It was a 1960 Bonneville coupe, robin's-egg blue where it wasn't rusted and only slightly bigger than the QE2. You could ram it into a telephone pole at sixty and not feel a thing for fifteen minutes. It had a 389 V8 engine, a Hydra-Matic transmission, and upholstery of the finest Corinthian plastic. The power steering was so sensitive that the slightest adjustment would send you careening over three lanes of traffic, and the brakes needed only the lightest tap to throw you into the windshield and bring the car to a raucous halt. There were no seatbelts. The radio was strictly AM and owed its reception to a bent wire hanger stuck in the hood.
It cost seventy-five dollars and was ugly as sin. I loved it.
It had no speedometer needle, so I painted one on at sixty-five. I figured if I were ever pulled over, I could show it to the cop to prove I hadn't been speeding. It only occurred to me later that once the car stopped, the speedometer should read zero. This didn't augur well for my future as an engineering student.
I dubbed it the "Hunk of Tin" after a popular car commercial of the late '60s in which two stereotypical Mexicans in serapes and sombreros made fun of a gringo asking directions to Baja. "You loco? You goin' to drive thees hunk of teen through de Baja? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" The gringo survived, and I had the perfect name for my car.
In the summer of '67, just before my freshman year of college, I used the Hunk to go back and forth to my job. I worked at my father's textile plant, something I had done off and on for several years. In order to show there was no preferential treatment for his children, my father gave my brother and me the lowliest jobs at the lowest possible pay. My specialty was stripping bobbins, pulling the last bits of tangled thread off the spools that were placed in shuttles on the looms. When the bobbins were almost empty, they would be dumped into large wood bins where they formed an enormous multicolored Gordian knot. It was my job to disentangle this mess and remove the empty bobbins for reuse, a process that caused extreme strain on the back and multiple splinters under the fingernails. My brother had the more glamorous job of crawling under the looms and, with oil dripping in his face, vacuuming lint off the machinery.
But the Hunk's raison d'etre wasn't the daily commute nor its true home the backstreets of Holyoke. Like its owner, it lived and breathed on the Mass. Turnpike.
I had a long history with the Pike. I first traveled the road a month after it opened in 1957 to see an eye doctor in Boston. During my childhood, I rode the Pike west to summer camp and east to the Cape. By the time I could drive and long before James Taylor immortalized it, Interstate 90 from Stockbridge to Boston was embedded in my genome.
Every weekend that summer, the Hunk and I would traverse the state in search of knowledge, thrills, and love. With a death grip on the huge blue steering wheel and shrieking the lyrics to Sgt. Pepper over the noise of the wind, I would be jumping in anticipation of the next adventure or savoring the one I'd just had.
Most of the knowledge came in the form of cultural enlightenment and involved bombing around Boston with my friend, Dave. Club 47 in Harvard Square was in its final years but still drew top talent. At that tiny but fabled venue, I heard Patrick Sky, Tom Rush, Spider John Koerner, Mose Allison, Buddy Guy, and other folk, jazz, and blues legends of the day. At the Brattle Theater, I saw Humphrey Bogart and Marx Brothers movies on the big screen for the first time. It's one thing to watch Casablanca on a small TV and another to sing the Marseillaise at the top of your lungs with two hundred other film buffs in proud defiance of Major Strasser. It was as close to fighting the Nazis as a post-WW II kid could get.
For thrills, I took my first baby steps into intoxication and altered consciousness. One night when my parents were out, Dave and I raided my father's supply of Colt 45 and learned first-hand the joys of oblivion and the price you pay for it, the freedom from inhibition and the enslavement to the toilet. I also had my first taste of weed that summer, smoking a few bowls with a certain family member who shall remain nameless to protect the not-so-innocent. As you might expect, the colors were vivid, the music transcendent, the food incomparably delicious, and the revelations earth-shattering. And like all novices, I learned two hours later that the colors were ordinary, the food unexceptional, and the revelations nutty. Only the music remained profound.
As for love, it may be a stretch to call my night at the Berkshire Theatre Festival romantic. It was more an exercise in teenage hormonal madness, and she was to blame. "She" was a stunning blond girl who sat next to me in the first row of the balcony during The Skin of our Teeth with Anne Bancroft. In the middle of the first act, she started pressing her leg against mine - the girl, not Anne Bancroft. At first, I thought it was an accident, but when I moved my leg slightly, she moved hers right back. Since the play was in progress and her parents were sitting on her other side, my options were limited to sweating profusely. This agonizing flirtation went on for three acts and two curtain calls, and I left the theater bent over, clutching my program judiciously. During the drive home, a friend explained what happened on stage while I was in the silent and unfulfilled throes of passion.
The Hunk survived into the following summer, but it had lost its mystique and only provided transportation in the geographical sense. I had spent the year in Boston and had acquired that strange combination of arrogant sophistication and disdain which typifies the newly-emancipated college student. I was a seasoned drinker and smoker and had won and lost my first girlfriend. And jaded fool that I was, I cared less about new experiences than the pleasurable repetition of the ones I knew. The Hunk was just a car and a rapidly deteriorating one at that.
It's only in the reveries of my later years that it returns as the magic carpet of my youth.
