I’ve never been much of a car guy, so it wasn’t terribly important to me that I have a "cool" car in high school.  In fact I was tickled pink when my Mom bought me a chocolate brown Datsun 310 hatchback after my junior year of high school.  The car had power-nothing and no air conditioning which meant you really had to muscle the steering wheel if you were trying to pull out of a parking space and you broke into a full sweat in the process.  It also had tires the width of your average mountain bike and topped out at around 55 MPH if you were going down hill with a stiff wind at your back.  I loved that car.

Before Mom bought the car used from the dealership just down the road she got the sales guy, a student at GMU, to agree to give me lessons on driving a stick.  In the year that I’d had my license I had only driven our Oldsmobile sedan with an automatic transmission.  So on the fateful day of our purchase the guy drove us over to the parking lot at Fairfax High School (Fairfax, VA) and gave me a 1/2 hour lesson on the use of the clutch.  Let me point out that we didn’t drive up one hill during that time.  After returning to the dealership and finalizing the purchase the guy handed me the keys and Mom said she’d follow me home.  I stalled four times in the 1/2 mile between the dealership and our place.

That first night of having my own wheels I decided to take my girlfriend out on a date.  I somehow drove the 10 miles to her house without hitting a stoplight which meant that I didn’t have to deal with a lot of gearing up.  On the way to the movies I hit a red light on a steep hill and it occured to me that I had a real challenge on my hands.  I pondered a moment and decided the most prudent course would be to use the hand brake and get everything revved up and then release the hand brake and we’d be off.  I did this seven straight times and stalled every time, suffering through four light changes and the incessant giggling of my not-so-sympathetic girlfriend.  On the eighth try I had the RPMs so high that when I finally managed to get the car in gear I gave us both a mild case of whiplash as we hit 30 MPH in about two seconds.  I then ran four "orange" lights on the way to the movie.

Eventually I learned to shift pretty smoothly but unfortunately my tutor had never said anything about down shifting.  A couple of months later my cousin Jeff was visiting me from Winston-Salem and we went out for a ride.  As we approached our first red light I engaged in my standard "throw it in neutral and slam the brakes while going from 50 to 0 in about 20 yards" braking maneuver.  From the passenger seat all I heard was "Jesus-Christ-slow-down-we’re-not-gonna-make-it!" and when we stopped right on the line I looked over with a kind of self-satisfied smirk.

Jeff, ghost white, spluttered "Haven’t you ever heard of down shifting?"

"What’s that?" I replied.

"Well, you go from 4th to 3rd and on down as you’re slowing down," he said incredulously.  "It helps save your brakes and it keeps you from scaring the crap out of everyone else."

"Oh, okay," I said. 

At the next light I came barreling to a stop as I shifted from fourth all the way to first gear without once letting out the clutch.  Jeff just kind of looked at me and started laughing.

"Man, you gotta let out the clutch to do any good!" he said in between guffaws.  "What kind of drivers ed do they have in Virginia anyway?"

That’s when I told him about my 1/2 hour lesson and he asked why my Mom didn’t hold out for more.  I told him I thought it was because she was in a state of shock since the guy wore really tight white jeans and you could see his striped bikini underwear.  Not that she was dazzled, just frazzled.

Anyway, that car became my home away from home my senior year.  To pay for gas I’d give guys rides to school in exchange for gas money. Eventually I had a regular crew of five guys, including my younger brother squeezed into what was charitably classified a "compact" car.  Since we went to a small private high school about 15 miles from our place I’d end up spending about an hour to an hour and a half getting to and from school every day.   I think those trips could be the material for a coming-of-age book or maybe a really bad teen-movie.

Usually my brother and I would leave the house around 6:30 in the morning and get home at around 6:30 in the evening since we both played sports throughout the school year and practice wasn’t over until 5:00.  I was always too tired, or lazy, to empty my clothes out of trunk of the car so every two weeks I’d have to take a big bag and stuff it with my clothes in order to do laundry.  To say that car was odiferous would be a vast understatement.

Those clothes came in handy one time when I lost my gas cap.  I rummaged through the hatch area and found an old sock, stuffed it in the tank opening, closed the little door over it and promptly forgot all about it.  The next day I volunteered to drive on a school trip to a Lutheran camp in the mountains (our school was Lutheran) where it was parked for two days in torrential rains.  On the way down the mountain my car sputtered and came to a stop in front of an old farm house.  When I couldn’t get it to turn over the residents of the house, who all looked like Cooter from Dukes of Hazzard, came out to give me a hand.  They correctly surmised that something was going on with my fuel line and when one of them went to check my gas tank he found my sopping sweatsock that had managed to funnel a whole bucket of rainwater into my tank.  Eventually they got me back on road with some stern advice about the proper use of knitwear in vehicles. Apparently there aren’t many, but as I said I’m not a car guy.

I drove that little beast for three years until Mom decided to sell it.  One summer morning while I was working an internship across the street from her office near Dupont Circle she arranged a meeting in her office parking garage with two Arab gentlemen who’d agreed to pay her a couple of thousand dollars cash.  She had me go with her as protection, which is laughable considering I weighed 160 pounds soaking wet at that time, and after our little imitation of the Deepthroat scene in All the President’s Men we promptly walked to the bank to deposit the cash.

At the time I was happy to see the Chocolate Beast go, but now I think of it more than a tad nostalgically.  It may have been my generation’s version of the Edsel but it was my first set of wheels. Now I’ve graduated all the way up to a five-speed Saturn, which in about a year will be what Michael, our oldest son will be driving.  Suffice it to say he’s going to get a lot more tutoring than his Dad did.