I Can't Drive 55

But Sammy Hagar would be happy to know I'm doing better now.

My parents made a deal with me. I would buy my own car, pay for my own gas and they would pay for the insurance. Telling you that now, I question how well that deal worked out for them.

I was skittish initially about going on the interstate, which seemed a lot more high stakes compared to driving on city streets (and indeed it was). But once I got comfortable with the interstate, it became an important path to go to concerts (certainly, an big motivator) and I had additional ways to speed.

”Take it easy there, leadfoot,” the old saying goes and I’m sure I heard some variation of that from my friends and perhaps a different, yet still kind scolding from my dad. Whatever the speed limit was, it always seemed like it should be five or 10 miles per hour faster. I got speeding tickets. I came to realize that my parents’ insurance went up as a result of those speeding tickets.

Eventually (and with a period of years passing), I was old enough where I could get off of their insurance and get my own. But until that day arrived, they ate the consequences of that higher insurance price, letting me know that they weren’t happy about it. They weren’t hardcore enough to take away my car, but they probably should have.

You’re getting the somewhat short from me Cliff’s Notes version of the above, but I’ve shared that story with folks over the years as far as the car goes. While I didn’t necessarily appreciate it at the time, I came to appreciate that they made that deal with me and had me purchase my own car.

The lesson, of course, was to teach me the value of money. I’d been working at McDonald’s for about a year leading up to the moment when I got my license. They’d set the plan with me sometime early on, so I was saving money to buy the car. We were living in the Cleveland area by then.

Somehow prior to the internet, when it was time for me to get a car, my dad learned that his old secretary (coincidentally, the mother of my first little childhood girlfriend — a girlfriend who no longer spoke to me, illustrating the first pains of young “love”) was selling her 1978 Olds Cutlass Supreme. Dad was a big car nut (something we should discuss further in a future dispatch), so he already knew that this was a good car, from seeing it arrive at the church every day while we were still in Illinois.

It was 500 dollars, a good price for a young person’s first car. We arranged to drive to Illinois to pick it up. I think I was spared seeing the ex, but it was nice to see her mom. Driving it back to Cleveland, I was of course thrilled to have my own pair of wheels.

The Oldsmobile was green, quickly christened by my friends as “The Green Machine.” A green and white Spin Doctors bumper sticker that I still miss was quickly placed in the back window of the car. (After nearly three decades of searching, I found one as I was writing this and bought it on eBay!)

The music part of the new ride had to be sorted out. It only had a cassette player (Only? You spoiled brat, you!), which was unacceptable for the kid who was quickly building a collection of CDs. It was a situation that would continue to grow once I got a record store job and yes, eventually, a gig at WMMS where I discovered promo CDs sat in the largest stacks I’d ever seen and it seemed like each day, record label people brought more and more of them (if they didn’t arrive, many packages at a time, in the mail).

Somehow, I heard about the cassette tape adapter and a bunch of you out there just smiled. So I quickly had a way to hook my Sony Discman up to the adapter and I was able to play CDs in the car. I became adept at gingerly predicting and navigating certain bumps so that the CD wouldn’t skip while I was driving.

This car of course became my everything. It was the vehicle that took me to so many early concerts — and sometimes, shows that were memorable for other reasons. We went to see the B-52s and the Violent Femmes at Blossom Music Center in 1992. The B’s were touring behind their first album without Cindy Wilson, Good Stuff — a record that I really enjoyed, so I was looking forward to seeing what the revised version of one of my favorite bands sounded like. Verdict: It was my first time seeing them, but they sounded great to me.

I was not really a Femmes fan, but that’s one of the early times I remember making an effort to see a group that I was unfamiliar with, something that was important to me when it came to opening acts or other bands on the bill. I viewed it as musical education and found a lot of new favorites that way. This particular experience didn’t make me go out and buy their catalog, but I appreciated what they were doing. “It’s fine,” as my comrade Jeff Giles would say.

The real memories happened in the parking lot after the show. It had been a particularly packed night at Blossom, so getting out of there was going to be a nightmare. Cars weren’t moving. We elected to all just hang out there and enjoy the night. My friends were delighted at the large stash of glass Dr. Pepper bottles I had in my backseat area. They cleared them out of the floorboard, laughing at the clinking of the glass as they hit the grass parking lot.

Back to CDs for a moment: Of course, once I had a way to play them in the car, I had many of them in the car. One day when I came out to the high school parking lot, one of my car windows had been smashed and the CDs were gone. A substantial part of my early collection? Gone.

Luckily, I’m working at the record store by this time and we took CDs in trade, so there was a good chance the culprit would take them there to trade them in. He did. Worse, my boss knew his mother, took the CDs in and then called his mom to address the situation directly.

Years later, I’m doing a heavy metal show on the radio. The kid, now fully grown, called in and was a winner for concert tickets I was giving away. He had to know it was me. The tickets were to go see a nationally signed band made up of folks we’d both gone to high school with. I debated telling him off and not giving him the tickets. Time had passed, life is short. I gave him the tickets.

I don’t recall the circumstances of how the Green Machine left my life. Learning to take care of a car was also a process. My recollection is that my mom told me a story once about burning up an engine because she didn’t realize at a similarly young age that a car needed oil. My dad was very on top of stuff like that, but still, there were things to learn.

Eventually, the Cutlass Supreme met its end. I’m surprised now thinking about how many different cars I had in the first decade or so that I was driving. My next car was a maroon Volvo station wagon. Made in Sweden, it had a great heater or “the inferno” as friends called it. It was perfect for hauling band equipment (a big plus, for our high school rock group, the Intergalactic Transforming Cheeseburgers, quickly shortened to I.T.C.). But it proved to be very expensive anytime something broke.

When it needed a new muffler system from front to back — and it had two separate systems — the Volvo was out the door. It was going to be more economical to buy another car instead of paying a couple of thousand dollars for the muffler repairs. Off to South Carolina I went on Greyhound, to buy (I think) an Oldsmobile Delta 88 that had no rust, since it was in the South — a big plus here in Ohio.

The bus broke down on the way to South Carolina, so by the time I got there, I’d missed having the luxury of spending the night at my grandmother’s house prior to driving it back. I picked it up at the dealership, grabbed a quick nap and headed back. The benefits of that trip didn’t last long. Sometime in less than a year, I got into an accident driving home from my “the record store has closed suddenly, but I need a job now” job at the gas station where I was working 16-hour double shifts.

It was early in the morning and I was headed out after working an overnight shift and hit a patch of black ice going over a local bridge not far from the gas station and went into a spin. One car hit me and as my vehicle spun around, an SUV hit the other half. Miraculously, I was okay, but the car was totaled.

The final car in our storyline here was a Pontiac Firebird that I bought from the dad of one of my high school classmates. It was a thousand bucks and I couldn’t believe there was any possibility that my parents would let me buy it. But I wasn’t thinking about how much Dad loved any “new” car. He’d help family friends shop for cars, happily. He’d sold cars during time away from the ministry in the mid-’80s, so he knew how to talk to the sales folks at the dealerships.

“I can’t possibly own every car I want to drive, so it’s a real thrill for me to help you do this,” he’d tell friends. Similarly, he was happy to help make the Firebird purchase happen, so he gave me backup as I talked to Mom about it. They both agreed.

It was a nice car with low miles. Once I got an internship at the radio station, I was driving to and from downtown at least six days a week. I put a lot of miles on the car pretty quickly. It was time to let it go, as my dad had taught me, while I could still get my money out of it. He helped me sell it and got two grand for it. We made money! I had a wonderful dad.

We spend so much time in our cars, I think they tend to become special things for some of us and I’m certainly in that category. A commute that usually clocked in close to an hour each way in the past 20 years gave me lots of time to listen to albums I was getting ready to talk about with an artist and really soak them in. I relished the long commute, because it gave me time alone to think. I’d have things that were bugging me at the office that I couldn’t sort out. I found that sometime between the moment I left and drove home and the next morning when I came back, the solution would come to me in that uninterrupted space.

It’s still a place I go to when life has been hectic. Sometimes it’s a drive across town to pick up books for Annie Zaleski. Other times, it’s longer than that — a drive of several hours to see a band out of town (most recently, Triumph’s reunion!). It’s a good reset and a chance to clear my mind of the noise that won’t leave.

Isn’t it something how many memories we can have tied up in a particular area of our life? For me, this dispatch was triggered by a question earlier this week that was put to me, someone simply wondering, “How did you get your first car? I’m guessing your parents paid for it.” It was more than that and in fact, completely different than that. But I’m grateful for the journey their initial purchase strategy opened up.

Mom, I’m also thankful that as my driving instructor, you kept me from hitting the mailboxes. I’m still successfully avoiding them.

"1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Advertisement People Magazine October 17 1977" by SenseiAlan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.