Frigid Passage

My friend had this 1958 Chevy. It was an obscene colossus of a car with a paint job consisting of peeling blue enamel, gray primer, body putty and rust. It used a rusty wire coat hanger as a radio antenna. Whenever one of the two massive doors slammed shut, a fine effluvium of rust would drift from the rocker panel to the ground.

Inside the vast interior plastic peeled and headliner drooped behind an ornamental dash that managed to combine an art deco theme with the late fifties standard of conspicuous consumption and ostentation.

It was the last in a long line of elderly vehicles that Rob had managed to acquire for a modest sum only to abandon them, engine smoking on the side of some mountain road.

Built at the very apex of post war greatness the car was a mammoth statement of American affluence and power. Now fifteen years later the rusting chrome and coat hanger antenna whispered a darker message of decline and approaching death. Like a dinosaur headed for the tar pits it trudged down the road dropping an occasional chrome ornament or hubcap and looking for all the world like it wished only to find a place to pull over to rust and drip oil while the sun cooked the interior.

Looks can be deceiving.

The Chevy was the one-in-a-thousand car that, for whatever reason, despite appearance and price was relatively sound.

The former owner had ambitions of creating a racecar and had installed a custom shifter, done some work on the transmission and equipped the huge engine with a mammoth turbocharger.

Maybe he got sick of working on it or got drafted or ran away to a commune. Whatever the reason, his parents were left to dispose of it. They parked it in a vacant lot where it sat with weeds growing up through the grill and a "For Sale" sign propped on the dash behind the dusty cracked windshield. Rob purchased this monster for seventy five dollars; cash.

The modifications the former owner had made meant two things. The car drank more gas than a bulldozer and it was faster than it had any right to be. Much faster.

We would pull this creaking behemoth up next to the brand new Corvettes and shiny hot rods waiting at the traffic light to race across the viaduct to North Denver. Ignoring the catcalls and laughter from the suburban kids, we would sit, engine idling in a cloud of blue smoke waiting for the light to change.

The light would turn green and while the other drivers squealed tires and laid rubber Rob would step down on the accelerator gradually pressing it half way to the floor.

He couldn't afford to squeal his tires because they were all bald and at least one was showing fabric. I really don't think he could have squealed them if he wanted to since the car weighed so much.

The reason he accelerated gradually was because of a very real fear that the transmission would tear itself lose, rear up between us like a huge metal beast and kill us both while fragments of hot metal rained on the intersection and engine parts flew clanging down the street.

Even with this gradual method of acceleration, we would both be pressed back into our seats by the drag of gravity as the massive road locomotive got underway. Halfway across the intersection the rest of the drivers would see our one functioning taillight through a heavy blue vapor of unburned gasoline disappearing over the top of the hill leading on to the viaduct.

Usually, just as we got about half way across the viaduct we would see headlights from the other cars topping the rise at the beginning of the overpass. We usually got going eighty or ninety miles an hour before we had to slow down. On the open road the Chevy had a cruising speed between a hundred twenty maybe a hundred thirty miles an hour. We never had the nerve to find out what the top end was.

Anyway a car like that required lots and lots of gas and we didn't have lots and lots of money. Our favorite method of filling the seemingly bottomless tank was to pull up at the gas pump so the car blocked the proprietor's view of the numbers that measured the gas going into the tank and the price we should pay for that gas..

One of us would start filling the tank while the other watched the clerk inside the station. When the clerk got busy ringing up another sale we would stop the pump, flip the switch so all the numbers went back to zero and start filling the tank again. One of us would go in and pay for the dollar or two showing on the pump and we'd be on our way.

We were engaged in this very activity one Friday evening as we prepared to leave town to visit my girlfriend Carol who lived in Oshkosh Nebraska.

It was late in the year, past autumn, but not quite winter yet. Still the chill in the air was beginning to sharpen as Rob watched the clerk inside the station and I listened to gasoline gurgle into the colossal tank.

The summer of love had long since faded into a winter of cynicism and paranoia as the beat of Disco music displaced the folk anthems of the sixties. Nixon was president and the war in Vietnam ground on and on and on. Kent State had made the point that the government was through fucking around with protesters.

The former protesters and flower children were either busy eradicating their consciousness with an ever-growing pharmacopoeia of increasingly dangerous drugs or else they were crouched down in basements attaching electric wires to high explosives. They too were through fucking around.

None of this mattered to me as I listened to the gas gurgle into the tank and waited for Rob to signal for me to stop and turn the dial back. Around us traffic whizzed by in the fading twilight of a hazy November evening. The smell of wood from fireplaces had mixed with the brown cloud that customarily hung over Denver on Friday at sunset in cool weather to create a breathtakingly crimson dusk that glowed fire red in the west. Now in the growing darkness the half light faded like embers and the crisp fall air had a real wintry bite to it.

"OK, flip it back"

I flipped the lever running the numbers back to zero while Rob kept an eye on the attendant. I squeezed the handle of the pump and the sound of gas pouring into the black hole of our tank resumed.

"Is Willie coming?" I asked.

"He said he wanted to see Bill and Kenny, something about car parts."

"Stolen?"

"Do you think he bought them?"

His point was well taken. Willie Cortex had never to our knowledge held a job longer than it took him to locate and steal anything of value. A completely hapless alcoholic at the age of fifteen, he had the pasty furtive look of someone with quite a few years of prison in his future.

With dark curly hair and a fair complexion, Willie was an Irish and American Indian lad with the misfortune to reach adolescence just as the Age of Aquarius got into full swing.

Along with an astonishing alcohol intake, Willie had been ingesting LSD and a variety of other illegal mind altering drugs on a more or less daily basis since the age of 12.

The effect this had on him was to reduce his already limited intellect significantly. As a matter of fact his vocabulary had been shrinking over the past year to the point where he made do with about ten words to cover all of his conversational needs.

One story told about Willie was that he was sitting in the back seat of his cousin's new GTO at the Old Wadsworth drive-in when he cracked the rear side window with a quart bottle of beer he was drinking. Looking at the damage, he laughed drunkenly and said "Telephone"; one of the ten words he used in place of a real spoken language.

His cousin understandably annoyed at the damage to his brand new car and Willie's apparent lack of remorse drug him out of the car and gave him a sound beating. Willie wandered off bleeding still clutching his half-full quart of beer.

A few minutes later Willie reappeared, having finished the beer and filled the bottle with gravel. He drunkenly shouted something along the lines of "You're obviously telephone, so later." and smashed the front window out of the shining car.

The second beating his cousin administered that evening is still discussed in some circles. His cousin's car was parked toward the back of the drive-in so fewer people passing on their way to the concession stand would notice the clouds of marijuana smoke wafting out of the open windows.

Willie was beaten punched and finally kicked from the damaged car all the way to the concession stand where he was left unconscious and bleeding to walk home alone.

Such a beating would have killed or at least disabled any other person at least any normal person. Willie reappeared the next day badly cut and bruised but apparently none the worse for the wear. Neither Willie nor his cousin discussed the matter with anyone else and next Friday night Willie was at his accustomed place in the back seat next to a replaced window enjoying the drive-in with his cousin and their friends. He did not however damage his cousin's car in any way ever again.

One other thing is worth mentioning about Willie. He had no parents. I mean he must have had parents somewhere or other but in all the time we knew him we never saw them. I mean not even once.

We pulled up to his house in the deepening nightfall and honked the horn. Willie emerged from the garage carrying a bulky and apparently very heavy object. He stopped at the driver's window and when Rob rolled it partly down, Willie said "trunk".

Rob turned the Chevy off and silently handed the key over. Willie scooted around to the back of the car and popped the massive trunk lid. We felt the Chevy settle slightly as he put whatever he was carrying into the back end. He ran back to the garage and emerged with another object and threw it in as well. The 58 settled a little more on its tired old springs.

Willie repeated this operation several times and finally slammed the trunk lid shut. He got in the back seat, handed Rob the keys back and promptly lit a joint, which he passed around as we drove toward the highway.

Between hits Rob, ever the optimist, attempted to start a conversation with Willie.

"So how's it been going man?"

"Cool."

Mind if I ask what's in my trunk?"

"Parts."

"What kind of parts?"

"Car."

For Carol's brothers?"

"Obviously."

We drove past the oil refineries of Commerce City in silence for a few minutes and then Willie lit another joint. Rob turned on the radio and we listened to "Good time Charlie's got the blues" playing and watched the Chevy suck up the road like a string of oiled spaghetti. Once the lights of the city faded behind us Rob opened it up. Soon the old relic was rocking along as we cruised down the dark road passing the occasional truck as if it were standing still.

About half an hour later a drop of rain hit the windshield. This was followed by another drop and then another. In a few minutes we were driving through a buffeting rain and Rob cut the speed down to about ninety and turned on the wipers.

The ancient wipers barely cleared the cracked windshield before the downpour obliterated our vision again. Rob switched them to high which improved the situation only marginally.

"You ok to drive?" I asked.

"Nothing out here but the trucks, even in this mess they're kind of hard to miss."

In the back seat Willie lit another joint and passed it up to us. Rob took a long hit and then passed it to me saying, "Don't worry we're not going to let a little weather stop us."

Ten minutes later the rain changed to snow and Rob slowed down again. The snow was sticking, not only on the brown buffalo grass on the side of the road, but to the road itself. This was not a good sign. Rob slowed down a little more and said "If this keeps up, we're going to have to pull over and put the snow tires on".

"How far to Fort Morgan?" I asked.

"About ten miles, it this doesn't let up we'll stop and change tires there."

The snow didn't let up and by the time we pulled into the brightly lit truck stop at Fort Morgan it was an island of light in a sea of darkness and blowing snow that was starting to drift around any object that protruded from the ground. As we pulled into the gas station I felt the back wheels slip a little when we rounded the turn.

"Looks like we made it just in time". Rob said shutting the engine off. "Get your shit out of the trunk." He said, handing Willie the key.

While Willie unloaded the trunk, Rob and I went to the station to use the bathroom. By the time we walked past two islands of gas pumps and into the station we were nearly frozen and very wet. There was no doubt by this time in either of our minds that we had driven smack into the middle of a fall blizzard on the plains.

This should have been our cue to turn around and try to make it back to Denver which lay about sixty miles to the west. Our goal, a tiny town situated on the Platte river was still about two hundred miles away to the east in Nebraska.

Outside the wind howled flinging sheets of snow out of the darkness nearly obscuring the nearest island of gas pumps. Willie and the huge Chevy was entirely shrouded by the fury of wind and snow that seemed to be picking up even as we looked through the window. The small clapboard building shuddered as the wind moaned outside and I looked at Rob questioningly.

"Once we get the tires changed it'll be cake." He said without hesitation.

I didn't argue I was in love.

When I first met Carol, Rob was going out with her. I joined them at a coffee shop and sitting across the table from Carol, I was smitten.

In a way, it was like being in a serious auto accident. You don't really remember what happened, you just wake up in the hospital. I don't remember a single thing about the night I met her except what she told me later.

She said I just kept looking at her and when it was time to leave I said, "You sure are lucky to have met such a nice girl Rob." I don't know if she called me up or I called her but within twenty four hours we were passionately necking at a drive in. From that night on, we were together.

There was no apology to Rob and no sneaking around either; we just were. You don't apologize for breathing.

A few years later, Rob slept with an exceptionally beautiful girlfriend of mine while she and I were in the process of breaking up. He didn't apologize either and it didn't even cause a ripple in our friendship. I wasn't angry when Rob slept with Sandy and he wasn't angry when I took Carol. These things all seem to have a way of working themselves out.

Here's the funny thing. Carol wasn't particularly gorgeous, at least not in the sense of conventional beauty. Mind you, she wasn't ugly by any stretch of the imagination but basically she was just a normal healthy seventeen year old girl.

She was my height and I preferred girls to be a little shorter then me. She was plump. Not fat, but curvaceous and robust. She had dishwater blonde hair, brown eyes and a shy hesitant smile that reduced me to total mush.

Carol certainly wasn't the first girl I had gone out with. Although at the time, technically I was still a virgin, I had spent more than my fair share of time exploring my sexuality with a variety of willing partners. At one point I had removed the back seat from my car and installed a bed complete with pillows and comforter. This may have explained my lack of popularity with the parents of girls I had dated before Carol.

What bewildered me about us was the sheer power of the passion and animal magnetism between us. It went past sex and extended to everything. When we talked I felt like I was talking with myself. It was like she was just another part of me, a part that had been missing and I had been lucky enough to find.

When her mother and step father decided to move to Oshkosh on the theory that there would less for her two brothers to steal in a small town there wasn't a question in our minds that we would continue to be together.

There are things about Carol I can barely remember and others that remain lodged in my memory like a bad tattoo.

These thoughts continue to bob to the surface of my consciousness sometimes like the taste of a sweet summer night, sometimes like a bloated corpse surfacing after years of putrefaction in the cold depths of my subconscious.

When she moved along with her family we were true to our word, our vow...our love.

We wrote each other on a daily basis, not just love letters, but a continuation of the dialogue we had started the first night we were together and now found it impossible to live without. We wrote monster letters of many pages, sometimes more that once a day, pouring our words onto the paper like a pent up stream of consciousness that unwritten might cause one or the other of us to explode.

It wasn't sex we wrote about, aside from noting we missed each other, we wrote about what was inside us, what was happening, what we felt.

And of course I visited her in Oshkosh at least once a month but usually more often. Each time I saw her it was like coming up from deep water for a breath of fresh air. It was like being an amputee who is allowed to have his missing limb back for a little while or a blind person who receives the gift of sight for a short time. It was like being made whole again.

So as we stood looking out at the growing blizzard I didn't argue with Rob about our destination. In my mind it was far preferable risking the storm then turning back. Like a junkie waiting for his connection, the thought of Carol drove everything else from my mind including the colossal stupidity of driving into the heart of a Colorado fall blizzard in an ancient car that to my knowledge hadn't had so much as an oil change in the last year let alone a tune up.

Driving across two hundred miles of darkness and drifting snow seemed like the only logical course of action open to us, so when Rob said, "Let's get those tires on" and pushed the door open, I followed.

The howling wind almost pushed me back inside, but I lowered my head and pushed out into the gale. Willie was unloading the last of the parts onto the ground where the snow was drifting around them.

Rob reached into the trunk and removed two of the oldest baldest most threadbare snow tires I've ever seen before or since that night. Pointing to a couple of rusty metal hobs extruding from the thinning tread he said, "Don't worry, they're studded."

Working together we got the gargantuan hulk of the car jacked up and the tires changed in a matter of minutes. When we were finished and Willie had loaded his trove of stolen auto parts back into the trunk, Rob noticed one of the tires was low.

"Looks like a slow leak" he observed as he unscrewed the valve cap with blue numbing fingers. "It ought to hold until we get to Oshkosh and then I can patch the tube". He hooked the air hose to the valve letting the air hiss into the ruined tire.

"There" he said stepping back and looking at the tire which was rapidly disappearing in the deepening snow, "good as new."

We capped the gas tank, not even bothering to watch the station now lost in clouds of drifting powder. When we finished Rob flipped the pump back to zero.

He started the car and slowly pulled out of the station aiming the car toward the eastbound entrance to the highway. In less then a minute the island of light had disappeared entirely and we were surrounded by darkness and blowing snow. In the back seat, Willie lit a joint and passed up to us.

Between Fort Morgan and Julesberg, the last town in Colorado before Nebraska, lies about a hundred and fifty miles of utterly desolate and empty land. Flat as a pancake and lacking a single tree to break the monotony or the wind blowing down from Canada to Mexico it forms the heart of what used to be called "The Great American Desert".

A few years back on New Years Eve I took a non stop transcontinental flight from New York City to Los Angeles.