Thrown Under the Omnibus, page 89
Saturday, June 25, 1977 Crescent City to Nowhere
The Buick Special was, however, beautiful: two-tone turquoise and white with seat covers to match. The weather was splendid. People smiled and waved to us as we rolled through the small northern Florida towns (which, in 1977, snowbirds had not yet left their droppings on). At blue highway speeds the Buick was a big, steady pleasure to drive. We went 150 miles like that, sipping beers and returning salutes. The Buick ran perfectly right up until it didn’t.
When the engine went out we were in a godforsaken stretch of piney woods on County Route 98 somewhere around about, but nowhere near, Tallahassee. All of a sudden the car was too quiet, and we weren’t going as fast as we should have been. We figured it was the old set of points.
There was a shack about two hundred yards down the road with two broken gas pumps and a sign that said BEER. It was half overgrown with creepers in the front and half sunk into what, these days, would be called wetlands in the back. The scene resembled an EC horror comic Swamp Thing title panel, but it was the only building we’d seen for twenty miles, and it did have that sign that said BEER. We pushed the Buick there. I went inside to borrow some tools.
About a dozen hard-visaged, definitely unfriendly, and possibly cannibalistic Southern types were in there, all eyeing me suspiciously. The bartender was a big, nasty-faced old guy with an enormous paunch, a flat-top haircut four inches high, and a cigar turned backward in his mouth. (I assume, but am by no means certain, it was unlit.) I got the idea he didn’t like my looks either, but he loaned me a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench.
Humphrey was all business under the hood, tinkering with this and tapping on that. I thought maybe he knew what he was doing until I realized he couldn’t find the spark plugs. Buick used to put these lid things over them. After we’d pried one off and given ourselves some spark-plug-wire electrical shocks, we figured maybe it wasn’t the old set of points. Maybe it was vapor lock. If you leave vapor lock alone it gets better. This was exactly the kind of mechanical problem that Humphrey and I were good at solving. We decided it was vapor lock and went inside to get a drink.
Humphrey was from England so he thought this bar was quaint, charming in its primitive way, a real piece of Americana. I’m from Ohio and I thought we were going to get killed.
The South was still The South in 1977. And the Florida piney woods weren’t full of good ole boys in Ralph Lauren Polo shirts who’d made it big developing gated (and de-gatored) golf course communities. The Florida piney woods were full of the kind of rednecks who were beginning to fill that bar—none of them an improvement on the rednecks who had been there already. This was only five years after Deliverance hit the theaters and only eight years after the premiere of Easy Rider, which I had seen three times when I was trying to be a hippie (and which—from my present perspective of a dad with daughters, surveying the good-for-nothing young men on motorcycles who might want to date them—has a happy ending). I mean, Jimmy Carter had carried the South in ‘76. They were so primitive down there that they hadn’t even evolved into Republicans.
And then there was Humphrey’s English accent, a posh accent, one might even go so far as to say a plummy accent. It was a nice accent to have—in England. In the Florida piney woods it was an accent that might not sound, well, you know, manly. And Humphrey, after he’d had a few drinks, began to speak—as English speakers the world around do, especially in foreign climes—more loudly. When Humphrey started talking a little louder, people started to look at us a little funny. The louder his talk became, the funnier the looks we got. And just when I was sure we were going to get killed somebody asked if that was our old Buick out front with the hood up. We said yes. The room went silent. Then there was, I swear, an audible sound of cracking smiles (revealing a good number of missing teeth). Even the bartender’s expression turned faintly cheerful.
“That old Buick quit on ya?” someone else asked. We said yes. There was a rush out the door. Trunk lids popped up, tool cases snapped open, and in minutes our engine compartment was packed with fearsome drunk Florida crackers undoing fuel lines, pulling off plug wires, and wrenching on things that I couldn’t see while beer bottles piled up in front of the grille.
Not that any of them were able to get the car started. Humphrey and I went back in the bar and began drinking at a table with the local game warden and José, an immense half-Indian, half-Mexican who’d been the 1959 and ‘60 Rocky Mountain Professional Wrestling Champion and whose presence in the Florida panhandle was never adequately explained. The game warden said that he himself had had a ‘56 Buick. “Had one just like it,” he said. Several other people said the same thing. In fact, on our entire trip, it was hard to find a man over forty-five who said he hadn’t had a ‘56 Buick. And they were fondly remembered, to a car. “You couldn’t break ‘em with a stick,” said the game warden. “That car’ll run forever.”
Humphrey said he’d settle for tonight.
I asked the warden what the BEER place was called. “Well,” he said, “sometimes we call it the 98 Inn and sometimes we call it the 98 Tavern, but mostly we don’t call it anything at all. Hell, you’re thirty miles from nowhere and forty miles from nowhere else.” Then he went off and got into a fistfight.
By midnight Humphrey and I were very drunk. We were talking to a fellow named Jack who was twenty-two and looked like he robbed gas stations to get his heart started in the morning. He had a sharp Appalachian face with various scars and a row of absent dentation. He’d recently shot himself in the stomach over something to do with an estranged wife. He showed us where the bullet had gone in and where it had come out. Now he was living in a trailer with another lady and her five kids, but they were all off at her mother’s canning something, so he invited us to stay with him. We were sure he was a homicidal maniac but it was that or sleep in the car.
Jack turned out to be a perfectly amiable guy. It was all we could do to keep him from persuading us to take a little vacation and spend a week down there bait fishing for razorback hogs, or whatever it is they do on vacation in the Florida piney woods. And he did persuade us to share his quart jar of moonshine.
Sunday, June 26
Nowhere to Mobile
Ouch, we woke up. Our friends of the night before had done a fair amount of damage helping us out. There were a lot of loose hoses and wires. Fuel lines were draped over the fenders and the contact arm on the points had been bent double. Humphrey decided that he’d better work on this himself, so he squatted atop the valve covers and sweated and diddled in the distributor for the next two hours. Finally, Jack rounded up yet another local, who took a big screwdriver, jammed it once into the points, slapped on the distributor cap, and started the car first try. “Had one just like it,” he said.
Humphrey and I drove south until we found the ocean. We rented a motel room for the day and had showers and a lot of Bloody Marys. And then, God knows why, we went to a water park.
Humphrey thought this was quaint, charming in its primitive way, a real piece of Americana. I thought, between our hangovers and all the Bloody Marys, we were going to drown.
Then we went to Sears and bought some tools that must have seemed at the time as though they would be useful: a large hammer, three unusual sizes of Phillips screwdrivers, a pair of tiny Japanese pliers, and a pry bar.
Just after sundown we got back in the Buick. It was running perfectly now. We drove to Mobile with no problems except that Humphrey turned out to be scared of insects they don’t have in England, which is most insects. He nearly put us into a ditch when he got a June bug down his shirt. Also, we couldn’t figure out how to work the instrument panel lights so the driver had to open his quarter-ton door every time he wanted to check the speedometer or the gas gauge and this would cause the driver to accidentally yank the steering wheel, sending the car careening across the road into oncoming traffic and making all the water that had leaked out of our busted Styrofoam cooler slosh into our shoes.
Monday, June
Mobile to Natchez
We figured that if the points weren’t screwed up before, they certainly were now, after being jammed with a big screwdriver. But only one junkyard in Mobile had a ‘56 Buick, and it had kudzu growing up through its engine compartment, and the distributor was missing anyway. Eventually the junkyard owner found a garage that had a new set of points. We were on our way there when the car quit again. This time we knew it was the points. I hitched to the garage and came back with their tow truck. The driver (he’d had one just like it) unhooked the fuel line to the carburetor. There was a vicious reptilian hiss. “Vapor lock,” the tow truck driver said. We had a new set of points installed anyway and spent the rest of the day battling vapor lock all across Mississippi.
Back in the 98 Tavern, José the wrestling champion had told us that the one surefire cure for vapor lock was to put wooden clothespins all along the fuel line. We thought that sounded pretty stupid, but by the time we got to Hattiesburg we’d bought two bags of them and had stuck on as many as we could fit. When we stopped for gas in a little town, the station owner opened our hood to check the oil and the half dozen loafers hanging out at his station burst into hysterics. So the clothespins had to go. I thought we should give them another chance. Maybe they’d start to work or something. But Humphrey said he drew the line at getting laughed at if we died in a wreck.
Tuesday, June 28
Natchez to Dallas
We now had the process of unhooking the fuel line and curing our vapor lock down to about one minute, but we’d quit getting vapor lock. And we were just congratulating ourselves when the water temperature hit the bad peg and wouldn’t come down. We had to spend an hour and a half cooling off in Louisiana’s Kisatchie National Forest. There is absolutely nothing to do in Louisiana’s Kisatchie National Forest except sit around and look at the one kind of conifer that grows in the Kisatchie National Forest. Let us call it the Kisatchie cedar. Whether it is rare or endangered I do not know. I do know that after an hour and a half it cries out to be clear-cut.
The engine overheated again as soon as we started the car, and we limped into Clarence, Louisiana, where the proprietor of the sole filling station told us that the Buick’s thermostat had “shit the bed.” He didn’t have any parts or even a garage but he gave us the phone numbers of all the local mechanics and the use of his phone. I called everyone in a thirty-mile radius but no one had a hand free to do the work. Finally, I got one fellow who said, “Hell I had a ‘56 Buick, and I just tore the damn thermostat out. Threw it away. If you ain’t got a gasket, slap some damn cardboard in there. Damn thing’ll run forever.”
I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know where thermostats made their home. But the filling station owner did. He made a gasket out of the back of my reporter’s notebook and bolted it into the water hose connection where it stuck out on every side, little spiral binding holes and all.
The overheating was fixed, and while we drove toward Dallas that night Humphrey and I debated whether to have the thermostat fixed as well. Buick must have had some reason for putting a thermostat in besides cold mornings in Kansas. Even in Africa or Southeast Asia, where it’s always hot, cars have thermostats. At least we thought they did. Maybe thermostats provide back pressure or something in the water pump or somewhere to prevent, you know, surge and gurgling in there. Maybe we’d really need one in the desert where surge and gurgling could be expected to be at their worst. Without a thermostat all the water might swish around too fast in the cooling system, running through over and over again at hundreds of gallons per minute and turning into superheated steam until the whole car blew up like the steamboat Sultana. We didn’t know.
Wednesday, June 29
Dallas to Nowhere in Particular
The new thermostat—plus labor, fresh antifreeze, a radiator flush, a “water pump inspection,” and several other things I couldn’t make out on the bill—cost almost (2009 readers, prepare yourselves for a Dr. Evil moment) fifty dollars.
Out beyond Dallas somewhere we came upon something called the Cadillac Ranch. A sculptor (soi-disant) had planted ten Cadillacs nosedown in the empty prairie. The Caddys—1951 through 1960—pretty much covered the history of tail fins. About half of each car was sticking out of the ground, on a slant calculated so that the truly enormous fins of the ‘59 Coupe de Ville formed an equilateral triangle with the earth. Voilà, art. Humphrey and I inspected this cultural treasure and found beer can and condom package indications that the backseats of the sculpture had been used for traditional backseat purposes. You don’t see that so much with, for instance, a Rodin.
When we got up toward Wichita Falls we realized we needed a drink and, also, the engine was overheating again. So, as it turned out, was the air-conditioning unit in my motel room. And the desk clerk told us that this was a dry county, and it was fifty miles to the nearest bar or carryout.
Thursday, June 30
Wherever We Were to Tucumcari
The Texas panhandle has to be one of the most featureless landscapes on earth. They have sightseeing buses that take you into Lubbock to see the tree. Or they should. For lack of anything better to do we stopped at a junkyard in Quanah or Goodnight or someplace where the owner had a lot of old Buicks parked in a field. He said our overheating problem had to do with the cylinder head design. “They’d all overheat,” he said, “all those ‘56 Buicks.” The next person blamed it all on hot oil in the Dynaflo transmission. Somebody else said the radiators were “too thick and not wide enough.” Another said they were “plenty thick but too high.” And one man in Barstow claimed that the problem was “this shitty weather we’ve been having for twenty years.” But not one of these people was shaken in his belief that a ‘56 Buick would “run forever.”
Actually, just then, our ‘56 felt like it would. The temperature gauge was strangely somnolent, and we didn’t have a single major problem all day except for the hour or so when our fuel pump was spraying gas all over the hot exhaust manifold.
For thirty miles, approaching Amarillo, Humphrey and I were complaining that the city stank of gasoline. And Amarillo does have a lot of refineries. But the gas smell kept getting worse for thirty miles, leaving Amarillo.
When it eventually occurred to us to stop and look under the hood we found that the tiny rubber gasket under the bolt that holds the fuel pump cap in place had collapsed and gas was squirting out and boiling up in little spitballs on the headers. I have no clue why this didn’t turn us into a rolling Hindenburg, not even after Humphrey gasped in dismay and let the cigarette drop out of his mouth and fall right in there. I forget what we used to stop the squirting until we’d bought a small rubber washer for two cents at a Tucumcari hardware store. Very possibly it was chewing gum.
Friday, July 1
Tucumcari to Albuquerque
There’s a beat-up old road, Route 104, running northwest out of Tucumcari through the desert to Conchas Lake, then up into the Cornudo Hills and across a grassland plateau to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Sante Fe. I’d flown to the West but I’d never driven over it. This little 150-mile byway awed me to imbecility. Humphrey said I was dangerous behind the wheel—bouncing up and down in the seat and jabbering about purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain and pointing out all the cows. We had to stop in Sante Fe to have a beer and settle me down.
Other than that it was just another day, with the engine overheating all the time and a new vapor lock problem that happened only on the edge of precipices or in the middle of blind curves. And even when the Buick was running right it was, truth be told, a very ordinary car. Once the museum-piece novelty had worn off, driving it was about as exciting as driving a new Buick. Or it was until we got lost down some lousy dirt roads south of Sante Fe and the car just sort of fell apart. The shocks and springs got Parkinson’s disease, and all four wheels broke loose and headed every way but straight. At twenty miles per hour you would have thought we were racing the Baja 1000.
Humphrey had a theory about suspension harmonics or something and claimed that everything would be much better if he just drove faster, which made everything much worse. At least the Buick took to getting vapor lock in front of bars and taverns in all the little towns we went through, and that was good. But by the time we arrived in Albuquerque we were beginning to doubt the wisdom of this enterprise. In fact we were sick to death of the trip and the thing it rode in on.
Saturday, July 2
Drunk All Day in Albuquerque
Saturday we were drunk all day in Albuquerque.
Sunday, July 3
Albuquerque to Somewhere, Utah
Up in the Nacimiento Mountains we had a truly perplexing mechanical problem. We’d stopped for lunch in Cuba, New Mexico. When we came out of the restaurant the car wouldn’t start and there was no vapor lock hiss when we opened the fuel line. Humphrey thought maybe the fuel pump had lost prime and was pumping backward. This seemed as likely a story as any. When we took the top off the fuel pump it was blowing bubbles in there. That, Humphrey told me, was an indication of backward fuel pumping. I took his word for it. Humphrey tried to suck some gas up the fuel line. That didn’t work so I tried until I began to giggle from the fumes and get sick.
