In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [68]
“He sure has some great-looking junkers over there,” I remarked, dredging an expression out of my misty past.
“Yep. Sure has.”
Next to bowling, automobiles are probably the single most important fact of a Midwesterner’s life, after his job, of course. The family heap, the weekly paycheck, and a decent bowling average are all they ask of Life.
“What are y’ driving these days, Flick?”
“Olds 88.”
“How’s she do on gas?”
“Oh, seventeen, around town. Maybe nineteen, twenty on the road,” Flick lied.
“Can’t ask for more than that.”
I found myself sinking into the laconic conversation that I had almost forgotten existed. I had become completely acclimated to the martini-drenched, impassioned, self-pitying monologues of the French restaurants and expensive bars of New York. Here, the Ego—if it existed at all—was barely discernible. They had never even heard of the word “Career.” Job, yes. Career, no.
“Olds 88. Hydromatic?”
“Yep.”
“Four-door?”
“Nope. Hardtop.”
“What color is it?”
“Dark blue. ’Bout the same color as that old Graham-Paige your Old Man used to have.”
“The what?”
“The four-door Graham. With the V-grille.”
Now I remembered. Of course! The Graham-Paige. In Hohman, cars were never forgotten, any more than old love affairs are ever really erased in other cultures. Family histories are measured in terms of cars, such as: “Clarence got the whooping cough when we had the Willys-Knight,” or, “Alex ran away with the Ledbetter girl right after we got the Hupmobile.”
“You know, Flick, there’s something I never told you about that Graham-Paige,” I said.
“Well, if you’re gonna tell me about the bad clutch it had, forget it. I know about that.”
Flick was showing off again.
“No, Flick, there’s something that’s been on my conscience for a long time. It has to do with that Graham-Paige.”
XXII THE PERFECT CRIME
My father loved used cars even more than he loved the White Sox, if possible. A Used-Car Nut is even more dedicated than the ordinary car worshiper. A true zealot never thinks in terms of a new model. His entire frame of reference and system of values is based on acquiring someone else’s troubles. It is a dangerous game, and the uncertainty of it appeals to the true Used-Car aficionado the same way that Three Card Faro draws on the profligate.
My father, in company with other Used-Car fanatics, loved to spend long Saturday afternoons roaming the Used-Car lots on the South Side of Chicago, beating the bushes for hypothetical great buys and spectacular deals in Willys-Knights, Essexes, and Hudson Terraplanes. And when the Used-Car type actually tracked his car down and made the buy, it was a total commitment. All the way. And if the car turned out to be actually functional, his love for it far transcended the love and involvement of the lesser men who simply went to a dealer and bought a new car.
Anybody can buy a new car and expect to get a fairly operative machine, but it takes guts, knowledge, and a reckless sense of deadly abandon to come home with, say, a Lafayette Six previously owned by other shadowy drivers that had gone through God knows what hells, and to feel confident of victory. A used car, therefore, is a far more powerful love object than a new one. And my father played this deadly game to the hilt. Each succeeding used car was loved and babied, petted and honored in its turn.
Some of the great emotional scenes of his life occurred on Used-Car lots when he was deserting the Pontiac Eight for the “new” DeSoto. He would even go back day after day to see if they were treating the Pontiac well, and then would get moody and morose when it finally disappeared forever off the lot.
The new DeSoto—he always referred to each used car as “new”—at first would seem strange and formal to us, vaguely unfriendly, like living in someone else’s apartment. On Saturdays, when we cleaned the car, we’d find foreign hairpins and other people’s lost papers under the seats. But