First Love

My first girlfriend was named Coke, not what you’re thinking. We weren’t fifteen year-old white powder fiends. Her real name was Carolyn. The nickname came from her first attempts at saying her name, but it stuck and she introduced herself, “Hi my name is Carolyn, but I’m called Coke.”

We hung out after school, and drank Lime Rickey’s at Brigham’s Ice Cream. Pre-driver’s license, I rode her high school bus and took a public bus home.

The Car

In the fall of 1962 my father was replacing the family wing-finned ’59 Chevrolet. He engaged me in the selection process. I was ecstatic. I subscribed to Road & Track and Car and Driver and owned a ’53 Dodge tinker-car.  We went to dealers together and brought home brochures. I had read about the new engine; Pontiac had sawed a 389 V8 in half, a big-bore slanted four cylinder motor. My Day ordered a ’63 Pontiac Tempest, one of the first US front-wheel drive cars, black with a red bucket seats, Quad 4 engine, four speed manual transmission with floor mounted shifter (four-on-the-floor). I convinced my dad to buy the four-barrel carburetor, so much for the miles-per-gallon advantage of four cylinders. I also convinced him to buy seat belts, “for safety,” secretly thinking “like a race car”.

License

In October I got my license on my sixteenth birthday. That took planning only a motivated sixteen year old boy could pull off. I took the written test three months earlier to get a learner’s permit. The high school driver’s ed course wouldn’t be done in time, so I paid for a private course with Money from my job at Howard Johnson’s. I rode two buses to class and doubled up on classroom and behind the wheel instruction to be done on time. Then I called the only Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), with a test on the day.

I was ready. My father started teaching me to drive when I could reach the pedals. My mother rode in the back seat of the Chevy, (the Tempest hadn’t come in yet). A State Trooper rode shotgun. I drove around making left and right turns, checking mirrors,  using hand signals and the blinker, doing a three point turn in traffic on a hill. Then came parallel parking on a 30 percent grade into a really tight spot.. I aced it. The trooper was impressed.

“You’ve obviously been practicing that, “he smiled. “OK, you passed. Take us back to the office.. . .. WATCH IT!”

In my elation, I had started to pull out into traffic without looking, almost into another car.

“Alan. Would you rather have your license or your life?”

“my life” I drove back to the DMV dejected.

“Alan, you know how to drive safely, but you can’t let up for a second.”

“yes sir”

“I want you to remember that, always! I am going to give you your license today. . .”

I don’t remember a word that came after that. I don’t remember the drive home, or what my mother and my father said or what I ate for my sixteenth birthday dinner or any of my presents.

I remember when the Pontiac Tempest came into the dealership. My father and I picked it up and he let me drive home.. My father and I loved that car; my mother not-so-much.

The Dance

Coke and I went to a dance the previous spring; my Dad driving us in the Chevy. Instead of a corsage, she preferred a single gardenia blossom, which she wore in her hair. The smell of gardenias still brings back memories.

I was in DeMolay, the Mason’s boys youth group; Coke was in Rainbow girls, the Easter Star girls youth group. February 16, 1963 Rainbow girls held a Sweetheart Dance and I asked Coke to go. I would drive the Pontiac.

I don’t remember the dance or what Coke wore. As we left at around 11:00, it started to snow. I drove her home. We probably kissed in her driveway, but not for long as I had to be off the road by midnight, when my license “turned into a pumpkin” a reference to the Disney Cinderella movie.

And then . . .

The drive home, under five miles, was winter magic. The plows hadn’t been out yet and there was about an inch and a half of new snow on all the roads. Everything was white and streetlights twinkled.  

I drove too fast, maybe thirty-five miles per hour, contrary to what I said later. This was New England. My father taught me how to drive in the snow. When you felt the rear end break loose, steer in the direction of the skid till the car righted itself. I may have even been trying for some fishtail action.

The Pontiac Tempest was a front-wheel drive car. Fishtails are a rear-wheel drive phenomenon. Front-wheel drive cars don’t fishtail, they snowplow skid. The front wheels lock in a turned position and you keep going forward.

In the soft fairy-white glitter light sparkling off individual snowflakes, a big oak tree leaped in front of me. I panicked. I stomped both feet on the brakes. The Tempest accelerated. Even now my memory is in slow motion, the tree reaching branches toward me, white lightning streaks in my peripheral vision. The crash, which must have been loud, is soundless.

I don’t remember getting out of the car. A man standing under a porch light yelled “Are you all right?” I was and he yelled that he’d called the police.

“Police?!”

It took every strand of my spinal cord not to run. The police came. I remember the sergeant saying “You were driving this?” I looked at the car for the first time. My bucket seatback had broken off backwards. The steering wheel was where the seatback used to be, there was an engine-shaped bulge between the two front seats and the four-on-the-floor pushed against the back seat.

“I can’t understand why you didn’t go through the windshield,” mused the cop.

“I dunno. Seat belts, I guess.”

“This car has seat belts?”

“Yeah, I talked my father into buying them.”

“Well you can thank your stars for that. Your Dad’s one of those Ward Cleaver types, right?” The  father in TV show Leave it to Beaver, was the most understanding father I’ve ever seen.

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head, but it turned out he was, even when the insurance company refused to call the car a total loss, which cost a lot of money, he just said, “Put your car on the road.”

I have been religious about wearing seat belts ever since. My father, even though they saved his son’s life, never liked them and had to be reminded to wear them even after the tickets.

Coke and I broke up about four months later as I discovered that other girls might be interested in me. But as the cop said that night:

“You’ll always remember the Sweetheart Dance, when you hugged a tree on the way home.”