The purring silver Maserati slipped up our suburban driveway on a Friday afternoon in the summer of 1970. Dr. Pollen had come to pick me up for a weekend with Clinton. We were having a double sleep over and went by to pick up my classmate Mark Kobasz for the drive down to Colt's Neck from Edison. With Mark in the leather passenger seat, I lay prone on the long ledge under the sloping rear window. My head was nearly between the two bucket seats. The Maserati was so low to the ground that I felt as if the asphalt was rolling up into my face as we sped along at 80 miles per hour. As many times as I'd stayed over the weekend, this one was definitely different as soon as we pulled in the driveway. There was Clinton looking over his new black 1953 Studebaker with its classic bubble rear window and endless bench seats. It was made for the road but now it was going to turn twelve rural New Jersey acres into an amusement park. We were thirteen.
Some of his friends were tinkering with the engine so we waited expectantly until Saturday afternoon to try it out: Clinton in the driver's seat, David in the passenger seat, Mark behind Clinton, and the rotund family friend John Arnold behind me. We didn't know much about the shift knob on the steering column but we knew a lot about the gas pedal. Clinton was fond of accelerating fast on the unpaved road around the property and spinning the steering wheel so the car would fishtail in the dirt, coming to a sudden stop in a haze of dust. We didn't know much about the shift knob on the steering column but we knew a lot about the gas pedal.
No car in 1970 was complete without it's eight-track player. We had one. But we had only one of those big cumbersome cassettes with the weird loose brown ribbon running through it: the Beatles' White Album, which came out in 1968. It was just about the best thing we had ever heard and we endlessly debated what the best songs were and couldn't get enough of the rumor that the white cover had censored the original photograph of John and Yoko nude. We must have listened to the whole thing through about a hundred times. Curtis loved "Rocky Racoon," but our favorites were "Birthday" and "Helter Skelter," the perfect rock-and-roll driving music.
All of us took a try at driving but Clinton did the best fishtails. So we let him. It was late afternoon and he got us up to about 60 on the straightaway, which was all the car would do. The "Birthday" was blaring and for the first time I had a bad feeling. We were going fast, really fast. The trees were whipping by and the dust was high up over us on both sides. Clinton whipped the steering wheel to the left and the car seemed to float up on two wheels. Everyone says it. Everything starts to slow down, way down. "We're gonna crash," I yelled. We leaned, and leaned, and leaned and the car flipped. It must have rolled two and a half times, because it ended up on its right side. I can't say it was eerily quiet, because Birthday was still playing as loud as ever. Mark was freaked and cried out, "David," but luckily he had been cushioned by the enormous bulk of John Arnold, his own side air bag. Nothing had happened to us. Clinton and I just stepped out of the huge gaping hole where the front windshield used to be; Mark and John climbed out of what was now the top. We just stood there, the four of us, gawking at the smoking wreck. It seemed to be in agony as hot black oil gushed down the chassis. But we were o.k. and there wasn't anything else to talk about. We just walked together back up the dusty road toward the house. That was the end of the 1953 Studebaker. Somehow it had lost half its guts on that road, because as we walked, there were little engine parts and tools and all sorts of things from the trunk leading back about a half mile.
We practically forgot about the whole thing, or wanted to, because out parents would probably never let us sleep over at Clinton's again. Anyway, that night Curtis's rock band was making its big debut at a girl's party on the next farm. We arrived at dusk, just before the show. The band didn't seem too ready. In fact, despite all the hype, it didn't seem like they could play at all. What seemed like an eternity was that the drummer kept asking for a towel to put around his neck for the big drum solo he had to play for their cover of Iron Butterfly's "In the Garden of Eden."
We hadn't heard more than the opening vamp when Dr. Pollen drove up. He had learned about the big crash and came to check us over. He sat each of us down on a bench and gave us a pretty good orthopedic check up. Being satisfied, he left. But we didn't visit Clinton for about a year.
I never got tired of The White Album, though to this day, I still can't stand In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
3 comments:
DAVID! Wanna run these by me before you post them?
There was an OLD Studebaker my father owned that was NOT Clinton's. It looked NOTHING like the picture you posted. I think I have a picture of the actual car in fact.
Clint did roll the 'baker but it was on our property and uh... David... there was no such thing as an airbag in a car that old.
Val
Hello Valerie dear.
I must have believe it was his Studebaker. Who knows, he probably told me it was.
If you read it closely, I say that the big fat John Arnold in the back seat acted as Mark Kobasz's "airbag."
As for the first chapter, all is from memory. The details might be filtered through little Davy's memory from 55 years ago, but the stories overall are compelling.
That's just the point. I intentionally wrote the memoir in a loose conversational style as if it were the voice of a 13 year-old stuck on wonderful. So, if that accounts for the "poor writing" a man "of my education" put down on paper, then I'm proud of it.
Regards,
David
About the Studebaker, you're both partially correct. Valerie in that the vehicle depicted is a completely different model than the 4-door one we actually rolled that sun-dappled day so long ago, and you, David, in that it was indeed my own car and not my fathers at all. My father, for reasons known only to his warped mind, thought an 8-cylinder, 4,000-pound automobile was a fitting gift for his 13-year-old son and he procured said vehicle from his buddy Abe Golub for the price of a new battery, $15 in 1972 greenbacks, which I specifically recall in perfect detail since, true to form, dear old dad required me to pony-up that princely sum myself, which on a scale of 13-year-old economics in 1972 was like a gazillion dollars. By the way, I was quite right about the "Bible Thief Idiot" who contacted you...it was, indeed, my friend Johnny DeAngelos paranoid schizophrenic nephew Danny. It's a funny world.
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