Last week a friend of mine came by with his family to visit. My friend Steve is a wonderful man who lives at some distance from us so it is rare that we actually see each other. He has the most amazing disposition and no matter how much time passes between our meetings - warmth and mirth rise instantly to the surface every time we get together. The jokes and lively reminiscences flow easily between us.
I had always had a strong interest in cars and I casually asked him if he had driven to town in his Chevy Suburban (he has 6 kids). "No," he demurred. "I came here with our new motor home -- 1979 vintage." "What?" I exclaimed.
"Yes, it's 37 feet long - really something to see," he said modestly. I jumped up. "I must see it." "Of course," he said. "It's so big I had to park it on the main street right around the corner."
Sure enough there she stood in all her glory. I don't think you could know what 37 feet long is until you see it, but let me tell you it's big. I jumped in through the side door with my own kids and his in tow. It was the pinnacle of late 1970s gorgeous sleaze complete with champagne glasses over the kitchen sink, a large bedroom in the back with a king size bed and a small television lodged in a shelf on the right hand side -- a plush interior. Did it really have a faux shag carpet? Or was that my retroactive imagination.
My friend urged me to drive it and I accepted his offer. Any of you ever had fantasies of driving a NY city bus with the big steering wheel with a fare box to your right? That is what it was like - the oversized wheel, turning it, playing the happy bus driver with a big grin while taking impossibly wide turns. As I drove around the neighborhood an indescribable elementary, crude happiness came over me. It was a happiness that was at once giddy and surfacy and yet also sprang from deep inside my maleness.
As I drove, Steve confided that he had for years and years dreamed of getting it. His father had one when his original family was young and he felt a persistent, unrelenting desire to recreate this for his own family.
I alighted from this behemoth full of joy. This puzzled my children. "What makes you so happy to drive that heap, my 12 year old son asked me. Truthfully, I did not know what to say. My 10-year-old daughter added that she has never quite seen me like that.
That night I thought about my friend's persistent dream. I have many dreams that I have denied over the years, but one of them at once idiosyncratic, eccentric and at the same time attainable was to buy a 1959 Chevrolet Bel-Air. My father had that car when I was growing up in the 1960s in Atlanta, Ga. That car of my early youth imprinted itself unreasonably on my brain and has been there distantly in my dreams for decades. The big cat whisker fins in the back and the oval speedometer and gauges in the front have stayed in the folds of my grey matter to the degree that no passage of time can seem to dim.
I immediately went on Craigslist and to my surprise - a 59 Chevy was being sold somewhere in NJ. I was so excited to see the pictures. It needed restoration, but the ad said it was running and given that it was 50 years old, in excellent shape. I breathlessly dialed the number as though I was dialing into the past - trips with my mother to the Briarcliff shopping center in Atlanta for a haircut at "Jim the barber's," shopping sorties to the Piggly Wiggly in the summer with the breeze blowing through the windows and the sing-song of Martin Luther Kings sermons wafting from the radio. I even remember the sound of the transmission shifting when my mother, hit 20 miles per hour as we drove up Lively Ridge Road.
Perhaps I could go home again. "I want that car," I told the owner. "I want it." But then reality set in. I am not mechanically inclined and there is no way that I have the budget or the time to restore it. It would be a heap that would sit in my driveway, rusting, a curio at best. My wife was perplexed but supportive and my children were bewildered. Why spend the money so senselessly they asked me in earnest?
What was I up to? What am I up to?
My male friends instinctively understood this strange impulse to buy a 50 year old car. My brother commanded me to get it. "You must have this car," he barked into the phone from his home in Queens. I might even come with you. My close friends, each one to a man, admitted they had similar fantasies: this one for a 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado, another one for a 69 Cadillac coupe de ville convertible.
It seems that restoring these old wrecks, one friend said, is like restoring and reenacting our past. The women, on the other hand, struggled to understand. My sister found this quest totally incomprehensible. It is not as if women don't reenact the past, but they seem to do it differently.
I wondered about this as I hurriedly drove across the county to take a look at the car. Nothing though prepared me for the feelings I had when I laid eyes on her
