"Big Daddy" Where Are You Now That We Need You?

I couldn't believe it was really happening! To this day, I don't know how I managed it. But yes, Ronnie Timbush was really going to let me drive his car!

In my high school days, Ronnie Timbush was the baddest hotrodder of them all. And his car! Holy bejesus, his car! An Aqua Velva blue '55 Chevy; 327 cubic inch V-8 with dual four-barrel carburetors; Hearst "four on the floor" transmission; "tuck-and-roll" upholstery from Tijuana; chrome "mag" wheels with fat "slicks" on the back; open "headers" which roared, man roared; and a reputation as the fastest, coolest, slickest hotrod in town.

And I was about to drive this mean machine. A teenage boy's Walter Mitty fantasy come true. It was like having the school's whole cheer leading squad naked in your room with your parents out of town. Can you begin to imagine?

We started at the "Y" near the drive-in, the place where Route 66 divided after slicing it way through the heart of our little town, the place where we all turned around on our incessant cruising to head back into town again for another lap. For a few hundred yards there is a divided highway, perfect for tearing loose, "laying rubber," goading other drivers into a drag race, roaring thunder out your headers, and being so righteous bad.

Ronnie gave me the wheel like a nervous father giving his son his first driving lesson. Junior has to be given free rein, but pop's secretly not really sure Junior is up to it. Pop is clearly nervous, but Junior is oblivious, the glaze has come over his eyes. The hot moment has come.

I pushed the stout clutch in with all my skinny-leg might, touched the accelerator just a little and the engine roared, the car started to shake in a low rubble like the earth had come unglued, the tachometer on the dash flickered up toward 3,000 RPM, low, but high enough for me, I crammed the stick shift into first gear and let the clutch go. Holy shit! The car began to move like some low to the ground dinosaur, thunder in its steps. The tires squealed their complaint as the rear end began to "fishtail." I pushed on the gas and we leaped forward as I struggled to bring the car around straight again. The force pushed us back against the seats as I shifted into second. I pushed hard on the accelerator and the car roared its response. Now we were really moving, and I was not driving a car, I was ridding a rocket. It was all sound and fury and I was not even remotely in control. My seat in the universe turned to sudden jelly. The thrill rushed up my spine, and at some point, hit my fear button. I backed-off the pedal by reflex. The car squirreled its way to a straight line and slowed to a manageable pace. We had gone all of 200 yards. My career as a hot-rodder was over.

Cars were central to our lifestyle then, and loom large in the American psyche even now.

I used to work with a dour, crusty fellow named Mike Mason. Mike looked exactly like George Will, and he had some of that same Tory lack of flair. Although he was in some ways a queer duck, Mike was forever surprising me with a gem of wisdom about some particular little corner of life. His one radical extravagance was that he owned four cars--all monsters from the sixties.

During the gas crisis of 1979 California Governor Jerry Brown instituted odd-even gas rationing, in which the last digit of one's license plate dictated which three days of the week one would be permitted to sit in lines that wound around numerous city blocks in order to buy, at vastly inflated prices, enough gas to get you through to the next odd or even day, when you would be permitted to do it all again. The normally implacable Mike Mason exploded on the day this system was announced. In serious and red-faced tones, he explained to me that this was the most sinister threat to freedom in the recent history of the Republic. You see, since we no longer have a frontier to escape to, the only real freedom left is the freedom to get in one's car and go anywhere one damn well pleases; to travel for hours, days, weeks along a network of roads and highways reaching every crevice of the land. The freedom to drive, to move. Not public transport, which goes where it wants to go and you tag along. But one's own personal and private car. To move at will, where you want to go.

As I say, not much bothered Mike Mason. But the inflation of gasoline prices, and the state's intervention in the opportunities of purchase, was one of the few things for which he would go to the barricades. In his own cranky way, I had to admit Mike was right. It was always about freedom.

During my high school years we spent most of our free time in cars, driving from one end of town to the other. The course was fixed by some invisible, unspoken markers. We all started at the "Y," headed down Hopi Drive to the intersection, then north along Navajo Drive to loop through the Dairy Queen^" parking lot, and then back down to the "Y" again. That was one lap, and "making laps" was our primary occupation every night and all day on weekends. Our cars were our own personal preserve. Mobile homes in the purest sense of the term. We ate in our cars, smoked cigarettes and drank beer, worked on our "night moves, trying to lose those awkward teenage blues," socialized, and just roamed, free of supervision.

Cars were so much a part of our lifestyle back then that an entire genre of American popular music was created to service our hunger--the "car song." We had songs about cars, "Little Cobra," "GTO." We had songs about engines, "409." We had songs about parts of engines, "Little Deuce Coupe." We had songs about the mythic people who drove the cars, "Little Old Lady From Pasadena." We even had songs about love and death "Dead Man's Curve."

And many of our heroes were associated with the mystique of cars. One of my personal favorites was "Big Daddy" Roth. Roth was an artist extraordinaire. He designed everything from tee-shirts and logos to gleaming custom-built hotrods. His motto, if I recall correctly, was "rat fink" and he created a suitably unsuitable rat-like character to emblazon his tee-shirts and the stick-on decals he sold us and the comic books and magazines. In short, "Big Daddy" gave us a whole culture of counter-culture artifacts revolving around cars. He was hip, vaguely unsavory, outrageous, and designed the coolest cars anyone had ever seen or would be likely to see again.

It was the best of times.

But all fine and righteous things come to an end. Maturity, or some other disease, intervenes. The "car songs" have disappeared, because the mystique has been broken. The romance has gone out of cars because they are no longer wicked-fast muscle cars. They have become mere utilitarian devices to get us from here to there. But it was never the getting, it was the going.

Today I drive a tiny subcompact, a Chevy Chevette, purchased in 1979--at a time obsessed with economies rather than freedoms. I only drive it to go somewhere. Like my efficient neighbors, we zip here and jot there, and then back to base again. I no longer go for long drives in the late night air, living by dashboard light and radio chatter, the glowing tip of a cigarette in the dark, its night-blue smoke gliding across the rear-view mirror.

Recently I bought another car: a 1947 Chevy. Huge lumbering beastie, all curves and puffed-out lines; rounding shapes and fixtures built to last, with a slow artfulness. A Stylemaster sedan. The very name suggests what cars were about then. And the structure of the thing suggests a pace. You cannot zip and jot. It takes time to negotiate a simple turn. A car from the era of Sunday afternoon drives.

I overshot my mark. I was longing for a return to those glory moments when I sat strapped-in to the bucket seat of Ronnie Timbush's '55 Chevy. But I missed that period altogether. Missed the period when cars had speedometers that showed 120 mph, and meant every word of it. The speedometer on my subcompact crests at 85, and that is mostly empty boast.

I remember 120. That seemed almost a magic number once. A sacred limit, more real than the speed of light. And always that vague instinct which implied that if you but had the courage to fly to the speedometer's end, something transformational would happen. 120. Sweet number that. The Pythagorean cant of my teenage dreams.

But all of that is gone forever. The last I heard, "Big Daddy" Roth was working as a maintenance man at Knotts Berry Farm near Disneyland. And I drive a Chevette.

Life's like that.