By Scott Longman
There was an overhead door out to the alley behind the dealership. That doorway led to the coming years with this new car. Just looking at the rectangle of daylight put a hum of high amperage in my chest, along with the crazy idea that today was inevitable. Crazy, but not entirely unfounded, when you consider what they’d taught me.
1969, not yet five years old, the old man showing the difference between a five-eighths and a half inch. The noise of the V-8, thundering and marvelous, knowing that he was responsible for it. And then the physical component, the drive, crushed back in the seat, not knowing the word torque but understanding it. And then the uncles and friends, all of them, a Buick convertible, a hotrod ‘72 Camaro, MGs, Mustangs, Datsuns, Mopar cop cars, around the Cumberland cloverleaf and out onto the Kennedy, unable to lift your head off the seat when they were in the throttle. Torque, power, and upshifts at redline. It’s what we did.
The family scrapbooks showed me that we always had. Little glue-on corners held the pictures: my father, smiling, with a ’58 VW with racing-taped headlights, a pit road leading back out onto the track, Uncle Bob on a Norton motorcycle, Uncle Dave with a Sprite, even my father’s father, who I’d never known, proud next to an ancient Packard. And one picture showing a young face which, with a little imagination, belonged to my father, leaning on the fender of an Austin-Healey with an aluminum Buick V-8, an ultralight hotrodder’s hotrod.
And then one day in about 1970, it all took on a new dimension. We were wending, with characteristic enthusiasm, through the many miles of serpentine, undulating, two-lanes of Kettle Moraine State Park, gifts from a glacier and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, in grandpa’s ’68 Galaxie. Then, angry braking and the sound of that 390 downshifted into second at sixty, followed by slamming lateral motion, harder than fun, with my father sawing around a two-car disastrous wreck in a kettle hairpin, flashing by, one car inverted, seeing the children in it. Then we were clear, and he was telling me that they needed far more help than we could give by ourselves, my first clear memory of stress in his voice. An instant later, he dumped the four barrel wide open and held it in gear, all the way up, hearing the violence in his upshift, flat out, running for the ranger station and its radio, all against the sudden understanding that all this stuff could actually matter.
And then several years later, that other seminal day, on the Kennedy Expressway, the whole family in a little Super Beetle, the old man again at the wheel, when a big 4-door Chrysler a couple cars ahead of us went sideways at speed. A flash memory of the first car slamming into it, crushing and horrific, followed immediately by the one closer to us hammering into its trunk with a truly sickening sound and the bumper in front of us seemingly rising to eye height, and then again before it could touch us, that horrific lateral motion, slamming, the gut-wrenching sound of metal crushing and he found the slot, narrower than the car was but all he had, Jersey barrier on the left and car on the right, there in an eyeblink, metal clawing both sides of the car to a shredded halt. The trunk of the car that had been ahead of us was obliterated by the giant Chevrolet that had been behind us, back bumper now in its back seat. As we left in the ambulance, my mother told my brother and I that if my father hadn’t raced, we’d all be dead.
So they aren’t just cars.
They are a foundational element of existence.
They are the basis for relationships.
And even, in the extreme, they are preservers of life itself.
And today, it all comes together. The decades of tuning, of changing carburetors, jetting, headers, gears, distributors, points, condensers, intakes, heads, whole engines, pressure plates, clutch plates, u-joints, transmissions, shifters, linkage, bushings, master cylinders, lines, wheel cylinders, tires, shocks, sway bars, leaf springs, wheels, all in the quest for expanding the margin of performance, they all collapse in one frenetic rush into this car, like a movie of a dam exploding, played in reverse, fast. They do, because this car takes everything we’d ever done and jumps an order of magnitude. It is superlative, a resident of the pantheon of truly fast cars.
So, how do you mark something like that? How to give it its due?
Yes, agonize over it for months. Yes, give the process the day it needs. Yes, take pictures. But none of that is enough. What it really needs is to have them there.
All of them.
To share in the sheer, unbridled, crying joy of it. To marvel at the new engineering, to examine the shift linkage, to speculate how it would do in a descending off-camber turn, to reflect that the pedal feel is astonishingly like that on the MG TD, to wonder about the bulkhead connecter, to exclaim the short throw of the shifter, to deny that a center differential could possibly do that, to laugh about the extreme advances over a ’50 Olds with a Rocket V-8.
But, of course, they can’t.
They have moved. And they have aged. And they have died.
Some remain alive and well, but geography and time conspire to mean that even those who remain aren’t buying plane tickets to observe the purchase of a car. And thus, their values and their voices and their knowledge come only as they remain in me.
So I sat there, in an alley behind the dealer, holding the leather-wrapped wheel of the best car I’d ever owned or probably ever would. I’d thought in advance about how to preserve the memory of the day. Scent may be the sense closest to memory, but there was no way to preserve scent, at least not for long. But next to scent in the memory associational hierarchy is music. I’d selected one song, put more time into selecting it than would seem rational to non-car folks, to forever associate it with the car, this day. It’d had to be something untainted by memory from any prior era, something strong and clear and upbeat. And, quixotically, I figured it ought to have been given to me, not bought. Yes, that’s dangerously close to old-new-borrowed-blue, but the marriage metaphor wasn’t far off, either. The song was perfect, something about the music itself hitting the moment, center of mass.
I turned onto the street, and fought the impulse to stomp on it. The break-in rule said nothing over 4,000 rpm for the first thousand miles. And I respected it. Had to. It was to pay the car its due. To prepare it for its future.
But far, far more importantly, it was simply what they’d taught me.
