Fifty-Dollar-Car

Fifty-Dollar-Car

John Michel Hurt

It all started at band rehearsal. In nineteen-seventy, we were college students living ‘communally’ in a house near the university. Communally meant that after tuition and rent we shared selflessly the nothing we had left. Naturally, we had a band. We played all original music and we were, in fact, very good. Friends and acquaintances would regularly drop by to listen to our band rehearsals. Sometimes the police would drop by to forward little messages from the rest of the people on the block about our music, especially after eleven pm, and we would reduce the volume some. (We didn’t reduce it enough I guess, since I respond to everything these days with “What?” and a blank look.) The practice room was a large bedroom with blankets on the walls to absorb some of the sound. Sometimes, characters that we didn’t know would sort of appear out of nowhere, and suddenly be discovered standing next to the trap set or by the Hammond B3, looking like they were furniture that had always been there and which I had just never noticed. Sometimes they would even have kind of a dusty appearance like the rest of our furniture. I think when I first saw Mike, he somewhere was over by Larry’s guitar amp and was only a little dusty.

          He introduced himself to me after the rehearsal and since everyone called me Michael instead of Mike, there wasn’t too much confusion. Actually, there was another guy named Michael that was part of the gang, but we called him Steven. Mike was a short, slender guy with brown hair that he wore in the sort of “I’m letting it grow out”, 1965 Beatles look that was common in those days. Mike had one strange feature. His eyes were very squinty. They were almost closed, but you could see that they were made like that. I asked him if he was partly of Asian descent, but he said no, he was just squinty. Mike was a musician, too, and he attended a couple of more practices. After the last one, he got everybody’s attention in the practice room and asked if any of us wanted to buy a car.

          Of course, we all wanted to buy a car. Who doesn’t want to buy a car? The problem, of course, was in order to buy a car, you had to have that ‘special something’. The special something was money. “How much?” was what we all said first. Not “What kind of car?” or “How old is it?” or “What condition is it in?”

“Fifty dollars,” he said matter-of-factly, as if this were the going rate for cars.

We looked at one another for maybe three whole seconds—anyhow just long enough to let stupidity settle in real good and make itself at home—and I said, “I’ve got fifty dollars.”

Mike had the car. It was already in my driveway. Mike took the fifty dollars, promised to bring the title by later, and rode off into the sunset with a friend. Of course, that was the last time I ever saw him.

We looked the car over. It had trouble written all over it. Really. It was a 1959 Chevrolet Impala. It had blue paint that had not aged gracefully so that it had a matte finish and in some places the primer showed through. There must have been a lot of chrome mines in operation back then, because cars like this one had massive bumpers that would really bump. Unlike today, in those days, any car that was eleven years old was pretty much shot. If this one had just been a little more shot, it could have saved a lot of trouble.

There was a hole in the floorboard that we didn’t see until later because of the carpet.  It let in so much exhaust that you could only drive the car with the windows open, and even then you had to pull over every so often and clear your head. Once or twice it caught on fire. This could be very problematical in winter when combined with the fact that the defroster didn’t work either. The muffler was only what one might generously call “vestigial.” It was fortunate that the huge V-8 motor was so powerful that you could ride around in idle, because when you hit the gas, it sounded like Armageddon. The lights weren’t reliable and we soon learned to coast it to a halt whenever possible because the brakes were vestigial, too. It had a three speed-transmission and the clutch was fine. I don’t know if they even make three speed transmissions anymore, much less cars with shifters on the column. In other words, all the parts that could get you into trouble worked really well, and all the parts that cold keep you out of trouble were dysfunctional. Ah, hindsight, you grinning bastard, you knew, didn’t you?

We drove the car around with a license plate in the back window that I had gotten off of a Pontiac that Tommy had sold, and which still had the right year on it. I couldn’t find Mike to get the title, so we had no registration. Insurance? Hah, don’t make me laugh. Insurance is for sissies. In Tennessee, it wasn’t even required for registration then. You have to understand that in small town Tennessee back then, if the cops went around trying to catch people for registration violations, the courts would have been packed shoulder to shoulder with guys named Ruben and Shorty, Delmar and Buford. I’ll bet that a third of the automobiles in Tennessee at that time weren’t properly registered. We drove the car around on various missions. It always worked. It always used lots of gas, but that only cost thirty-five cents a gallon. When you hit the accelerator, it didn’t accelerate, it flushed. You could literally hear the gasoline being sucked out of the tank. We cruised out into the country, and down to the Laundromat, over to the grocery store. Once we got word that Jim was being sought by the law for armed robbery. We cruised the car out to George’s house, feeling like outlaws, and hid out until we found out it was a case of mistaken identity. So, the car had a history, it was our Argo. It carried us on our odysseys to the land of the lotus-eaters and was to carry us eventually to the land of the Cyclopes as well.

Now I want you to get the picture of one particular evening. Here we are. A bunch of hippie types sitting around on an evening. Strangely, no one had imbibed any illegal intoxicants. You also have to understand that this was you might call a costume-rich environment. There were around ten people over at the house and among them were no less than three fringed ponchos, four pairs of sandals made from old tires, ten pairs of patched and bellbottomed jeans, twelve strands of love beads, three peace medallions (one in stained glass), seven heads of long hair and two floppy hats.

These people were sitting around deciding what to do with the rest of the evening—it was only eleven thirty—and the group in its wisdom decided that we should all go to the cinema to see the midnight showing of the movie “Gone With the Wind.” Wow, what a great idea! To this day, I have the feeling that midnight movies are always some kind of trap to lure out the naïve and unsuspecting.

We jumped into the two cars present, one was a nice Plymouth owned by one of the kids’ parents into which six of us piled, and the other was, of course, the blue monster.  Four of us climbed into that. You’ve seen “Gone with the Wind,” so we’ll leave it at that. After we learned once again that we didn’t know nuthin’ bout birthin’ no babies and that we no longer gave a damn about that bitch Scarlett, we loaded into the cars and started for home. I was driving the blue monster with Jim and Dickey in the back seat and female friend Shiz riding shotgun. The others pulled out ahead of us in the Plymouth.

Trouble wasn’t long in coming. In small town Tennessee at that time there were only two kinds of people out at two am: us and the police.

I saw him as we passed the used car lot at Memorial and Broad. He saw us, too. I immediately shifted into invisibility mode. This consisted of looking straight ahead with a blank expression, letting off of the gas so Armageddon would quiet down, and telling everyone else in the car to be quiet and not look at the cop. This is what I call the rabbit technique. It worked about as well for me as it usually does for the rabbit. At least the hawk doesn’t have to work so hard that way.

The highway patrol car eased out of the car lot where he had been hiding, like a crocodile on the Zambezi slides into the water. He eased up behind us, then he pulled up alongside. I tried to whistle and look out of the corner of my left eye to see what he would do. He pulled up in front of us and ran there for a while, then he dropped back to the side and then behind us again. Why is it that no matter how much you expect it, a siren and lights going off right behind you make you levitate?  As he pulled us over on the upgrade of the hill that ran into the center of town, I saw our other car pull over at the top of the hill.

He came up to the window with a flashlight. Man! This was the biggest policeman I had ever seen! He asked me for my license and when I felt in my pocket, I remembered that Dickey had paid for my movie ticket because I had left my wallet at home.

“Uh, officer,” I stammered, “I don’t have it with me right now. But I do have a license. If you want we can drive on over to my house which is very close and I can get it.”

He looked at me funny. I could swear now that his name tag said Polyphemus. “Come back here and get in the cruiser,” he ordered. So, I went back to the patrol car and got into the front seat on the passenger side. The patrolman pulled out a pad, which I recognized as a pad of tickets. Tickets the police give out now are like an order form with lots of little blanks to write some of the bad stuff in and boxes to check other bad stuff. Back then ticket books looked like the order book the waitress uses at the local diner, only a little bigger.

 “No driver’s license,” he mumbled, half to himself, as he wrote, then, “What is your name sir?” I told him. He wrote it down.

“That’s not the correct license plate for that car is it, sir?” Somehow, policemen can say “sir” in a special way that makes it sound like they are saying “moron.” Maybe it’s part of their training, I don’t know. He wrote in the ticket book.

 “No, sir. It came off of a ’62 Pontiac.”

“And why is that, sir?”

“I haven’t got the title yet.” More writing.

“Muffler shot?”

“Yes, sir.” I guess I thought that if I volunteered information, he would think I was on his side, and that together we would punish the fifty-dollar car for being so bad. Another ticket.

“Do you realize that your brake lights are not working, sir?”

“Um, yes sir.” He wrote on.

The patrolman picked up the microphone of the police radio. “Base, this is car thirty-four, come in please. Repeat, base, this is car thirty-four, come in.”

Now, we had been getting along pretty well so far, the policeman and I, but somehow that changed when the station answered. The voice that came over the crackly speaker sounded for all the world like Gomer Pyle. I swear.

“Cawur thartyfower, cawur thartyfower, this here’s ba-is. Cum back.”

The trooper frowned. I think he was rather well educated and didn’t like having to talk to a yahoo in front of a college student. I think it embarrassed him. I could see his mood change. Nonetheless, he talked to the Gomer guy.

“I need you to run a thirty-three-twenty-eight on a blue – what year car is this…”

“Fifty-nine.”

“Fifty-nine Chevrolet.” And to me: “Where are you from?” I gave him the name of my home town, Hendersonville.

“Call up to Hendersonville and get a character check on a John Michael Hurt.”

“Yeas sar, I’ll git right on it. Bais ayout!” I thought the trooper hung up the microphone with a little more force than was needed. I asked him what a thirty-three-twenty-eight was.

 “Stolen car check. You stay right here. I’m going to impound this vehicle.” He said with a cautionary look as he opened the door. He strode up to the fifty-dollar-car and stuck his head in the open driver’s side window. I tried to think who would want to steal a car like this.

Shiz told me later what happened. “Who in here has your driver’s license with you?” he demanded looking around at my three passengers. The two guys shook their heads. Shiz said, “I do.”

“I’m going to impound this car,” he said. “Get over here under the wheel and follow me.”

“But..” Shiz began. The other two looked at each other and whistled.

“No buts, get over here.”

“But..,” She began again. The frown on his face shut her up, and she slid across the wide front seat and got under the wheel of the fifty-dollar-car. Now the two passengers in the back, Jim and Dickey, and I in the police car, knew something the officer didn’t know yet. This was that we had been trying to teach Shiz to drive a manual transmission car for weeks, and the results had been really, really discouraging. Two of us had mild whiplash from being jerked around the big university parking lot, which now had little tire marks on a good portion of its surface from the sudden clutch-popping she had done. From the police car, I saw Shiz get under the wheel.

The officer got back in the patrol car, which of course was running all this time.

“But..” I began, and was greeted with a look that said, “Just how much trouble do you want to be in?” My mouth snapped shut. He looked down to continue his ticket-writing marathon. He was working on ticket number six. I looked up apprehensively to see smoke bellow out of the fifty-dollar-car, some from the tailpipe and some from underneath somewhere, and I gulped as it began to roll gently down the hill toward us, its horizontal chrome-covered tailfins looking like silver eyebrows over the glowing red eyes of some angry tiki god. I had time to realize there was no point in panicking – I was already a dead man and it would be a waste of the energy I would need for crying and begging later. But I felt I should say something.

“Officer,” I began and he looked sideways at me. “She’s, um, going to hit you.”

The officer looked up in sudden comprehension and the state police cruiser jerked like an animal that been shot as the fifty-dollar-car plowed rear first into its front end. Police cars back then didn’t have the nifty push bars on the front they do now and there was a loud crash followed by the tinkling of glass and chrome as the trooper fumbled in haste for the shift lever. He was too late. I don’t know why I said it, but I did.

“Officer, she’s going to hit you again.”

There was another lurch and crash and more glass and plastic and chrome rained onto the pavement. The frantic officer got the cruiser into reverse and floored it just before the fifty-dollar-car jumped at him again, and we roared thirty yards backwards down the highway shoulder. I don’t know what his expression was right then because I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face. I didn’t know what would happen if I did. He shoved the shift lever of the patrol car into drive and roared across the road to the other side and stopped, panting. Shiz lurched and squealed the car into drive and began the big U-turn that would bring her across the highway and behind the police car so that he could take me in to the station. The other six friends, who had been watching from the top of the hill all this time, started their car and began to follow us.

Right then the radio crackled to life.

“Cawur thartyfore, cawur thartyfore, this here’s ba-is. Cum back.” The trooper snatched the microphone from the radio so hard that he almost yanked the curly cord off.

“What?” he yelled. “I mean, this is thirty-four, go ahead.” The fifty-dollar-car lurched and puffed across the road. I watched it apprehensively and eyed the door handle. I made up my mind that if she hit him again I would make a run for it.

“Weyull, I called up thar ta Hendersonville and tawked to th’ Sheriff. He says he knows ‘im and knows his fambly. Seems like they’re good folks and he ain’t been in no trouble or nuthin’ up thar.”

“Okay, okay.” This impatiently.

“An’ there ain’t no stolen kawr report on no blue fifty-nine Chevrolet.”

“Thank you base. Thirty-four out.” There was a sound that I can only think was the officer’s teeth gritting loudly. He put the patrol car into drive and we headed off toward the State Trooper Station over on Lytle Street with the fifty-dollar car lurching along behind. I looked back as it passed under a street light. Was it really smirking or was that just an optical illusion?

Now I have to tell you a little about me, or actually the me of that time, because now I am five-eleven and weigh one-ninety. Then, I was six feet tall and weighed one hundred and twenty-three pounds. With my long brown hair bushed out, I looked sort of like a Q-Tip with bellbottoms. I think scrawny is a word that could come to mind. I was a late bloomer I guess, but we didn’t really eat all that much, and it seemed like every religious fad I got into required fasting. So, when the six-foot-three, two hundred and fifty pound state trooper wearing a smokey bear hat and a Sam Browne belt with a huge pistol hanging from it led me by the arm into the police station, it had to look pretty odd.

Inside the station the other officers, who were all big too, froze at the sight. Uh oh, more Cyclopes! Two with coffee cups halfway to their mouths. They stared for a second and then they all began to laugh.

“What’cha got ya there Bob, a murderer?” one croaked as another choked from laughing with a bite of sandwich or something in his mouth. There was that teeth gritting sound again and Bob turned red, his eyes squinting closed kind of like Mike’s. My three passengers came in to the station on tiptoe, using the invisible rabbit technique I had taught them. The officer shoved me into his office.

Then it happened. All the other friends from the other car, who could have just gone home, came pouring into the station and suddenly there was the police station full of love beads and peace medallions and ponchos and floppy hats. My friends had come in with a combative demeanor. It was certainly true that all of us had been on the front line in civil rights protests and anti-Vietnam War rallies. We had faced rock-throwers and baton wielding riot police, smelled tear gas, but somehow, I had counted on discretion rather than valor. They weren’t going to let me go without a fight.

“WHERE’S OUR FRIEND?” they demanded. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIM?” It seemed like they were all over the police station. I looked on in horror. The other officers looked at each other, their eyebrows shooting up to new heights, and back at the flood of hippies now threatening to take over their inner sanctum. Their eyes nearly popped out. Most of them had never seen any hippie types up close, but all of them had stereotypes in mind, and all the stereotypes were very, very bad. The policemen reached for their holsters and began unsnapping the straps. A newspaper headline flashed through my head: Massacre on Lytle Street, Foolish Hippies Slain in Bloody Incident!

I jumped up and came into the station with my hands raised. “Wait!” I cried and everybody stopped, eyes on me.

“I’m okay, everything’s okay. Thanks guys, but everything’s okay.” Somehow the massacre was averted. The doubting throng began to filter out, throwing wary looks over their shoulders, and the cops eased back puffing into their seats. I prepared myself to be thrown into the dungeon with the criminally insane guy. I figured they kept one especially for guys like me who had messed up a new cruiser. But it was not to be!

The trooper turned out to be reasonable man. Or maybe he was just a tired man now. At least he was able to reason out that I didn’t have the five hundred dollars for the bail, so he called the dean of students at the university, who was soooo thrilled to be waked up at three in the morning to make a recognizance bond for me. In a special interview later, he told me exactly how glad he had been, and just how much he looked forward to doing it again sometime.

Later I had to go to court. I had to show the judge that I really had a driver’s license, and I had to pay a couple of the tickets, because the state trooper didn’t show up - I don’t think he wanted to stand in court and have to explain about the damage to the cruiser - so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. They told me that I would have to get the registration corrected and go down to the impoundment lot to get the fifty-dollar-car, but somehow, I didn’t feel motivated any more, and strangely enough, none of my friends ever mentioned the fifty-dollar-car again.

I’m sorry, but this story doesn’t have such a happy ending. One day about a month later, I ran into a friend of Mike’s. He told me that Mike didn’t bring me the title because he didn’t have it; he had actually stolen the car from his uncle. All the blood in my veins turned to icewater for a moment as I realized I might have gone to prison, or at least to the workhouse for grand theft auto, or actually not-so-grand theft auto.

I got my comeuppance about my ire over the Fifty-Dollar can when I ran into a mutual friend. I was angry and thought I wanted revenge. “Why did he do that?” I cried, outraged. “I’m going to kill that little worm when I find him!”

“He did it because he was addicted to heroin,” the friend replied. “And you’re too late. He overdosed. He died last week.”

As I walked away in the bright spring air, my anger melted into sadness and pity.