Driving Southern: Life in Cars

1 See the USA

Ralph Bland

In 1967, I had bagged groceries and swept floors and cleaned restrooms for a year already and still wasn’t close to having enough money to buy my first car. It was entirely possible I had even less money than when I started working the year before. I seemed to always be buying something to eat on my break or pitching in money for gas when a bunch of friends and I rode around in the evenings after work. Drinking illegally purchased beer and smoking cigarettes cost money I should have been saving. Each time I made headway in my quest to save, I would end up buying a new shirt or pay for a movie if I was going out on a date. There was also the purchase of the latest Beatles album to play on my sorry excuse of the stereo in my room so I could sing them in my head while I was loading groceries into backseats of cars at Kroger.

I was in a hopeless situation, not even treading water financially speaking, when my Uncle Dick stepped up. A life-long bachelor and Greyhound bus driver who lived with my spinster aunt in a small town outside of Nashville, he took pity on me and decided to bestow his high school graduation gift a year early, endowing me with three hundred dollars to go with the four I’d managed to save so I could buy a car and have wheels of my own. He explained to my mother that a young man turning seventeen needed to have a few adventures. My mother didn’t much like the idea, but my dad semi-agreed in principle and even donated a hundred dollars of his own toward car insurance, stipulating that from there on out, it would be my responsibility to take care of the car, including repairs while staying legally insured. He surprised me further by taking me down to Nashville Electric where he worked and introducing me to one of his friends in the Accounting Department, a widow named Winona who had a 1962 Chevrolet Impala she wanted to sell. Because I was my daddy’s son, she dropped the price she so I could afford it. She figured if I was anything like my daddy, I was a good fellow and deserved a break.

I’d never held that much money before. When I counted six hundred dollars into Miss Winona’s hand, I felt like I was giving birth—that my whole world was about to change. She signed over the title and handed me a ring of keys, and I went out and got into my new car. I’d taken it for a test drive a little earlier, but this time it was different. This time it was all mine.

I washed and polished my Chevy that afternoon until I thought my arm was going to fall off. I drove around after supper on a full tank of gas, getting used to the steering wheel, the dashboard lights, the radio, and the low and high beams on the dark road. The next morning couldn’t come fast enough. I drove to school and picked out a choice parking place among all the other students’ cars, the bright fancy automobiles bought for them by their parents. None of them had worked for their rides the way I had. Maybe my 1962 Chevy wasn’t as shiny and new with four-in-the-floor or bucket seats, but I was still proud of it. Parked in its prime spot, it said to the rest of the world that I had finally arrived and everybody might as well start getting used to it. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt like I was as good as anybody else. It was a feeling that had been a long time coming.

A grand moment was spent after school was dismissed that afternoon, when I walked to my gleaming 1962 Chevy Impala, unlocked the door and got inside, giving everyone in the parking lot the opportunity to see who this new car belonged to, who was the cool driver who’d recently entered into the elite social caste of automobile hierarchy. Even if my V-8 didn’t pulsate and hit a lick like some of the expensive muscle cars the other kids drove, the sound was still music to my ears. I had a hard time deciding if I wanted to turn the radio on to a Top 40 station or leave it off and enjoy the low rumble of the Impala’s engine.

I went home, changed clothes and grabbed a bite to eat before leaving for work. My shift at Kroger always lasted until thirty minutes past closing time at nine, which meant mealtime for me was a fifteen-minute break in the middle of the shift. I could either down a candy bar and a Coke from the vending machines in the breakroom or run to the Wilson Quick drugstore next door, which had a soda fountain and served hamburgers and cold drinks all the way up to closing time. The only problem was most of the time the counter was maintained by an ancient, shriveled specimen of a woman named Helen, who looked like an end-of-the-line version of Bette Davis. Old and crochety, she had only two speeds, slow and slower. If you made it to the drugstore in time and someone had an order in front of you or for some reason you got on Helen’s bad side, you were doomed to leave hungry.

I drove to work that afternoon excited and proud that I’d be parking my new car on the hill where all my fellow workers could see it, where I could gaze up at it each time I came out of the store with an order to load in a car, knowing it would be waiting for me at shift’s end. It was wonderful to have the feeling that on this night when I clocked out, I wouldn’t need to ask someone to give me a ride home or worse, have to call my parents to come and pick me up. No, tonight I could punch the clock and stroll out the doors to my own vehicle. I could unlock the door under the moon and stars and the glow of the parking lot lights and slide in under the steering wheel of my very own 1962 Chevrolet Impala. Independence Day had arrived.

On my fourth trip outside to load some groceries into a customer’s car, I cast my eyes toward my shiny car on the hill. I had to blink two or three times to make sure I was seeing what I was not seeing. Lo and behold, my 62 Chevy was gone. It was no longer where it had been just five minutes before. It was gone. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Was someone playing a cruel joke on me?

No matter how desperately I tried to process what I was experiencing, the hard truth was my car was gone. No one was playing a trick on me. I was not imagining things. The car I had come to cherish in such a short time was not where it was supposed to be.

I ran back inside and told my boss that my car had been stolen. He called the police department and I called my father. Thirty minutes later, a police officer and my dad arrived at the store. The three of us walked up the hill to examine where my car had been parked. Nothing looked suspicious other than the fact that the car was gone. There was no broken glass or footprints or as my imagination ran wild, a left-behind ransom note for me to read.

We have your car. Give us all the money

from your upcoming paycheck and we will

return it. If you delay, we will send it back

to you one piece at a time.

The policeman filled out a report on a clipboard and I signed it. I was too sick to my stomach and depressed to go back to work, so my manager excused me, and I rode home with my dad. He was driving his service truck from Nashville Electric as I sat and looked out at the road before me. Everywhere I looked I thought for a brief moment I’d caught a glimpse of my car.

I stayed in my room that night feeling sorry for myself and wondering why God hated me so. Turning on my clock radio, I listened to some songs and did my best to keep from crying. You’re seventeen years old, I told myself. You can’t be crying over a car. You can’t cry over anything anymore. Your dog can get hit by a truck or a pretty girl can say you’re ugly and mean people can hotwire your car and steal it and sell it for parts and you still can’t cry, because you’re seventeen and you can’t be a baby about such things. You have to grow up now. That’s just the way it is.

I didn’t sleep much that night and when I went to school the next morning, my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t stop thinking about some rotten thief driving my car somewhere around town.

It was one o’clock when a messenger from the school office came to my algebra class with a note from my dad. He was coming to the school to pick me up. My car had been found!

It wasn’t the police who had located my car, but a man who worked at my store had managed to track it down. He’d just had a hunch, he told us, and when he looked behind a body shop, he found my beloved car sitting there by a dumpster. I didn’t even know this fellow. He worked in the dairy department during the day while I was in school. But he’d heard all the commotion when he was leaving, and he had himself a hunch that he decided to follow up on.

To my surprise, there wasn’t much wrong with my car. The thief had torn out the rubber seal around the window on the driver’s side when he’d used a crowbar to get in. He took the same crowbar and knocked the ignition piece from the steering column so he could hotwire it. The chrome from the ignition lay in pieces on the floormat. Mr. Hinton thought maybe the cops get could dust for prints. That was his name. Mr. Hinton. Every day for the next two years, I went back to the dairy department and said hello to Mr. Hinton as I was coming and he was going. He would always ask, How’s that car doing?

In fact, my car did fine for the rest of high school and my first two years of college. I took it to church camp three years in a row and fell in love with a college girl five years older than I. I also lived with its one eccentricity—when I went on any trip more fifty miles, the Impala became beset by vapor lock and shut off. As a result, I would have to sit on the side of the road for thirty minutes or so until it was ready to start back up again. It wasn’t so bad once I got used to it. Sometimes I would be on a date when it would simply choose a place to shut down which would become our place to park. On a number of occasions, the choices my Chevy made were more original than mine.

On a summer night after my freshman year of college, I clocked out and drove down the street to buy burgers and fries for my friends who were still working. We would always eat in the parking lot after we all got off work and laugh and joke for an hour or so before heading home for the night. It was a little like having a Saturday night party. The grocery store’s front walk was lined with new lawnmowers, bins of watermelons, barbeque grills, hanging plants, and other displays to entice the customers to get into a summer mode and spend all their money. I saw two guys rolling a lawnmower down the walkway, toward a waiting pickup truck. I knew they were in the process of stealing it, so I punched the accelerator and drove up on the sidewalk to cut them off, scraping the bottom of the Chevy with a sickening crunch. The men ran to their truck