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[
this was supposed to have been last weekend's post, and for a minute it was--until i dragged my ass outta bed the next morning, saw the horrific left turn it had somehow taken the night before and yanked it immediately.
maybe one of these days i'll learn: write drunk, publish sober.]
six oldsmobiles and a chevy
one of the great things about maintaining a blog is that random shit like this--a sudden urge to scour the internet for pictures of every car my family owned while i was growing up--becomes a concrete, frozen memory for all the world (or at least, all eleven of my readers) to see.
as is often the case, what started out as a simple, straightforward pictorial has turned into yet another lengthy, anecdote-filled tale from my past--feel free to skip all the prose and just look at the pictures.
i must admit, i've been brooding about the sad, sorry demise of general motors [because make no mistake, that's what it was] ever since it happened--for me, it truly was the end of an era.
see, i grew up in a time in america when there were only three tv networks and three car companies--namely, GM, ford and chrysler--of any real consequence. while a family might be permitted to promiscuously flip from NBC to CBS to ABC on their televisions, cars were different--folks back then tended to pick a brand and stick with it through thick and thin.
our family? we were GM people--more particular to my branch of the tree (i.e., the ones who couldn't afford cadillacs), we were
oldsmobile people, goddammit.
the following is the first car of which i have any recollection:
1. 1956 oldsmobile holiday 88 sedan
ours wasn't anywhere near this fun; it was solid white on the outside, but even more red in its interior than the above--more [in fact, exactly] like this:
can you youngsters of today even imagine riding around in a car like this?
long before seatbelts and car-seats shackled the weak impulses of the meek, cowed, ritalin-drugged youth of today, my little brother and i would bounce wildly from front-seat to back in our holiday 88's vast interior, beating each other senseless and screeching maniacally as our mother careened down the road, all windows open in the stifling houston heat, cigarette in one hand whilst screaming and slapping around behind her in a vain attempt to control us with the other.
god, those were the days.
2. 1964 oldsmobile jetstar 88 sedan
our family's first new car.
once again, ours wasn't anywhere near this fun--it wasn't red, and it never ventured anywhere near the slopes.
in fact, its first iteration (so i'm told) was a dark, drab green--my father, having traded in the holiday 88 and picked out our new car without consulting my mother [he had a tendency to do
unilateral shit like that], was apparently totally unprepared for her tearful reaction to his nice surprise.
by the time i got home from school that day--i remember it was cold and raining, and kennedy was freshly dead--a neighbor had been dragged in to watch my brother and sister, and my parents were on their way back to the dealership to pick out something my mother could live with. i sat there in front of the tv, literally beside myself with excitement at the prospect of a new car, and counted the minutes until they got back.
i still remember hearing them pull into the driveway, dashing to the back door and flinging it open to watch as our shiny new car, droplets of rain beading across its sleek, sky-blue hood, rolled into the garage.
it looked exactly like this (only much more shiny):
they piled us all into the car, and we went for a ride. it was a miracle machine--i mean, you pushed a button on the dash and ice-cold air emerged, for chrissakes--who'd've ever thought? and my mother could move the thing from lane to lane with a finger, such was the magic of power steering--and the heady new-car smell emerging from its plastic royal-blue interior i remember to this day, but can't even begin to describe.
and, like its predecessor--in fact, like all full-sized GM cars of that era--it was big and powerful and fast: stomp on the gas, and that big v-8 would lay you back in your seat as it leapt forward to claim the road.
ultimately, the jetstar would prove no more durable than the life we thought would go on forever--by late 1970 we were fatherless, near-penniless and sorely in need of a new car.
enter the
deus ex machina known around our house as
uncle don.
3. 1969 oldsmobile cutlass supreme holiday coupe
that sweet little cutlass--i remember it well.
don drove it down one night, told us it was ours [
it had been his company car--he'd bought out the lease so his dead brother's widow would have a decent car to drive], swapped his keys for ours, gave my mom a hug and immediately headed back north to tulsa in the by-then decrepit jetstar (which would overheat twice before he managed to make it home) because he had to work the next day.
incomparably beautiful, our new car was a sleek, glistening, metallic tobacco brown, looking like it had been built for nothing but speed. after don left, we walked around it a few times, just gawking.
my recollections of that first drive (cross-town, to pick up my little sister at her dance class): it was dusk, a light rain was falling, the wipers and air were on low, the rich brown interior was redolent of don's cigars, neil diamond's "cracklin' rosie" was playing softly on the radio, and at every red light to which we smoothly rolled to a stop, my mother and i just looked at each other and shook our heads in disbelief at how goddam lucky we were.
needless to say, we loved that car.
and it served us nobly and well and with great style until, newly-minted driver's license in hand, yours truly managed to single-handedly deliver the one-two punches that
finished it off.
4. 1971 oldsmobile custom cruiser station wagon
[
i decided fore-and-aft pictures of this monstrosity were necessary in order to attempt to convey an accurate impression of its sheer size.]
practically the only person who was happy about the cutlass's premature demise was my uncle don's wife, pat--it gave her the perfect excuse to pawn the big green albatross she'd been dying to get rid of onto us.
dubbed "the titanic" by my mother immediately upon delivery, it remains to this day the largest, heaviest, most ponderously unnavigable non-commercial vehicle i've ever driven.
and by "driven," what i really mean is, you gripped the wheel of this cushy, softly-sprung motherfucker, squared your shoulders, sighted across the length of its vast hood, aimed it in the general direction you wanted it to go, hit the gas and hoped for the best--seriously, on the best of days, driving this thing was like navigating a ship on the high seas.
and fuel economy? yeah--you could push the pedal, hear that mighty 455 v-8 roar and literally watch the needle drop towards "e" before it ever started to move.
i used it a couple times for
booze runs, though--boy, did it load up nice. the suspension, such as it was, was never quite the same afterwards.
and then there was the time a dozen of my closest friends and i accidentally backed her into the lake with the tailgate down--the electrical system, such as it was, was never quite the same afterwards.
my most enduring memory of this car: my mother grabbing the keys whenever she walked out the door, sighing and saying to no one in particular, "i sure miss my little cutlass."
salvation would come two years later with the arrival of the ringer in this humble little post.
1973 chevrolet caprice classic
by this time, uncle don had graduated from being a vice-president buying out leases on cars owned by his employer to being the employer buying out leases on his own vice-presidents' cars, which is how ma got the caprice.
and even though it delivered her from the titanic, my mother hated this car from day one (i think for no other reason than because it was black-on-black, and god knows she had a history of distaste for dark-colored cars).
i, on the other hand, loved it--it was big and elegant and smooth and powerful, and as soon as i drove it i swapped her immediately for my new lipstick-red '76 malibu classic, and everybody was happy.
this state of affairs would continue for a year or so, until something unexpected and marvelous happened.
5. 1976 oldsmobile delta 88 royale coupe
'big red,' we called her--she was a total fluke.
what happened was, a vice-president in don's company to whom pat [with whom you really didn't wanna fuck] had taken a particular dislike chose to prove her instincts correct by abruptly quitting and cashing in his stock options--don made all his people shitloads of money, and they mostly crapped on him in return--at a most inopportune time.
[
said vp had good taste in cars, though, and had spent a lot of time carefully factory-ordering this one. my aunt pat, upon seeing it for the first time, decided it would be perfect for my mother.]
when said vp walked into my uncle's office to pick up his final check, don's secretary, barbara, told him to leave the keys to his car on her desk.
when he protested--don always let his departing executives take their cars--barbara flatly reiterated, "don said to leave your keys."
the vp in question slammed the keys down on her desk, snatched his final paycheck outta her hand and stalked out.
don, of course, knew nothing about any of this--all he knew was, his most-recently departed vp had for some inexplicable reason left the keys to his gorgeous, practically-new company car behind, thus providing a new car for...guess who?
pat, laughing, called my mother, filled her in on her machiavellian machinations and said, "act surprised when he calls you with the good news, ok?"
don flew her up to pick up the car, which was firemist red with a white vinyl top and whorehouse-velour interior [identical to the above, minus the pimped-out wheelz]--my mother finally had the car of her dreams.
she called me as soon as she got home: "honey, i thanked everybody, climbed behind the wheel of that thing, stopped at the first 7-11 i came across, bought two packs of cigarettes, a big coke with lots of ice and the eight-track of
saturday night fever, cranked up the volume, thanked god for all that was good and holy and boogied all the way home."
god, she loved that car--and so did i.
see, at 21, having been born, bred and fully-acclimated to the marque, i had come to the belief that (a) there was nothing in this world to compare with the sheer majesty and power of a full-size, liberally-optioned general motors automobile; and (b) this particular car exemplified all that was and had ever been good about GM.
here's the only picture i have of big red [she was mine by the time this was taken], parked next to my brother's graduation-present jeep in the lot of the adjacent uncle-don-supplied condos he and i enjoyed whilst attending college on (you guessed it) uncle don's nickel--god, we were so insufferably spoiled, but that's a post for another day.
[in case you're wondering, this picture was taken not because of the car, but because it was a rare snow day in austin.]
all of the foregoing is what makes the final installment of this post so sadly paradoxical, because after '76, it was all downhill for GM--that's when the downsizing began.
and i'm not just talking mass--i'm talking vision.
6. 1982 oldsmobile cutlass supreme coupe
christmas, 1981--gathered together in tulsa, we watched as my mother opened the box containing the keys to the first truly-new car she had owned since that long-ago day when she and my father had rolled into our garage in the jetstar 88.
and, as always, don and pat meant well--it wasn't their fault that the new car they offered up to my mother was but a pale, scaled-down imitation of the mighty oldsmobiles that had come before it.
i mean, look at that sad, pitiful, downsized, impersonal piece of corporately-designed shit up there, and imagine having to reluctantly climb into its diminished quarters after having spent four glorious years in #5 above, not to mention all the full-bodied cars that had come before it--and trust me, the thing was as cheap, tinny, ungainly and underpowered as it looks.
my mother handled the transition graciously, of course--and, much to my delight, i ended up with big red for the remainder of my college career.
[
what ultimately happened to big red, you ask? she and i ended up participating in a t-bone collision (refreshingly, not my fault) from which we both rolled away relatively unscathed, whilst our opponents--a drunk and his flimsy post-1976 GM piece-of-shit--were (a) badly shaken up, and (b) totaled, respectively.]
of course, several cars have occupied my mother's driveway since, but not a single one has come close to being as distinctive or memorable as even the least of the foregoing.
R.I.P., GM--you will be missed.
