Dream Car

The whole idea was for the five of us to hitchhike to Delmar with the 100 dollars we'd bummed from Tony the Source, pay for the model A coupe, get it out of the old lady's garage and push it the ahh, 20 miles or so back to Chris's back yard, soup the buggy up, paint it Candy Apple red, win Hot Rod of the Year and a few important drag races, use the money to pay for college, then get high-paying jobs from which we could change the course of history to our liking. Simple.

None of this, except the hundred dollars and the garage part, was discussed or even thought about at the living edge of our teenage minds in the hours and miles we went into the darkness before we at last pulled open the creaking doors of the old garage back there among the big trees - in the movie the background music would be Maybelline by the immortal Chuck - and brought to the light the object of our odyssey on that hot summer night in 1957, but the dream was there and we all felt it to the core, it had drawn us to this place.

If the movie was made right now, we'd all be played by overage actors overdoing young in a smartass young director's conception of what teens in the fifties - who attended the actual birth of rock'n'roll for godsake, to say nothing of all that followed - were really like, but the whole thing would be such a crock and we'd know it, sitting here graying along with the balding, paunching audience, watching our characters hitchhiking out there with the clothes and the music chronology all screwed up, what a ripoff, what do those punky hollywood whippersnappers care about getting eternity right?

'Cause we were really there, we knew how it really was, there was just Sun records and Chess and a few others, all 45s, don't let me get too far off the track here. For good background music, just also hear Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis, Gene Vincent, Screamin Jay, the Coasters, Lloyd Price, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and a dozen or so others, Carl Perkins, Ronnie Hawkins, the Diamonds, Mickey and Sylvia, the Silhouettes completing the air around us On the Road to the garage way out in Delmar and back, and the adventures that befell us along our journey.

As for threads: no dumb, square, uncool short-sleeved shirts with birds or dogs on them for godsake from way back in the late forties, might as well be off by a hundred years, back when the director's grandfather was working on his third divorce. For any up-and-coming director who wasn't there but might really care about authenticity, for shoes we wore cordovan ducks or baby ducks or crepe-sole desert boots or converse all stars. All key style items in season. Fruit boots too. We all had DA's and rat tails or Balboas maybe, since this was summer. Definitely no wimpy whiteside haircuts look like Eisenhower. Greasers all.

T-shirts, Levi's or black, white or tan chinos, rat-tail comb in the back pocket. Used often. Especially on street corners. Oh yeah. Richie Valens. The Del Vikings. Frankie Lyman. The Bobettes: maybe a little earlier, but definitely there. The Beatniks were thriving down in the basements of NYC and elsewhere, wearing berets, shades, sandals and digging jazz, selling paintings on the street, getting high on pot, wine, espresso, reading poems of the cool kind in the souped-up, bebop night.

We were gonna make a world like that too, only way moreso, more like we wanted. You know how it is when you're young and absolutely right, perfectly on track for the first time ever in history, we knew it deep in our Dreamlover hearts, as proven in the music our parents hated, which would ruin us they were sure, and in our craving for the fast cars of our dreams that would take us away, cigarette packs in the rolled-up T-shirt sleeve. We were on the mark alright, but in fact we had no idea what a Model-T the world was. - Of course: Bill Haley. - And always will be, as each generation steps up to the old garage with its dreams and opens the doors on reality.

Time Slow, Life Rich

We grew up in a US time when horses were still used to deliver milk and baked goods, and collect recyclables (generically called 'rags' back then)... It was a slow time, when summer days were a week long, and to get from Saturday lunch to the starting bars of the first Looney Tunes of the Saturday matinee with 25 cartoons and cowboy double-feature took about 3 days.

There was no tv then, so all we could do in the living room was live. That was mostly at night. During the day, if not at school daydreaming out the windows we were always out playing, up to many miles away, on foot or bicycle, often taking our lunch with us. The radio was in the kitchen, for listening to after dinner or while doing the drudgery of homework while Mom did the ironing.

The only apparatus in the living room was the big clunky iron telephone you had to dial, then wait for the dial to roll clickingly back till you could whirl in the next number but there were only 5 numbers in those days, since there were about 2 billion people in the world and only a tiny portion in Albany. My Brady/McTeague grandfather, an electrician for the phone company, had one of the standing phones with the earpiece on a side hook and the dial at the bottom, like in all the old black-and-white fast-paced newspaper movies. "Get me the desk!" Things began to change palpably when the phone numbers started getting longer. Where I live now my number is 10 digits long, 15 or more if you're calling from another country.

We had no Victrola, as phonographs (itself a neoarchaism now!) were called back then; the only person in the family who had a Victrola was my Robinson/Kelly grandfather, a NYCRR conductor, who had a then merely quaint wind-up Victrola in his basement, with a big morning glory megaphone where the sound came out. Next to the whizzing green felt turntable it had a little metal cupful of playing needles like headless finishing nails that lasted about an hour and were attached to the tone arm by vising them in place with a knurled knob.

The living room in those days was where guests sat and chatted or Dad read the newspaper in the big red easy chair under the standing lamp by the window after dinner. On really rainy days when we had friends over or went to their house, we played in the living room: checkers, cards (War was a favorite), chess, Monopoly, Clue, Go to the Head of the Class... but when the weather was even remotely tolerable (in winter there were no limits) and we didn't have measles or mumps or whooping cough we would never in a million years have stayed inside, we'd be out somewhere exploring, playing, finding stuff to do all day long, even into dark in summer, home only to eat then out again, except for the detested but implacable Saturday night bath.

Each of those days was about a week long. The school year was about a decade in length, but seemed longer. I remember one time at the end of summer vacation realizing it would be 9 months till summer vacation, an impossible duration, as time-distant as the Civil War, which had ended only 80 years before, when great grandma was a teenager. Then at the start of summer vacation, school was almost 3 months away, in the heart an essentially unending length of time, though we knew better.

Comics were a new thing then too, this was only a few years after the first Batman, the only copy in existence now a crumbling million-dollar item. I used to own millions of dollars worth of comics at today's prices, bought them for dimes I got doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, original Donald Ducks, Little Lulu, Mad, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and all the many others, read 'em and tossed 'em in a pile, filled my wagon and went trading comics in the neighborhood.

It wasn't a better world in many ways, there was more manifest prejudice, for example, and pollution was the norm-- litter wasn't even a full-blown concept yet (the word 'litterbug' was the winner of a contest to give the phenomenon a name), and though age and nostalgia likely play a big part in my perspective, it seems from here that many of the technoadvances we now enjoy have been achieved at the cost of time's depth and richness. The journey is where the treasures are.

In a Tarzan movie I saw one long-gone Saturday afternoon, Tarzan is shown a movie on a screen set up in the big white hunter’s jungle camp; on the screen Tarzan sees a train rushing at him and panics. "That train in the picture can go from coast to coast in three days," explains the civilized white guy. "What for?" asks Tarzan.

In so many ways, those were the days.