BetterTimes
Recollections from my misbegotten youth. This chapter concerns my dad’s love of cars and our ritual Sunday afternoon drives.
In better times, Dad and I would clamber into whatever hotrod he’d bought that year and go for a drive. It became something of a Sunday afternoon ritual. After whatever tiff he and Gail had gotten into, he’d have to go and blow off steam and this is how he did it. At an early age, I’d discovered a love for speed which delighted him no end, so we would pile in the car, just the two of us, and invariably head for Rodyate Hill, a long, straight descent about ten miles away where he could really put his foot down and let the car fly.
I can see him now, rocking gently back and forth as he stomped on the accelerator, pinning us back in our seats. Looking up, I could see the merest beginnings of a smile on his face and his eyes turning glassy, distant. Here, in these moments, was where he was free to be him, the only time he was allowed to be him.
Do not deviate, he might have told himself or... maybe his imagined father whispered to him. But his path did deviate somewhere along the way and whatever calling he’d imagined for himself got away from him. I could see, at these moments, he wasn’t the owner of a beaten down chain of dry cleaning stores that nobody but him gave a fuck about - for just a few minutes each week, he was Sterling Moss.
He would barely look at me at all during these drives. I’m not even sure why he wanted me along for the ride, truth be told. He wasn’t ‘here’. He was elsewhere, ambling through a life that he must have known was utterly beyond his reach now, a life that had any room left for excitement. Five kids, college educations looming, a shell of a marriage and a very iffy business to go along with it. It must have been crushing.
Convention had inserted itself into Dad’s life long before we ever met, as I think it would for so many sad men of the era. Just do what's expected.The country was still rebuilding after the war. Just making ends meet was about the most we could expect. Anything more was gravy.
So instead, here he was with me, his strangest, most untrammeled offspring, dreaming. And here I was, a mote of dust, afloat on the breeze. Unseen.
If Mum had only known how much danger her six-year-old was in at these times, she might have garotted him at the kitchen table.
One year, Dad stepped briefly out of character and bought my favorite of all his cars. This time it wasn’t to be a classic sports car as was his usual predilection. He’d found a beautiful example of a 1950’s Citroen Traction Avante, in laughably inappropriate British racing green.
This car wasn’t racing anywhere.
Nevertheless, Poirot and Maigret must have tooled around Paris in one just like this I thought. It had graceful, sweeping wheel fairings and frog-eye headlights. The smell of real leather and real wood permeated the interior with perhaps just a hint of Galloise thrown in. I loved this car for it’s pure Gallic pugnaciousness.
Upon reflection, I think Dad’s judgment must have been seriously clouded by the car’s outward beauty. If he’d taken it for a test drive, it can’t have been that long or he would surely have detected the latent animosity embedded in every divine centimeter of the car's bodywork. Of course, it’s entirely possible the car just played possum until after money had exchanged hands in order to inflict maximum emotional trauma.
From the outset, it steadfastly refused to do anything expected of it. That car had a mind of its own, it’s makers clearly having imbued this one with a massive dose of French animus, knowing it was headed for UK shores.
It was a French stealth weapon, skillfully crafted to fragment the psyche of any poor sod stupid enough to climb behind the wheel.
For one thing, it hated being driven by a Scotsman and on the wrong side of the road, que Dieu nous aide. Just being on British soil must have been injurious, being the color it was, merely added insult.
‘Comment peux-tu? Regardez où ils mettent le volant! C'est quoi ce bordel.’
In sympathy with its assembly line brethren, it would simply down tools at the drop of a hat, refuse to move and give no clue as to what ailed it, as if anything were required.
I imagined a cartoon, the car sitting in a cafe just off the Rue de la Paix, reading Le Figaro, not giving a shit.
‘Non.’
Taking me to school in that car became, for me at least, a mirth-filled coin toss, as we’d sit, often as not somewhere along a country road, miles from any garage or pay phone, with the hood open and Dad standing alongside, scratching his forehead.
The restorative came in the form of a very large wrench kept in the boot expressly for this purpose. I’d wince as Dad beat one of the pipes in the engine compartment, repeatedly and with an admirable degree of violence, one I’d never seen in him before.
Watching him through the windshield, I conjured up my own Waterloo, a slowly fermenting Nelson vs a hapless yet stoic Bonaparte. I had a perverse wish for us to break down every school day, just so that I could witness this battle of wills. Broadside after broadside.
‘Va tu faire foutre, Rosbif. Fais ton pire.’
‘You won’t bring me down.’
‘Regarde moi. Au moment ou j’en aurai fini avec toi, tu mendieras pour ta mere. Putain d'espèce d'enculé.'
There was a priceless life lesson in here somewhere, one far more valuable than any school time I was missing. Resilience? Perhaps. But whose side was I on? I found myself deeply conflicted. Part of me was always rooting for the car. It felt like treachery. But I didn’t care.
Few sons ever got to see their father’s in such flagrant disarray. I ask myself now, why he never showed this much passion around anything else.
Needless to say, this car didn’t last long