Bone

Thursday, December 28, 2006

A post in the spirit of the season...

Well.

I guess it’s about time for another motorhead post.

Wait! Wait! I meant, another post about, uh, Care Bears! C’mon, please, sit down. I didn’t mean to scare you off. Here, would you like some lemonade? How ‘bout a scone? Finger sandwich? Bite-size burrito? There ya go…it’ll be okay. Comfy?

So these two Care Bears were having this drag race and…

HA! While you were selecting your burrito (damn fine, if I do say so myself), I handcuffed your ass to the chair, so y’all just sit right back down and stay put whilst I wax all gearhead and greasy on ya. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. That is, of course, unless you click the ‘Back’ button. Please don’t.

It won’t be entirely bad, though. In fact, you might find it to your liking, as it seems appropriate for the holiday season.


Ahem. Now then…

My dad’s a gearhead, and that means that my brother and I are both gearheads. Not so much any more, you understand—for him, it’s the two-kids-and-the-minivan dealie. For me, it’s ‘cause I’m broke. But there was a time when we were as gearhead as possible.

We both learned a lot of tricks from our father. We learned to match revs on downshifts, which is kinda hard to orchestrate as, while you’re hard on the brakes with one foot and stomping the clutch pedal in with the other, you have to blip the throttle to catch the engine with the transmission. This a) allows the engine to help in slowing the car down, and any help that allows you to wait a little longer before you start braking for a corner means you go in just a little hotter than the other guy; b) is just that much smoother, as not blipping the throttle and just abruptly letting out the clutch could cause the wheels to lock momentarily as the engine drags on them, possibly sending you into a nasty spin; and c) sounds really cool. Regardless, it means that you have to slide your brake-foot over to the right a little bit and blip the throttle with your instep. The professionals call it ‘heel-and-toeing,’ but it’s really toe-and-instep. This takes a lot of practice, but by now it’s a habit.

We learned that a little wheelspin is a good thing on a launch, because it keeps the engine from bogging. You don’t want too much, however, as you make a lot of smoke and noise and teenage kids think you’re a hero while the other guy is showing you taillights.

We learned that when the going is slick and taking a corner really fast can be treacherous, the handbrake is your friend. We learned, also, that you can use the foot-actuated parking brake in most American cars if you hold the release lever out with your left hand while you steer with your right.

We learned that power oversteer (what the young’uns call drifting) is one of the most beautiful things to behold on this planet, when done well.

We also learned that, in the glory days of muscle cars and the SCCA and Speed Racer and Carroll Shelby and the Corvette Grand Sport and the Cobra 427 and Woodward Avenue, that you could set up a drag race with any guy you got next to at a red light with a simple ritual that worked flawlessly.

You’d pull up to a red light, and either the other guy would already be there, or he’d slide up next to you. If you wanted to race the guy, the ritual went like this:

1). You’d blip your throttle once. Just once. If the guy was at least open to negotiation, he’d answer. Just once.

2). You’d look the other way as though you were not interested. More than likely, the other guy was doing the same thing.

3). You’d kind of roll your head on your shoulders toward the other car and look at the guy from underneath your eyebrows. If he was looking back at you, you’d perform the fourth and final step that aimed to seal the deal.

4). You’d make a pistol out of the thumb and forefinger of the hand closest to the other guy. You’d lift it all lazily and, with a snap of the wrist, point down the street toward the next intersection. If the guy was a taker, he’d answer with the same gesture, and the race was on—that is, if the light hadn’t changed back to green while all this was going on. If you had time and you wanted to seem especially bad-ass, you’d light a cigarette—but only if you knew you had time. You didn’t want to appear rushed.

5). If you won, you wouldn’t look at the guy at the next stoplight. He was beneath you by now and was no longer worth your consideration. Hopefully, while you were beating his ass and making him snork up your exhaust fumes like a demon, he got a chance to look at your license-plate frame that said only “A.M.F.”

(Oh, God, Jay, please tell us what A.M.F. stands for! Does it mean “Association of Mindless Fruitcakes?” Does it mean “Amigos Muy Fraternanza?” Does it mean “Actually, Mine’s Fucked?” Please, please tell us!

Nope. Gotta wait til the end.)

6). If you lost, you’d turn right at the next intersection so you wouldn’t have to look at the guy. Or, if you were stupid, you could try it again—but if he beat you once, he’d probably get you twice and you couldn’t have that.

My brother and I did this a lot fucking around on the streets of our neighborhood—me in my rattletrap Cavalier station wagon (with a 5-speed, don’t forget) and him in his piece-of-shit Chevy Monza, or me in my Mazda pickup truck and him in his rust-bucket 1982 Honda Accord. Regardless of what we were driving, he usually won.

So let’s fast forward from the late 60’s to 1998. I was in my third year of grad school, and I was home for the holidays. I had loaded up my 1988 Acura Integra LS (by this time, my altercation with a large-ish full-size Chevrolet pickup had long since occurred and the poor thing bore a large scar all down the driver’s side) and driven home a few days before, and now it was Christmas Eve. Our tradition worked like this: I would get out of the church after playing two Christmas Eve masses in a row and meet my brother, who had come from his then-girlfriend’s house, and my parents at our long-time family friends, the Beliches. We’s stay until midnight or so, drinking warm grog and snacking on cookies, then drive home, all in separate cars, to wait for Santa.

We usually left at the same time, but this night, my brother and I pulled out of the Beliches’ driveway while my folks were still saying their goodbyes. My brother and I had a good time playing tag on the deserted streets on the way from Winfield to our house in Naperville. I did a lot of handbrake-yanking in my four-cylinder front-driver, while my brother got all ass-happy in his 1989 Thunderbird SC (the ‘SC’ bit stood for ‘Super Coupe,’ a play on the ‘Turbo Coupe’ of the previous-generation Thunderbirds, and also stood for ‘supercharger,’ which nestled comfortably between the cylinder banks of the 3.8-liter V6 and spun that bad boy up to about 235 horsepower). His car was rarer, and slightly faster, than most SC Thunderbirds because it was a 5-speed, too. A fast car indeed, that.

We pulled up to the red light at the intersection of Naperville Rd and Ogden Avenue. At 12:30 in the morning of Christmas Day, the place was a tomb.

I heard a throttle blip from the lane next to me. Just one. I answered.

I rolled my head toward my brother. He was looking at me from underneath his eyebrows.

He made a pistol with one hand and pointed down the empty street. I followed suit.

(Let’s pause right here and say that I knew I was gonna get killed. 116 horsepower versus 235? Yeah, I know, but let’s just let the story tell itself, because the ending’s not what you think.)

Another trick my dad taught us is that, if you pay attention to the traffic signals on the cross street, you can often get an idea when the light on your street’s gonna go green, so you’re not caught entirely off-guard. I leaned forward in my seat and watch the cross light change from green to yellow. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my brother doing the same thing. I dialed up about 4,000 rpm and held it there.

When the light went green I dumped everything and put my foot to the floor. Because of the lighter weight and shorter gearing of my car, I actually beat my brother’s Thunderbird across the intersection, but then I heard a growing whine behind me as the supercharger spooled up and he was past me and gone before I even got second gear.

Too into the moment to lift, I kept my foot down and chased my brother’s taillights around the first bend, the lovely whoop of my engine echoing my own. I think I touched eighty or so, my brother easily twenty car lengths ahead, and that’s when I noticed the flashing red-and-blues in my rearview mirror. Apparently the cop had been sitting in the gas station across the street from us and had watched the whole thing.

“Oh, shheeeyiiit,” I breathed, even as the cop shot past me and bore down on my brother. My relief quickly switched back to dismay at the thought of two minutes worth of fucking about landing my brother—not me—in the cooler on a reckless driving charge.

My brother had already slowed down considerably and was drifting toward the shoulder. I attempted to go around and had plans to immediately pull over and plead my brother’s case, seeming as though the cop had no interest in me, slow and battered as my car was. But when I tried to pass on the left, the cop swerved and cut me off. His arm shot out of the window and motioned us both to the shoulder. We complied sheepishly. I pulled in behind my brother, my shaking hands on the wheel.

The cop’s PA system crackled. “GET OUT OF THE GODDAMN CAR, BOTH OF YOU!”

We both got out, still dressed in our traditional holiday garb—a jacket and tie covered by a long black overcoat. At least we matched, somewhat.

“GET YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND KEEP ‘EM WHERE I CAN SEE ‘EM!”

My brother walked back towards my car, and we both stood there, squinting in the cruiser’s glaring lights, our hands held high.

“ALL RIGHT, BOTH OF YOU WALK BACK TOWARD THE CRUISER, NICE AND SLOW!”

We walked slowly as though to the gallows.

The cop’s window was still down and we could hear him jabbering a lot of cop-speak into the radio. He sounded excited. The radio answered back. He got out and stalked over to us.

“All righty, boys. Do I cuff you, or are you gonna cooperate?”

We both answered for the latter at the same time.

“Good. Now get those licenses out and hand them over to me. Wait right there and keep your hands up.”

We did as we were told. Neither of us spoke. We both knew we were fucked. My deepest fear was that my brother would be doubly fucked simply for the fact that he had been winning.

All of a sudden, we heard the cop exclaim. “Now what the hell is this?!”

He got back out of the car and ambled over to us, not hurrying. “Do you mean to tell me that you two assholes are brothers?”

“Y-Y-Y-Yes, s-s-sir,” I stammered, trying desperately not to stammer.

“Well, what the fuck are you two doing, drag racing on Christmas Eve?”

“We haven’t done anything like this in a long time, Officer,” said my brother. “It really was more of an ‘old-time’s-sake’ thing than anything else.”

“I guess it must’ve been,” said the cop, not nastily. “I ain’t never seen a more mismatched drag race than that.” He gestured to our cars idling at the curb. The glare from his door-mounted spotlight made the bashed-in contours of my car’s driver’s side stand out in stark relief.

Another car pulled in behind the cruiser, and my brother and I looked at each other. Backup? The headlights, however, looked like those from no cruiser I had ever seen. Nor were they; they were the lights on my mother’s Lincoln Continental. Both she and my father got out. My mother made as if to brace the police officer, but my father stilled her with a hand on her arm. Slowly, they approached the cruiser.

“Now, who the fuck is this?” the cop demanded.

“Uh, sir?” I managed. “Begging your permission, sir, those are our parents.”

The cop leaned back against his cruiser and started to laugh. “I don’t believe this.”

He told our folks about the entire escapade. They engaged in a brief conversation, punctuated with, thankfully, laughter on the parts of both the cop and our parents. The cop gave us back our licenses with one final admonition, then got back into his cruiser, still laughing. He turned around in the road and drove off the way he had come, turning the red-and-blues off as he went.

My mother wouldn’t talk to us. She stormed back to her Lincoln and got in on the passenger side, apparently too pissed off to drive. My dad, head down in laughter, came over to us.

“You two are some of the luckiest assholes I ever saw,” he said. “No one would believe this if I told ‘em. I’d say this was just about the best Christmas present I ever saw anyone get.”

“Yeah,” said my brother. “If it hadn’t been Christmas Eve, if we hadn’t been related…”

“…if your mom and dad hadn’t shown up to fuck up the entire deal,” my dad added. “Get in your cars and let’s go home, and if I see either of you do anything stupid on the way there, I’ll kill you myself.”

We went home.

Now I drive an even-slower 1992 Civic. My brother has a Chrysler 300M, and even with the automatic, it’d still kill me. The two child seats in the back remind us both, however, that such shenanigans these days would be highly frowned upon. But, in the summertime, when we get the bikes out…well, I’ll let you fill in the details on that one all by yourself. Although these days, I usually win.

And that’s the end! Merry Christmas, and may the coming new year bring you all happinesses.

By the way…

“A.M.F” stands for “Adios, Mother”…well, you get the idea.

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