Cars and Kisses

There’s a car commercial playing on TV now that shows a man running into one of his ex-girlfriends at a party and experiencing a romantic flashback. At first, he seems to be mentally cheating on his wife, but we soon see that he is recalling the good times spent with his first Subaru. I hate to admit it, but I know how he feels. Not that I ever run into my girlfriend from senior year, but I do remember fondly the car in which we first made out.

In my mind, it is always The Car and its improbable adoption into our family amazes me to this day. Back in 1968, when I was 13, my mother was in the market for a vehicle to replace her aging and non-descript sedan. Fortunately, a family friend, Don Fraser, Sr., was in auto sales, so she met him at the dealership to find something suitable for the twice-weekly five-mile drive to her medical office and other errands around town. You can only imagine our astonishment when my mother returned a couple of hours later with a brand-new Chevrolet Camaro. I don’t think we would have been any more surprised if she had appeared in our driveway at the wheel of a Formula One racer with Mario Andretti riding shotgun.

First of all, this was no family car. It was a sporty blue two-door coupe with bucket seats and a black vinyl roof. A fully-automatic transmission (a first for our family) controlled a throaty 327 cubic-inch Chevy V-8 engine. In short, it was a bombshell of a car that simply begged to cruise the boulevards looking for trouble.

That carnal desire was borne out quickly as, within a month, my sister introduced the shiny new Camaro to one of the local telephone poles down on the Redwood Highway frontage road. The mating did not turn out well. Fortunately, the car was fixable and quickly returned to the fold, with only a few new rattles to give voice to a troubled past. But it wasn’t through driving on the Wild Side. A couple of years later, it was almost totaled with my brother at the wheel and me in the passenger seat (see Love Songs and Glass, December 2010). Again, it was repaired (although it probably should have been a write-off) and was once again in our driveway, having made the “drive of shame” home from the body shop.

The Car may now have been a bit worse for wear--with more nagging noises, persistent leaks and the vinyl roof showing its age--but it was finally My Turn. I got my driver’s license in 1971 and, with it, the occasional use of the Camaro, my sister having moved on to a second-hand Ford Mustang of her own and my brother to an ill-fated love affair with Alfa Romeos.

Now you have to understand that I learned how to drive in the family station wagon, a car so decrepit that the only way my father could explain the vagaries of its stalk-mounted shifter was to “imagine you’re scooping up a large spoonful of bolts and then shove it into gear.” Compared to the Ford Falcon, the Camaro, with its power brakes and power steering, was nothing short of erotic. Not only that, it had an FM radio, an extravagant option my father refused to order for our other cars. We could finally listen to something other than the local news station and delved willingly into the steamy realms of (gasp) Contemporary Music.

To say that the Camaro was zippy around town would be an understatement. Not that I was macho enough to engage in anything like drag racing, but I did occasionally leave a stoplight with a certain youthful eagerness. But it was on the open road that The Car excelled. By this time, winter weekend trips to Tahoe were a regular thing as I pursued my ski racing hobby. Apparently, my parents’ concern over trusting me on icy roads with a souped-up pony car was trumped only by their not having to be my chauffeur. US 80 was both my weekly commute and my chosen speed for the drive from the Bay Area to Truckee and back. The ride was seductive and the lure of the blacktop hypnotizing. And, in the spring, with the windows rolled down, the radio blaring, and my skis and a bundle of bamboo slalom poles strapped to the roof; well that’s my nostalgic Subaru ad right there.

Yes, I do remember parking with Trudy P. in my mom’s Camaro for the first time on graduation night, but I’d be less than honest if I told you that I recall the taste of her lipstick and the smell of her hair more than the feel of the black bucket seats and the sounds of Crocodile Rock playing on the softly-glowing FM radio. But, like the guy in the commercial concludes, I’m okay with that.