Last weekend, I stopped at one of the service stations in town to gas up my car. As I painfully watched the LED readout of my gas purchase whiz higher and higher, a guy pulled up to the pump across from me. He was in town for the weekend car show, driving a Corvette, an early one, like the one Todd Stiles and Buz Murdock drove in the hit TV series Route 66. As he began filling his car, I caught his eye.
“This must be the least fun part of driving a car like that,” I said to the guy, “filling a gas guzzler like your Vet.”
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s my guilty pleasure.”
I’ve always considered cars incidental to my life. Kind of like phones, business suits, cats and power drinks. Automobiles were designed to get us around. And, most of the time, if they successfully accomplished that – delivering me from A to B – I was generally a happy camper. Unlike my acquaintance at the gas station, I’ve rarely looked at cars as sources of pleasure, merely as a means of transport. Some would suggest that sort of attitude betrays my gender. All men are supposed to love cars, right?
Dan Neil, a lifelong chronicler of the obsession North American men have with their cars, wrote in Men’s Health magazine a few years ago:
“Cars make us feel cool. They look sexy, and make us look sexy (maybe). They are fun and loud and empowering. … Young or old, gay or straight, hair-highlighted hipster or bush-bearded loner, guys dig cars. It’s the one machine that defines our tribe.”
Meanwhile, a scientific study in the United Kingdom noted that while men and women both enjoy psychosocial benefits from access to automobiles – feelings of autonomy, protection, and prestige – only men derive measurable increases in self-esteem. The study also found that car type brings psychological benefits to men, but not women.
I’ve never felt that kind of empowerment from a car. That’s not to say I haven’t connected with a car. About 1969 (pre-certification era), while I was attending classes at Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson), I bought a 1960 Volkswagen bug.
The VW was dark green in colour and very temperamental. Its handbrake rarely worked; so, I generally parked it with its front wheels turned into the curb. It didn’t perform well in damp weather (which made me wonder if it ever rained in Germany). In fact, the floor in the bug had nearly rusted through. We had to be really careful stepping in and out of the back seat.
“I’ve named my car Norman Green Bomb,” I told my best buddy and Ryerson roommate, Dave Ross.
“As in Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky?” Dave said.
Dave was only too familiar with my car’s idiosyncrasies. One time, I’d gone to the family’s hobby farm in the country. I parked Norman in front of the front gate, pulled the hand brake (remember, it didn’t always work), stepped out, opened the gate, turned around and Norman was gone. Because of the slight incline of the road, Norman had simply responded to gravity and rolled backwards disappearing in deep weeds in the ditch.
Another time, Dave and I had taken all our dirty laundry and empty stomachs (remember, we were students) to his mom’s house in the suburbs. A saint, Ma Ross fed us and washed all our clothes. Meanwhile, Norman sat in the driveway in the pouring rain. When it was time to leave, Dave got inside the back seat and I rushed baskets of our clean clothes to him and he piled them while standing on the back-seat floor.
Suddenly, I heard a crunch. The floor where Dave was standing had rusted right through and there stood Dave inside Norman with his feet planted firmly on the driveway.
Note: the VW battery was situated under the back seat, so it too had fallen through the floor to the driveway. That meant, from then on, to start Norman, we had to remove the back seat, hold the battery up to the connecting cables, turn the ignition and start the engine.
Then, we had to remove the battery (so it didn’t fall to the street), replace the back seat and drive on. On several occasions, when Norman stalled, Dave and I had to complete this manoeuvre in downtown Toronto traffic. Funny but not fun.
So unlike Dan Neil and my acquaintance at the gas station, I guess I’ve betrayed the male tribe, not ogling over vintage cars. I just think of Norman, probably still haunting some junk dealer in a wrecker’s yard somewhere.