I looked over at Old Jim who was camped at the apex of the Amen Corner at Willow. The doors were wide open and the air conditioner- a perennial problem at the AC- was turned off. I said that the saga of the muscle cars had been fun, but it was important to move on and talk about some other things.
“Your problem is that you are all over the map. You need to introduce some characters to personalize things and draw in the reader.” He took a deep draft of Budweiser from his long-neck brown bottle. “But the pictures of the cars are fantastic. Brings back a lot of memories.”
“OK, what was your favorite car?” I looked at the glass of happy hour white in front of me, content that the worst part of the day was over, and the last thing to accomplish was to plunge in the strangely chilly waters of the pool in this unseasonably cool summer. Jim beetled his brow in thought.
“It was a goddamn Karmann Ghia,” he said finally. “I loved that little thing. Peppy, pretty good on gas and stylish.”
“Hah!” I said. “That was going to be next up, but as a part of the Beetle story. I have to get past what happened in Bloomfield Hills in Dick’s Charger 440 R/T. I think that is why Dad went down and got that red VW Beetle. It was a demo, and I think he got it for less than two grand. Like new, low miles, all that crap.”
“He was trying to slow you down, wasn’t he?”
I nodded and took a sip of wine. “It was no Charger, that is for sure, and not a Javelin, either. It would do 85 with the pedal down to the floor, though, and it was great on snow and ice and fun to drive with the manual transmission. I got in trouble on a date one time- I was showing off doing drift turns in the snow and she thought I was nuts.”
“She might have been right,” Jim growled. “Funny how a humble relic of the Nazi nightmare became the symbol of the Age of Aquarius.”
“I think that was the Microbus, mostly, I said. “But Uncle Adolf’s Wagen fur das Volk became a passion for some British occupation troops, and the manufacture of the Beetle for the overseas market shaped a lot of the West German economic miracle.”
“Frigging Krauts.”
“Hey, the Socotras are part Kraut,” I said. “Mixed with the Irish side, that is why when we drink we think about invading Poland. But the Beetle was a great car. Didn’t have a heater that worked except to melt all my LPs that I had stacked on the floorboards in the back seat, AM radio only, no air conditioning, and it took until 1968 to get the fuel filler on the outside. But it always worked.”
Barrister Jerry walked in and slapped me on the back. “Fried Chicken tonight, Gentlemen.” Jon-without appeared and bellied up, looking elegant in bow-tie and ordered a happy hour dark brown craft beer.
“Well,” I continued, “it always worked if the battery didn’t die. We were Up North one time and the only people at the cabin. We had to start the car every couple hours to charge the thing up. I drove in the snow into Elmira at zero-dark-thirty one morning to warm it up. It was snowing pretty good and dark. I was going to just pull a U-turn on M-32 since there was no traffic and head back to go back to bed. Instead, I remembered what Dad said and pulled off the road and just as I was cranking the wheel over a school bus appeared out of the white out.”
“So you would have died?”
“Yep. Would have shredded that little car, but good.”
“Those are the sort of things that stay with you,” said Jim. He waved at Jasper for another beer. “I assume you know that it was Virgil Exner who had a hand in designing the Karmann Ghia.”
“That I did not know,” I said. “But that gives me a two-degree of separation to car. I thought it was a Pininfarina design, like the Nash Metropolitan.”
“Nope. You should check it out. It is stranger than that. Much stranger.”
I resolved to do that, right after getting home from the bar in my Police Car, not Arlington County’s, and into and out of the pool. I am going to have to tell you about the whole Spring Break adventure in that Beetle tomorrow with Dudley, George and Sunny. And why I don’t like gin to this very day.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
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Twitter: @jayare303