(^52) themotorhood.com
U
ndeniable as it may be that cars were
truly the epicentre of our ever-so-slightly
wayward youth, one of life’s greatest car-related
mysteries for me as a young lad was this: how
was it — how the bloody hell was it — that I
had pretty nice cars, yet my efforts to snag a
chick in urban Whanganui were generally met
with a noticeable lack of good fortune? Worse
still was that, if I did manage to find a partially
cooperative young Whanganui lass sitting in the
front passenger seat beside me as we watched
the late-night submarine races at Castlecliff
beach, conversions tended to bounce back
off the goalposts with tragic regularity, and,
typically, the most excitement that would
come my way on such nights occurred
once I was back at Mum and Dad’s house
wondering if what I had missed out on
bore any resemblance to what appeared
on the pages of the magazines I kept in my
bedside drawer.
Highly perplexing stuff for a testosterone-
filled young lad — I really struggled to
understand why these girls wouldn’t
cooperate when I had such nice cars. What
was wrong with them?
It got even worse. It was usually great
being the guy in the group with a car, but
the downside was that my buddy would
get a nice big back bench seat while I
was left with formed bucket seats and a
protruding centre console that only served
to provide my front-seat companion with
an even greater line of defence against my
advances than her own desire to retreat.
If you’ve never had the misfortune to
experience this first-hand, let me tell
you: there’s little worse in the world for
a frustrated 16-year-old lad than sitting
beside a good-looking girl in the front seat
of your car — with nothin’ going on (and I
mean nothin’ going on) — while listening
to the soundtrack of your buddy in the back seat
having a happy old time with your front-seat
companion’s obliging best friend. Forty years later,
I can still feel the pain. So, while our cars were
doubtlessly the epicentre of our youth in every
sense, not everything that went on inside them
was great.
The greatest irony is that, for all of my indignation
about being unable to achieve the kind of
interaction with girls that I was working so hard at
but failing so spectacularly at — which, with the
benefit of hindsight, I realize was entirely down
to my crappy attitude and youthful arrogance
— I was guilty of the same traits of blundering
stupidity when perfectly good options were
staring me right in the face.
When presented with the opportunity to ask the
previous year’s Miss Wanganui Runner-Up out on
a date, I was so ignorant about such challenges
that seeking advice from an old family friend as
to how one might treat a ‘nice girl’ resulted in me
taking this beautiful young lady out to a game of
housie. I kid you not! Stupid batshit-boring housie.
Unbelievably, she had a great time playing housie,
and we dated for some time afterwards, until I
arrogantly dropped her just because she made
a derogatory comment about a car that I’d just
bought and was utterly proud of. What a dick!
There was another lovely young lass that I’d been
trotting out for some time during my 16th year
who I dropped like a maggot-infested log when
she referred to my car — a 1962 Chevy Impala
sports coupe — as ‘our’ car. That was that. Gone.
Just like that. Why couldn’t I see that it mattered
not a jot that she wanted to think of my car as
‘our’ car? What a complete git I was. It might have
proven greatly to my advantage had I allowed that
little bit of fanciful-but-harmless presumption
on her part, as she really was a great girl in every
respect — except that her greatest assets were
those that she wanted to have surgically reduced
in size, which I considered then, and still do, to be
an act entirely akin to slapping God squarely in the
face in response to a wonderful act of kindness.
Of course, had I not ditched her then for her
innocent attempt to share some ownership of my
beloved Chevy, I would no doubt have callously
and shallowly ditched her when she forged ahead
with slapping God in the face.
A laugh is never far away when I reminisce about
teenage days with old mates. Things we did then,
which seemed quite normal and reasonable, seem
much less normal now that we’re a great deal older
and marginally more sensible. I was reminded
recently about how, back then, an empty flagon
was often used to our advantage during road
trips. We used to buy our beer in flagons in those
days because it was cheaper than to buy it in the
standard big bottles — stubbies and cans weren’t
around then. ‘Piss stops’ were always a bloody
nuisance when a full carload of guys were doing
a road trip — you could guarantee that whoever
didn’t take a leak this time would sure as hell need
one 10 minutes down the road. As guys got more
and more lathered up, it would become fun to all
take turns to pee at different times just to wind up
the hapless driver, who would be unable to go any
further than 10 miles at a time without stopping.
Even worse was if you had a youthful up-and-
coming race-engine builder by the name of
Grant Rivers with you; ‘Grub’ had a bladder
that was the envy of us all. He wouldn’t
need a piss stop often, but it was ‘stand back
Jack’ when he eventually did — he wasn’t
called ‘Captain Niagara’ for nothing. If we
stopped to let Rivers take a leak at the side
of the road, we’d switch off engine to save
fuel and prevent the car from overheating.
Back to the flagon: not always the tidiest
solution but a solution nevertheless, the
empty flagon would be passed among three
or four blokes sitting across a back seat,
from one to the next to the next, all taking
turns to have an empty-out into it — and
all of who seemed quite oblivious to the
various adjectives we might in hindsight
apply to such a practice — just in an effort
to save stopping on the side of the road
every few miles. Of course, a bump or
a pothole at the wrong time tended to
have unfortunate consequences, so that
excellent idea came to an end once we
started owning decent vehicles. There really
was very little that we didn’t do in our cars.
Of course, not all cars received exactly the
same amount of lovin’. We were discerning
about our choice of cars, if about little else.
My good old mate, Gummy Beets, dropped
an old Peugeot 504 into the yard at my paint
shop one fine day in 1981, needing storage for his
‘sweet-running bargain’ for a few days. The days
turned into weeks, and then months, and then
— because the Peugeot was European and one
of the ugliest cars we ever had the misfortune to
behold on a daily basis — we shot the shit out of it
with a borrowed rifle one Saturday afternoon for
fun. When Gummy called in soon afterwards to
find his pride and joy riddled with several hundred
bullet holes, it looked for a moment or two as if
our Saturday afternoon fun was going to cost me
a hiding, but, pleasingly, we had a laugh and a
beer about it instead. A top bloke is old Gum.
It’s hard for me — as it may well be for you — to
separate the events of my youth from the cars in
which I experienced those events. The early parts
of our lives and times are intrinsically linked with
the cars that carried us — for better and for worse
— through that formative and defining period in
our greater journey.
straight talk
WITH TONY JOHNSON
THE EPICENTRE OF
OUR YOUTH (PART TWO)
Forty years
later, I can still
feel the pain
frankie
(Frankie)
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