started telling him my sad tale.  I told him I was so sorry again and again as I went through every detail.  When I got to the Vegas toilet story, he broke out laughing and told me to get home.  I was almost crying when I  realized I was heading home.  Thanks to my border friend.

You get the idea.  I'm still waiting to grow up.  Hopefully no rush.