It occurs to me that today kicks off the fiftieth
anniversary of the Summer of Love. Funny how daydreaming about a long-ago
summer of sex, drugs, and rock and roll resulted in an essay that chose a
turn-off that had little to do with sex and drugs, included only a smidgen of
rock and roll, but a lot about death and automobiles. I attribute it to two
realities: writing is a way of thinking; remembering is different from
reminiscing.
The iconic summer got off to a bad start. It was my fault,
putting in a lot of hours at my part-time restaurant job instead of paying
attention to my classes. I did that to pay for my new ride, trading in my 1963
Austin-Healey 3000 for a 1966 Lotus Elan. Emma Peel of the Avengers drove one, as did two-time world champion driver, Jim
Clark. Playboy named it the
best-handling production car in the world. Gordon Murray, designer of the F1
McLaren supercar three decades later (an auto notably owned by George Harrison
and the Sultan of Brunei) reputedly said that his only disappointment with the
F1 was he couldn’t give it the steering of the Lotus Elan.
My Humanities final was scheduled for eight a.m., information
gleaned from the student newspaper. I showed at the designated hour, the only student
who did. Berating my laxity, I wandered around campus for an hour before I
found a classmate. He explained the exam was a take-home final, assigned three
weeks earlier by Dr. Livingstone. He fanned the spiral notebook as he spoke.
His essay on Plato nearly filled it. I hadn’t been feeling particularly good
about my predicament before, but this revelation cut me off at the knees.
I found the weary and unkempt professor an hour later, and
he gave me twenty-four hours to come up with verbiage that would account for
the semester’s grade. It probably goes to explain why I never became a fan of
Plato—not that I could imagine living in a republic like The Republic—preferring the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially
Empedocles. The professor gave me his home address and instructed me to deliver
the essay at ten the following morning.
Badly in need of sleep, I showed at his door at the
appointed hour. The two-story 1920s house sat on a large wooded lot, some of
which probably belonged to the Short Line, the little-used, nearby railroad tracks
that ran through the residential neighborhood below grade, so no visual
pollution ruined the lush greenery. A matronly African-American woman in a
white nurse’s dress greeted me, along with old newspapers and dust bunnies, but
mostly the aura of resignation that settled into every cubby and crack.
Due to some warp in the space-time continuum, I aced the
course, but within a few days of getting my grade, I spotted a newspaper article
that reported my professor had hanged himself from a backyard tree.
About that time, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper. I remember working that day. After numerous calls to
the record store to get an update, we finally got word the album was in. We
sent the dishwasher over to buy five copies for employees. When I got off work,
I headed to Muntz’s stand-alone store on University Avenue, two albums in hand.
Madman Muntz was an entrepreneurial character—riches to rags
to riches to rags to riches. One year, he sold cars worth seventy-two million. Five years later
he sold TVs worth fifty-five million. In 1967, he sold car stereos and tapes
worth thirty million. He had come up with the four-track cartridge and
player—state-of-art car audio until Lear developed the eight-track.
The
really cool thing was nobody gave a shit about intellectual property or piracy.
I left the store with a new cartridge loaded with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper
and went cruising. I-494 westbound was a trip until my engine started missing.
I checked the tach and found the needle hovering at the red line. The
speedometer needle was just south of one twenty, scaring the shit out of me. I
slowed down and headed homeward at the speed limit.
I ended up on Mississippi River Boulevard, one of my
favorite drives, at least until I heard a siren and saw flashing lights in my
rearview mirror—it’s difficult to go really slow after going really fast. In a
short car chase, the curvy road got me out of my pursuer’s vision just long
enough to allow me to make a hard right-hand turn. Two additional right-hand
turns got me chasing the pursuing squad.
At the end of July, my buddy and I headed for Road America
at Elkhart Lake. We got a late-night start, arriving in time to grab a burger
before the Sunday race. I parked on the street behind two Shelby Cobras and in
front of another. The big boys from Chicago were in town. It was cool and we
were, too. My Lotus was a big attraction at the track. Skinny people actually
crawled under it—it sat pretty low to the ground—probably to check out its
unique “backbone” chassis.
Because we hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before, we
found a motel in Milwaukee and crashed early, before it was even dark. Monday
morning we heard about the riots the night before and learned the city was
closed down, nobody in or out. The motel owner gave us the word we were a
couple of blocks south of the city limits. We decided to continue on to
Chicago. Driving all by your lonesome on a six-lane interstate is a bizarre
experience, like living in an end-of-the-world sci-fi flick.
I fought the urge to drive fast, especially as the guy in
the next seat once drove us across the entire state of Utah, averaging more
than one hundred mph, just one leg of a trip west that covered eight thousand
miles in three weeks.
A friend came home from Vietnam, all jittery. Then others didn’t
come home. Especially glaring was the loss suffered by identical twins. Two had
become one, something that couldn’t be forgotten, as the survivor became a
persistent reminder. Worse, the survivor, losing his other half, was never
complete again. Family and friends weren’t either.
I no longer remember getting any love in the summer of 1967,
especially not from my auto insurer. The outfit did not recognize my car as a
“two-door coupe,” which is how I described it when I took out the policy. They
refused to acknowledge it was a sports car, instead classifying it a “racing
car,” which they refused to insure. The four-cylinder Ford block did have a Lotus head that housed double
overhead cams and two Webbers that bolted directly to it without benefit of an
intake manifold—four lovely velocity stacks. The header junction glowed cherry
red. There was lots of performance, and the car weighed under sixteen
hundred pounds, almost a go-kart on steroids.
Bugging me all summer was the backyard hanging of a
middle-aged man who may have been ill. Still, he gave it up, not like the
friends who would be forever young. It wasn’t as if I believed that knowledge
led to suicide, but I found no enthusiasm for returning to school. I risked
taking some time off from the classroom. That decision got me a quick slap
upside the head, a letter from my favorite uncle intimating a study program
abroad, the other half of the double-whammy.
While not exactly bracketed by the suicide and selective
service, the summer of love segued into a winter of discontent.
I put in fourteen months or so in Vietnam before hitching a
ride to Long Beach on the slowest boat in the US Navy—three weeks at sea.
Finished up my degree. The Lotus is still on the road. It was a few years ago,
anyway. Ran into a Lotus driver while gassing up, and we got to talking. He
knew more about my car than I remembered. I miss that car terribly. And I miss
the boys who didn’t come home—another set of broken twins among them. I wonder sometimes
about the men they might have become. I wonder sometimes about the man I might have
become.
