Car Talk

My first memory of a car, indeed my very earliest memory, was the time, at age 3 or 4, I was looking out of a window at a car below on fire. I hung on to this image until recently when it dawned on me that I had a picture book of a little red fire engine and I probably fantisized it extinguishing the flames of a car on the street. The book was real and the car was real, but the scene owes its life to the power of my imagination.  

Again, my first drive in a car is an enduring memory, possibly because it also never happened. I was six years old at the 1939 World’s Fair. The big attraction was the Futurama exhibit by General Motors. I could have sworn we got into a car, and it drove itself around a series of what we now know as highways and cloverleaf looking down at the City of Tomorrow. No traffic. No horns or road rage. The vehicles were driverless and set apart at reasonable intervals from each other. Yet when I now Google the experience, it seems to be a model of a city we were looking down upon from a revolving chair.

Growing up in the 1930's and 40's, my third parent was the movies where I got to see the real world. I learned that most men wore tuxedos and there were three kinds of cars. Bank robbers always drove black sedans as in, Follow that car and step on it. Young people drove convertibles and parked on lover's lane. Then there were taxi cabs where babies were born.

Driving in reality could not live up to that early encounter at the World's Fair. Cars have never gotten much love from me. I couldn’t tell a Studebaker from a De Soto and I marveled how my friends identified the make from the grillwork alone, when I blindfolded them. I missed the art of their evolution and distinct designs. Just as I didn't bother knowing the names of trees. My loss, of course. I've since taken remedial action, at least with trees.

As a kid in NYC, cars were that hulk intruding on our stickball game in the street. With a subway stop around the corner, my family didn’t own a car until I was in college. To me, it was a horizontal elevator wheeling me from A to B. I learned to add water to the radiator and oil to whatever it is one adds oil to… but I didn’t know a gasket from a flywheel.

One day while driving in the slow lane, a driver in lane two suddenly decided he needed the off-ramp and cut in front of me. To avoid a collision, I swerved up the embankment into the landscaping. Better to go up the greenery than down into it. This was to be my ten minutes of fame, as a helicopter flew overhead, I was the morning’s Sig Alert.  

A few years ago, I backed up in a parking lot and nicked another car. In the course of an amicable interchange, the two of us became lunch buddies. There must be better ways to make new friends besides running into one another.

My present car is the color of duct tape. If it weren’t for the license plate, I’d never be able to find it in a parking lot. When a marine layer of on-shore flow rolls in, my old Toyota vanishes altogether. It has a pre-existing condition of being a salvage car and I’ve already added a few scratches to its pedigree. Past cars I’ve owned were named Burgess, Consuelo, Trevor and Fred. This one remains nameless, though it might answer to Foggy. 

I have another powerful memory of that World’s Fair. I was walking along holding on tight to my father’s coat when I looked up and saw it wasn’t my father. I was lost in the crush of human sardines in the enormous plaza. If this were Dickensian times I might have ended up in a workhouse begging for more gruel or rescued by some real estate magnate and sent to a private school full of little Donald Trumps. But, alas, my real father plucked me from such a fate.

Any freeway in L.A. after 2 P.M. is a ribbon of chrome, devoutly to be avoided. On their exodus home from daily bondage, the red sea does not part. 

If driverless, electric cars take over I would be returned to the Futurama as promised by General Motors. I might sit in the back catching up on my sleep or contemplate the meaning of life in a godless world.