The Great Timing Light Caper

Author's Foreword—

This is my first Non-Erotic offering to Literotica. It's my seventh posting since I created my profile; instead of giving you the titles of my six previous submissions, it'd be easier for you to simply visit my profile and look in my archives.

Enjoy!

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The Great Timing Light Caper

The following is a true story.

My family moved to Coolidge, Arizona after a historic blizzard paralyzed half of the lower-48 states in January and February of 1978. People even today talk about "the blizzard of `78" and make the occasional joke about the large influx of babies born in September and October of that year.

We were housebound for fifteen days with my Grandma Jean (1910-1995) and she was driving us nuts. She was a typically sweet little old lady but she was a born again Christian and that was all she wanted to discuss. Now I'm a Christian too, but once in a while a different topic is a good thing. Mom and my younger brother Jim would venture on foot to the store pulling a sled behind them to carry the groceries. Dad and I stayed home and shoveled snow away from the windows, doors and the firewood stacked on the sheltered porch. By the time Indiana thawed out enough to allow travel, we sent Grandma Jean home to where she lived at the time in Indianola, Iowa. We then jumped into our 1973 Chevrolet Chevelle Laguna four-door pillared hardtop and drove like hell for the Gulf States.

We liked what we saw out there; we knew we were in our new home state when we saw a herd of Harley riders cruising on Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend. They were all wearing T-shirts, jeans and biker boots—no gloves or jackets. Riding motorcycles was merely a dream for snowed-under residents of Albion, Indiana in February 1978 and we were primed to make the move 2000 miles west to the land of cactus, dry heat and wintertime daily highs of 68 degrees.

Dad went out ahead of us in April 1978. Mom, Jim and I stayed behind to finish the school year, sell the house and load the rental truck. I was a junior at Central Noble High School—home of the Cougars, as if anybody gives a fuck because I sure as hell didn't—and Jim was a freshman. Mom (1937-1999) was sawed off short at just five feet tall and had a helluva time herding that huge rental truck those aforementioned 2000 miles. It was presumed I would drive it since Jim didn't have his license yet, but the rental company said eighteen was the minimum age to drive. In June 1978, I was two months away from turning eighteen and almost didn't count.

We arrived in Coolidge on June 15, which was Mom and Dad's 20^th wedding anniversary. They locked themselves into our hotel room and made like rabbits paroled from prison while Jim and I took the Laguna and explored the area. They found a house to rent and we moved in. Four weeks later, Mom got a job at Central Arizona College—herein CAC for brevity—and one of her fringe benefits was an on-campus apartment. As such, we started moving from the Coolidge house to the CAC campus, ten miles away.

Jim and I were tired and cranky by the fifth day of moving. It was bloody hot in that area of the central-southern Arizona desert, with daytime highs of 109 degrees and eight percent humidity. The white 1970 Ford Ranch Wagon that Dad had driven out there in April was a base model and did not have air conditioning. We were overworked, overheated, underpaid and felt unloved.

We were westbound out of Coolidge with yet another load in the Ranch Wagon. There is an S-curve two miles out of town that has no reason to be there; after that, it's a straight eight-mile shot to CAC and you can see the entire length of the road ahead.

It was then we saw him.

Coming eastbound toward us was a car, and he was coming faster toward us than we were closing on him. Though he was still better than five miles away, we figured he had to be doing at least eighty. Jim and I grumbled to ourselves that he was out having a good time while we were sweating our asses off moving furniture in a non-AC car.

Seeing him have a good time while we weren't put us in a nasty mood.

He soon got within a mile and a half of us, close enough for two car guys like Jim and me to recognize the vehicle. It was a red 1969 Chevy Chevelle two-door hardtop; we had seen it cruising around Coolidge and its teenage owner was a real asshole! The car was just your basic standard-issue Chevelle hardtop, but he had dressed it up with SS badges—putting them in the wrong places and even putting one on upside-down—and swore on a stack of Bibles it was a factory-legitimate, numbers-matching SS. The black vinyl top was tattered and the paint splotchy and faded. He had jacked it up in back and was running tires three sizes too small on the front. Undersize tires are an accident waiting to happen. The car was a beat-to-hell piece of shit and the eight-track was almost always blaring some kind of chainsaws-idling-on-a-metal-table type of noise the owner thought was music. The Chevelle and its owner were both loud and obnoxious, and Jim and I were in a foul mood.

We decided we needed to ruin his day.

The Chevelle was closing on us quickly. I ordered Jim to fetch a couple of things from behind the seat, part of the cargo going to the CAC campus. He got them and we made ready as the Chevelle kept on coming—we were doing 60mph and he was still doing between 80 and 90 miles per hour. Jim and I waited to spring our happy little trap.

He got to within 100 yards; at the closing speed—about 140+ miles per hour—he'd go by us in mere seconds. We sprang our trap. Jim reached out the right-front door with Mom's big red mixing bowl and held it on the roof with his hand. Meanwhile, I thrust Dad's big gun-shaped timing light out the driver's window and pointed it at the Chevelle. Our front bumpers were just fifty feet apart when we saw him flick his eyes toward us. Those eyes got big as flywheels when he saw what he presumed to be a red Starsky-and-Hutch —style revolving light on the roof of a car that had a radar gun pointed at him. His little brain could only think one thought at the moment—

"COPS!!!"

Just as his car flashed past us, he dynamited his brakes. The front wheels locked up and those undersized tires I mentioned screamed on the hot pavement—for all of one second. Jim and I heard a loud "pow!" as his front bumper passed our rear bumper. We looked behind us and saw a big cloud of dust and smoke as the shitty Chevelle crossed the centerline into our lane behind us. He was careening all over both lanes when we heard another but smaller "pow" as we continued on our way. It was just what the doctor ordered; Jim and I were laughing our asses off. We were still laughing when we reached the CAC entrance and turned in.

It took us forty minutes to off-load the cargo into the apartment. Then we closed the tailgate, mounted up and motored back to Coolidge. Three miles out, we saw the Chevelle sitting beside the road. No one was around so we decided to stop and have a look. It turned out the first "pow" we'd heard was the left-front tire blowing out. This was why he crossed the centerline behind us. The right-front followed suit a moment later. There was a big black blotch on the pavement about 300 yards west of where it sat, and there were hundreds of rubber flinders all over the place. The only part of the tires that still looked like tires was the bead while the rest looked like gray/white cotton yard wrapped around the wheels. They were too small for the load they were carrying and were spinning much faster than was safe. When the dipshit dynamited his brakes, probably with both feet, they went from spinning 90mph to zero in an instant. That caused them to burst. We wondered about the black splotch on the pavement and crouched down to look under the front bumper.

The front crossmember was resting on the ground! The small front tires combined with the jacked-up back end to cause the crossmember to dig into the roadway when the tires went bye-bye. It must've been acting like a plow and was surely digging up stones, debris and chunks of pavement. The underside of the engine's oil pan was all torn up too. Not only that, the oil filter was just plain gone! Only a fourth of it was still attached to its mount and motor oil and sprayed backwards all over the undercarriage. Worst yet was the fact there was a hole in the oil pan big enough to slide a stack of pancakes into.

Jim and I looked at each other, jumped back into the Ranch Wagon and got the hell out of there.

We drove past that spot an hour later with yet another load. It was gone. After the load was stowed, we swung past the house where we'd seen it parked. It was sitting beside the garage and the teenage owner and two of his pals were looking it over. They didn't pay any attention to us as we motored about our business.

Over the next six years, Jim and/or I would cruise past that house now and then. The shitty Chevelle never moved from its resting place beside the garage. The tattered vinyl top got more tattered and the faded red paint got even more faded. It was on its way to deteriorating back to its baser elements in May 1984 when my family made the mistake of moving to Delaware. I don't know about Jim, but I feel a bit bad about it. We hadn't intended to tear up his car so badly. However, I feel the moron brought a lot of it on himself. In his quest to look what his stunted brain considered cool, he ran undersized tires up front and jacked up the rear nine inches over stock. Any margin of error had been deliberately thrown away and he was an accident waiting to happen! Thankfully, he happened in the wide and empty desert where nobody could get hurt.

Fast forward to December 2001. My family—the then-wife, our two kids and myself—were planning a trip from Indiana to Arizona. We drove instead of flying as planned since it was just four months past the September 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. On a whim, we swung past the house where I'd last seen the Chevelle parked in 1984. A nicely restored red 1969 Chevy Chevelle SS was visible through the open garage door. Whether the same people live there or not is unknown. Whether it is the same car or not is also unknown. I kinda hope it is. While I'm a full-on dedicated Ford guy, I have no wish to see a collectible GM car get scrapped. Hopefully, the moronic teenager learned a big lesson, grew up and made lemonade out of the lemons Jim and I inadvertently handed him.

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