I was reminiscing recently about my teen years and how we guys were into cars and cruisin’. I guess that’s what you do when you get old and your brain begins to resemble oatmeal; what’s left of it thinks about the good old days. Guys were either making their cars look cherry or on the lookout out for beaters, “beats walking” cars that we could bang around in until the words “auto” or “mobile” no longer applied.
I had one friend, I’ll call Dave (you don’t have to), who was basically a custom car guy. One of his best was a 1961 white Chevy convertible. He jazzed it up with a tube grill, pinstripes, shaved off door handles, hand-rubbed custom paint job, and more, and entered it into a rod and custom show at the Amphitheater in Chicago and managed to win a trophy. A bunch of us were at the show when it was closing and a few of us decided to ride home with Dave. He put the top down and we piled in. I was one of four bodies crowded in the back seat, so I slid up and sat on the boot, where I could see over the windshield. Speed demon Dave eventually cranked it up to over 120 mph on the Eisenhower, so I never had to wonder what a hurricane felt like with a 120 mph breeze tickling my face. I thought my eyeballs would be blown against the back of my skull. Unfortunately, he forgot that he welded up and painted over the fuel door on the fender to produce a clean look for the show and ran out of gas with no way to fill ‘er up. His trophy was now kind of useless, other than to bash himself over the head with it for being so stupid. It was tow-truck time.
Dave was a beater man. He was usually on the lookout for one and found a rusty, dark green, two-door ’51 Dodge. It ran, but that’s about all. It had no front seat, so he piloted it while seated on a wooden crate. The steering wheel was missing, so Dave ingeniously clamped a large pair of vice grip pliers on the steering column to steer the machine. At least the shift lever was still attached. Whadda ya want for $15?
We had fun riding around in it after hours, a couple of guys on the back seat and one on the floor, haunting a closed shopping mall parking lot, racing around, doing donuts on the asphalt, occasionally tapping a concrete light post base.
When it was time for the Dodge to enter hospice, nearing the hour it would belch out its last puff of oily blue-white exhaust, Dave decided it should be put it to rest at Rocky Glen, a place so named by some ancestral teens. The Glen was actually a section of unimproved weedy, lumpy, possibly former dumping ground land for clay and rocks removed from elsewhere during construction on Argonne National Laboratories property. Even on a bright moonlit night such as the one we were experiencing, the entrance and road, more imaginary than actual, was hard to spot and harder to navigate. Picture, if you will, a rock-filled, drainage ditch constructed by masochists. A little ways in, a sign hung on a broken wire gate proclaimed the area to be restricted Argonne property, with prosecution and possible conversion to castrati (if you don’t know what that is, Google it) awaiting trespassers. The dire warning was universally ignored.
A couple friends and I followed Dave and the beater a short ways in. Not willing to sacrifice my car to the Gods of the Glen before the glorified cow path got any worse, I stopped and we walked. I led with a flashlight in hand. The road made a sharp left at a high spot and went down a 30-foot-high hill to relatively flat, partially-wooded ground where it made a sharp right. To us, the hill seemed like an almost 90-degree vertical drop, but it was probably 50 or so, still steep enough that once you started down you could forget about stopping. Your only hope of survival was to make the near-impossible turn at the bottom. Remnants of old rusted auto hulks leaning against trees and scattered auto body parts attested to that fact.
Cowards that we were, my friends and I thought Dave should alone have the honor of putting the beater out of its misery. He settled himself on the crate, clenched the vice grips in his left hand, and eased the Dodge up and over the edge. We hurried to the precipice to watch Dave rattle and bounce downward, hoping to avoid the vehicle graveyard by making the turn at the bottom of the hill. His valiant attempt failed. As he turned, the top-heavy old Dodge flipped over on its side and skidded, nearly rocking on its roof before coming to rest against a rusting metal carcass.
When the dust settled, the passenger door creaked open and Dave climbed out, vice grips in hand, none the worse for wear.
As I think about this adventure and another similar Rocky Glen night, I wonder how I can remember the intricate details from nights in my teenhood when in adulthood I can barely remember how many children I have? Fortunately, we hang up Christmas stockings with their names on them. At least once a year I know.