Plymouth Rocks
Unnecessary Evil
The closest I came to owning a car as a teenager was the Saturday afternoon my dad and I met an old man in the downtown of our small Okanagan town. The old man ancient, stooped, a crunched up trucker cap on his head, looked like every other grizzled orchardist I’d ever met.
I was going to test drive a Volvo that must have been as old as The Grizzled Orchardist himself. He’d sell us the car for $400. My parents thought this was a great deal. Everyone knows that Volvos are the safest and most reliable vehicles around. The Grizzled Orchardist plunked the keys in my hand. I drove the Volvo all of 100 yards, when, with a sharp clunk the front end dropped, the steering froze up. I muscled the Volvo to the curb. Once out of the car it was clear what happened; the front passengers side tire had come off the vehicle and rolled up the street. I retrieved the errant tire which had bounced up on the sidewalk in front of the Esso gas station and rolled it back to the car. The threaded posts on the wheel hub were completely stripped.
“Thanks for your time, but I think we will pass.” Dad said.
“How about a hundred bucks?” The Grizzled Orchardist offered.
“No, I don’t think so. Thanks anyway.”
I am not a car guy, never been a car guy. The only vehicle I ever really wanted was a VW van. In high school I succumbed to the siren song of the 1960’s. I was weaned on media helmed by wistful refugees of the 60’s proselytizing the true cultural sea change of the 20th Century was not the Beat Generation, World War I or II, the Great Depression, or the Lost Generation, but the Hippies with their psychedelic art, Vietnam War protests, and LSD.1 I listened to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, watched Easy Rider, The Big Chill, and the Woodstock documentary over and over and over again. PBS played the damn thing on loop.
I concluded I had been born in the wrong decade. I shouldn’t be slurping truck stop coffee at the Tastee Freez across the street from my high school! I was meant to be in San Franscisco sipping cappuccinos at the Hungry I kitty corner from City Lights Bookstore. Or dropping acid in Haight Ashbury with a bunch of barefoot freaks and engaging in as much mythical free love as I could get in the back of my rainbow painted VW van.
After high school I started dating AC, a girl from my grad class. Not exactly high school sweethearts, but close enough. Neither AC nor I ever bought a vehicle. This was due partly to a learned personal aversion to the unpredictability and expense of vehicular ownership (see Volvo fiasco). partly because she did not have a driver’s license. And mostly because we spent several years in a cycle of working seasonal jobs: server, barista, winery warehouse, fruit picking, accruing a paltry nest egg and then lighting out for Europe or Australia to be a waiter, barista, fruit picker.
We made it to the ripe old age of 24 years old vehicle free. Back in Canada after a year in Australia, Brian C, newly minted husband of AC’s high school buddy, Melanie, agreed to sell us what was decidedly a very first car – a teenager’s car – for a screaming deal of $600. The time had come to cross the threshold into car ownership.
Then we broke up.
I wanted to play the field. AC and I had been in a committed monogamous relationship for 6 years, we had travelled a dozen countries together and I was getting itchy feet.
Brian C, in the interest of his own marital harmony, should have sold the car to my now ex-girlfriend. However, she didn’t have her driver’s license or even a learner’s license. So, he agreed to go ahead and sell the car to me.
A 1984 primer grey Plymouth Horizon was to be the avatar of my lost weekend.2 I was going to take a crack at free love, three decades too late and sans VW van. The Horizon would have to do. I fancied myself an unshackled Casanova, now free to sprint from suburban cul-de-sac to suburban cul-de-sac leaving the exhausted, sated bodies of my lovers heaving in my wake.
Fat chance.
First of all, I didn’t have the stamina, let alone the confidence.
Second, even if I suspect a woman was interested in me, I’d never believe it.3 I couldn’t fathom why any woman would want to talk to me, let alone exchange bodily fluids.
I moved into a Steinbeckian flophouse in Trout Creek. I worked as a waiter at the Gunbarrel Saloon in Penticton and every Friday and Saturday night after cashing out I would head to one of the four nightclubs in town. There would always be a few people I knew at the clubs, and maybe an opportunity to hook up with someone, or so I thought.
Outside Nite Moves nightclub I sat in the Horizon with Tanya. She worked at the coffee shop under the Gunbarrel Saloon. I was rolling a joint when there was a tap on the hood of the car. I let the joint slide from my hand and between the seats and turned around.
An RCMP officer on a mountain bike.
“Hey guys, how you doing tonight?”
“Good.”
“Where are you guys headed.”
“I am giving her a ride home. We just finished work.”
He looked in the car. Tanya nodded.
“Where do you guys’ work?” He dipped his head in the open car window the way a cop does.
“I work at the Gunbarrel.”
“Pacific Brim.” Tanya said.
“Alright. Be safe. Have a good night.”
“Thanks, officer. You too.”
Back at Tanya’s bachelor pad we smoked the joint, she lounged on her bed while I sat at the Formica kitchen table and we traded fantasies, intimate details of the best sex we hoped to have. Finally, I stubbed out my cigarette, bid her a good night and drove back to the flophouse in the Horizon.
See? The worst closer since Shelley Levene.
One night I slept at my friend Amy’s house. We finished the evening smoking on her porch, listening to music. Finally, crawling into bed, her naked, me in my boxer shorts. She cajoled me out of my boxers.
“It’s way more comfortable to sleep without your clothes.”
She demanded I spoon her. Drawing my arm around her while I diligently focused on not poking her in back with my erection. Nothing happened. How much clearer could she have been, short of yelling in my ear, “Hey idiot, you should kiss me!”
Alex, the first serious post-breakup crush, a charismatic hippie chick complete with dreadlocks, hairy armpits, and thick body. I was completely smitten.4
We’d spend the day swimming at Sunoka Beach, smoking joints and drinking beer. Then we’d hop in the Horizon, hit up the grocery store and go back to the flophouse and make some awful tofu stir fry. After a couple more beers we’d tumble into bed and fall asleep. Well, she’d sleep and I would lay awake, wide-eyed and rigid beside her, planning my move. My inner monologue something like, is it too late to make a move? Rats! I should have made my move already. When she brushed my arm, I should’ve… If I brush her arm, maybe... Is she still sleeping. Is she’s just pretending to snore? How long should I wait? Then as the sun started peeking through the Vancouver Canucks flag that doubled as a curtain, I’d fall asleep cranky and exhausted, no closer to making a move than I had been hours earlier.
I desired trysts with a constellation of lovers, but nothing ever happened, stymied by my fear of rejection.
I lamented my lack of prowess to a friend, a poet, the very sort of person who should be advocating indiscriminate dick slinging. That’s the great lie about hedonism, he said, free love is ultimately kinda gross, a pornified butcher shop, sweaty, smelly bodies lurching and slapping against each other. We are told it’s sexy, but in fact it is empty, cold and mechanical. Dead. And apres la fuck, bundled in bed with someone you don’t know, a stranger, stricken by the need to slip out of your skin and skedaddle. Or it’s an emotional minefield, one person thinking this is the beginning of something beautiful, the other wanting nothing more than to cum and go.5
There was a mass migration from the Okanagan to Victoria in the fall of my lost weekend. Twenty or so friends and acquaintances moved to the coast, as did myself and my ex. AC and I had the same social circle, or at least travelled in similar orbits. We started spending more time together and whatever libidinous compulsions had compelled the breakup ebbed. We ended up getting back together.
In August, the following summer, the Horizon sat, uninsured, in the alley behind AC’s Victoria apartment. I was spending more nights there than not. One morning I found a note tucked under the windshield wiper, the landlord threatening to have the car towed at the end of the month. I called an auto wreckers who cut me a cheque for $200 and carted the Horizon away.
The lost weekend was book-ended by the purchase and sale of the Horizon. I don’t regret not being bolder just the same as I don’t regret not ever having owned a VW van. Sure, VW vans are cool and at one time it may have been nice to own, but I don’t even smoke weed anymore. Besides, that VW van is more trouble than it’s worth. Have you ever been stuck behind VW van fighting it’s way up the Coquihalla highway, belching smoke and hazard lights blinking. You cruise passed them and have a look at the driver – does he look like he’s having fun?
This is all over. No longer is the previous generation installed as omnipotent taste makers extolling the virtues of their music, their movies, their writers, their television shows, their fashions to the next generation. It falls apart in the early 2000’s.
The internet fucked it.
The media landscape is not so much as fractured as completely shattered. It used to have a respectable linearity to it. My daughter’s road trip playlist has everything from Clairo Bags, Third Eye Blind Semi-Charmed Life, The Smiths Charming Man, Turn It Off from Book of Mormon, Disco Lines No Broke Boys, Pixies Wave of Mutilation. No rhyme or reason to it. It slaps to be sure, but it lacks coherency.
Smarter people than I must be able to make some sense of it. I have no idea. I am just the guy who looks at someone wearing a top hat and goes, “Hey everybody, look at that guy - he’s wearing a top hat. I don’t know why. Or where he got the top hat. Or what hat he was wearing before. But look - he’s wearing a top hat!”.
John Lennon had a lost weekend from 1973 to 1975. He broke up with Yoko, or she kicked him out. He moved between L.A. and New York (I didn’t have the means, I moved between the couch and love seat), drinking, drugs, woman, beholden to no one except his own Bacchanalian desires. Eventually he wound up back in NYC with Yoko. Probably for the best.
I always say ‘girl’ usually. But a females over the age of 18 should be referred to as a women, or young women if they are under twenty.
I never refer to males as ‘boys’. To call a bunch of men in their 40’s ‘boys’ seems diminutive – unless it is bellowed in hearty joviality. Ie: walking into the pub, “Hey boys! Next round on me, I found a wallet on the ground with a winning Scratch ticket in it.”
If you use the word ‘smitten’ you are not exactly a devil-may-care Casanova, slaying pussy left, right and centre.
Emotionally complicated is right - witness any couple I know in an open relationship; it is always the prelude to divorce.