My friend had this 1958 Chevy. It was an obscene colossus of a car with a paint job consisting of peeling blue enamel, gray primer, body putty and rust. It used a rusty wire coat hanger as a radio antenna. Whenever one of the two massive doors slammed shut, a fine effluvium of rust would drift from the rocker panel to the ground.
Inside the vast interior plastic peeled and headliner drooped behind an ornamental dash that managed to combine an art deco theme with the late fifties standard of conspicuous consumption and ostentation.
It was the last in a long line of elderly vehicles that Rob had managed to acquire for a modest sum only to abandon them, engine smoking on the side of some mountain road.
Built at the very apex of post war greatness the car was a mammoth statement of American affluence and power. Now fifteen years later the rusting chrome and coat hanger antenna whispered a darker message of decline and approaching death. Like a dinosaur headed for the tar pits it trudged down the road dropping an occasional chrome ornament or hubcap and looking for all the world like it wished only to find a place to pull over to rust and drip oil while the sun cooked the interior.
Looks can be deceiving.
The Chevy was the one-in-a-thousand car that, for whatever reason, despite appearance and price was relatively sound.
The former owner had ambitions of creating a racecar and had installed a custom shifter, done some work on the transmission and equipped the huge engine with a mammoth turbocharger.
Maybe he got sick of working on it or got drafted or ran away to a commune. Whatever the reason, his parents were left to dispose of it. They parked it in a vacant lot where it sat with weeds growing up through the grill and a "For Sale" sign propped on the dash behind the dusty cracked windshield. Rob purchased this monster for seventy five dollars; cash.
The modifications the former owner had made meant two things. The car drank more gas than a bulldozer and it was faster than it had any right to be. Much faster.
We would pull this creaking behemoth up next to the brand new Corvettes and shiny hot rods waiting at the traffic light to race across the viaduct to North Denver. Ignoring the catcalls and laughter from the suburban kids, we would sit, engine idling in a cloud of blue smoke waiting for the light to change.
The light would turn green and while the other drivers squealed tires and laid rubber Rob would step down on the accelerator gradually pressing it half way to the floor.
He couldn't afford to squeal his tires because they were all bald and at least one was showing fabric. I really don't think he could have squealed them if he wanted to since the car weighed so much.
The reason he accelerated gradually was because of a very real fear that the transmission would tear itself lose, rear up between us like a huge metal beast and kill us both while fragments of hot metal rained on the intersection and engine parts flew clanging down the street.
Even with this gradual method of acceleration, we would both be pressed back into our seats by the drag of gravity as the massive road locomotive got underway. Halfway across the intersection the rest of the drivers would see our one functioning taillight through a heavy blue vapor of unburned gasoline disappearing over the top of the hill leading on to the viaduct.
Usually, just as we got about half way across the viaduct we would see headlights from the other cars topping the rise at the beginning of the overpass. We usually got going eighty or ninety miles an hour before we had to slow down. On the open road the Chevy had a cruising speed between a hundred twenty maybe a hundred thirty miles an hour. We never had the nerve to find out what the top end was.
Anyway a car like that required lots and lots of gas and we didn't have lots and lots of money. Our favorite method of filling the seemingly bottomless tank was to pull up at the gas pump so the car blocked the proprietor's view of the numbers that measured the gas going into the tank and the price we should pay for that gas..
One of us would start filling the tank while the other watched the clerk inside the station. When the clerk got busy ringing up another sale we would stop the pump, flip the switch so all the numbers went back to zero and start filling the tank again. One of us would go in and pay for the dollar or two showing on the pump and we'd be on our way.
We were engaged in this very activity one Friday evening as we prepared to leave town to visit my girlfriend Carol who lived in Oshkosh Nebraska.
It was late in the year, past autumn, but not quite winter yet. Still the chill in the air was beginning to sharpen as Rob watched the clerk inside the station and I listened to gasoline gurgle into the colossal tank.
The summer of love had long since faded into a winter of cynicism and paranoia as the beat of Disco music displaced the folk anthems of the sixties. Nixon was president and the war in Vietnam ground on and on and on. Kent State had made the point that the government was through fucking around with protesters.
The former protesters and flower children were either busy eradicating their consciousness with an ever-growing pharmacopoeia of increasingly dangerous drugs or else they were crouched down in basements attaching electric wires to high explosives. They too were through fucking around.
None of this mattered to me as I listened to the gas gurgle into the tank and waited for Rob to signal for me to stop and turn the dial back. Around us traffic whizzed by in the fading twilight of a hazy November evening. The smell of wood from fireplaces had mixed with the brown cloud that customarily hung over Denver on Friday at sunset in cool weather to create a breathtakingly crimson dusk that glowed fire red in the west. Now in the growing darkness the half light faded like embers and the crisp fall air had a real wintry bite to it.
"OK, flip it back"
I flipped the lever running the numbers back to zero while Rob kept an eye on the attendant. I squeezed the handle of the pump and the sound of gas pouring into the black hole of our tank resumed.
"Is Willie coming?" I asked.
"He said he wanted to see Bill and Kenny, something about car parts."
"Stolen?"
"Do you think he bought them?"
His point was well taken. Willie Cortex had never to our knowledge held a job longer than it took him to locate and steal anything of value. A completely hapless alcoholic at the age of fifteen, he had the pasty furtive look of someone with quite a few years of prison in his future.
With dark curly hair and a fair complexion, Willie was an Irish and American Indian lad with the misfortune to reach adolescence just as the Age of Aquarius got into full swing.
Along with an astonishing alcohol intake, Willie had been ingesting LSD and a variety of other illegal mind altering drugs on a more or less daily basis since the age of 12.
