“I’m in Love with My Car”
My father’s fascination with automobiles.
Every year, around Presidents’ Day, I post a childhood memory to commemorate my father’s life on the anniversary of his death in February 2015. He was eighty-two. See: On My Father series.
WNEW-FM, the premier rock station in New York in the seventies, whose deejays we knew like disembodied friends, held a promotional giveaway to accompany the release of Queen’s fourth album, A Night At The Opera. I was a lucky winner, getting in the mail the LP, a t-shirt with the cover art, and two tickets to their concert at the Beacon Theatre, scheduled a few days before Valentine’s Day.
Days before the concert, I was flattened by the flu. Bedridden, I had to forfeit my ticket so my buddy could find someone else to go with him, the tickets becoming the best Valentine’s Day gift ever. For a few feverish days, I played the new record over and over. The album’s masterpiece, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” was so novel, curing time was necessary. Not so with “I’m in Love with My Car.” It was a straight-ahead rocker and an instant fave.
When I’m holding your wheel
All I hear is your gear
With my hand on your grease gun
Oooh, it’s like a disease, son*
I have long associated that song with my father, who had a matching passion for automobiles. While rolling down the highway, he would blurt out, “Check out that ’53 Oldsmobile 88,” or, “That’s a beautiful 1960 Chrysler.” His knowledge of makes and models was impressive. When he showed me how easy it was to verify the model — embossed on the tail light cover — he made me an insider with a secret to impress friends, you know, like knowing the lamp posts in Central Park have the nearest cross street embossed on them makes you a Manhattan insider.
My father loved classic cars, those with large fenders and hoods narrowing to the front grill. In the sixties, a few of these older cars were still on the road, to be called out and admired. Later, these classics could only be found in Havana, which would have been automobile heaven for him, if he didn’t despise Castro so much.
His obsession with cars was not, like in the song, a disease, but close, matched only by his obsession with airplanes. Our typical family outing after Sunday church was to watch airplanes land at LaGuardia Airport from a small park, a promontory over the flowing Grand Central Parkway, next to the Academy of Aeronautics — where the Apollo astronauts trained, I assumed. He would bring his Super 8 camera, recording a few seconds of my three sisters parading around the grassy knoll in their matching home-made gingham dresses and Mary Janes, then turning the camera to catch an approaching plane a few hundred feet overhead or tracing a fancy ride on the parkway heading towards Gatsby’s Gold Coast.
He scrutinized Consumer Reports, surveying their distinctive bubble charts. Harvey balls, they are called. Any car with too many red Harvey balls was sure to be a lemon. His research on new models never amounted to a purchase while we were kids, though. He always bought used cars, station wagons large enough to fit the seven of us. He treated his cars with great care, knowing enough about the engine to get under the hood for basic repairs, getting greased up in his short-sleeve collared shirts. It was against his social code to be seen on the streets in a t-shirt. When he finished, he would ask me, the junior pit crew, to open the can of grease remover, sticking his fingers in the smelly gelatinous ivory-colored rub that would magically melt the grease away. My other pit-crew job was to rush out of the car to pull up the telescoping aerial antenna, gently so as not to bend it.
He had a piano-tuner’s ear for ominous rattles or pings. If it was something he couldn’t diagnose, he would call on his mechanic friend. A breakdown, una varada, was to be avoided at all costs, especially with a car-load of kids, the word taking on a menacing hue. It was imperative to have the tires and the engine and transmission in perfect condition for his excursions to Washington D.C., to Niagara Falls, and summer weekend trips to Sunken Meadow (“no waves; safer for the kids”). Our longest trip was to Columbus, Ohio, to visit distant relatives, a married couple at the international-student housing at Ohio State University, their floor space barely enough to hold the seven of us. The only car trouble we had on that long trip was a stolen front license plate, surely, to hang in a student dorm — New York plates were rare in Ohio, I guess. My father worried about making the long trip back to New York without his front plate, but not enough to deter him from a side trip to watch the Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds of Johnny Bench, Dave Concepción, Pete Rose, Tony Pérez, and Joe Morgan, play an afternoon game. He and I sat in deep left-centerfield at Riverfront Stadium. Our favorite, Concepción, the Venezuelan shortstop, was so far away, he looked like a matchstick in a sea of astroturf—no sandy infield at Riverfront. We exited the game early, around the seventh inning, but I don’t remember if it was because he wanted to get back behind the wheel or because he felt bad about leaving my mother and the four siblings waiting in the parking lot. Perhaps both.
These road trips were part of our education, he said. We had to explore America.
In his later years, long after we had our own families, he enjoyed driving late model cars. No more paneled station wagons for him. He also rekindled his interest in miniatures, pricey collectables that he would keep pristine in their display boxes. These were no tiny Matchbox cars, rather they were large, detailed replicas of classic models. After he got sick, he gave a few of them to my son, hoping he might take up his interest in cars that I never had. Handing one over was an opportunity to expound on why this automobile was historic. He was hoping to preserve a little bit of his prodigious knowledge, when all my six-year-old wanted to do was to roll the cars on the floor, to watch them crash.
We still have a couple of these replicas collecting dust in a closet. His Special Edition Porsche 911 Speedster is exquisite, with adjustable seats, a working steering wheel, and spring suspension for the tires. I can’t take it out of the box, much less give it away. One admirer of these miniatures has been my son’s lifelong best-friend, a car enthusiast as knowledgeable as my father. One day he surprised me, relating some esoteric detail about how a minor difference in engine parts distinguished similar models. I understood his obsession. It’s almost like a disease, son.
My father would have known about the coming of autonomous cars from Popular Mechanics and other magazines he read. He would have considered it an unnecessary luxury for someone like him who liked the feel of the road and liked to be in control. His disdain might have matched how he felt about his Windows 95 computer, a necessary intrusion for someone who kept the neatest and most thorough checkbook log I have ever seen. On the other hand, as his eyesight worsened, he avoided driving at night. He might have welcomed an AI agent to help him with night driving as long as it was perceptive, could decipher his accent, and didn’t talk back.
“Cars don’t talk back”
“They’re just four-wheeled friends, now”
…
I’m in love with my car
(In love with my car, in love with my car)
Got a feel for my automobile*
*Songwriter: Roger Taylor, Queen
Read last year’s (2020) recollection:
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