the simca

.

back from austin yesterday.


not a pleasure trip, but it had its moments--dinner with my mother, my sister and her boyfriend on my last night in town, for instance.


end of a great meal and we're relaxed around the dinner table.  marcus and i are of an age and, being texas boys and all, naturally the talk turns to high school and cars.  his first was a '64 ford galaxie 500--and mine?


"'71 corolla," i start to reply, but i'm cut off in mid-sentence by my mother's flat pronouncement:


"no, michael--you're forgetting the simca."


i blank for a second, and then . . . oh yeah, the simca.  she was right--for better or worse, it had been my first car.


i turn to her, astonished. "ma, i had that thing for maybe all of three weeks--how could you possibly . . ."


and then it all comes flooding back, and i start laughing.  "oh yeah, i guess you would remember the simca, wouldn't you?"


she doesn't join in. 

picture it:  tyler, texas, summer of 1972

it was a faded periwinkle blue--a ridiculous, boxy little thing that looked pretty much the same coming and going, but i was inordinately proud of it.  yeah, it was butt-ugly, but it was a car, goddammit, and it was all mine.

even back then $200 didn't buy you much car, but when (a) you're a 15-year-old kid making $1.25 an hour slaving away part-time at the local sizzler and that's all you've managed to accumulate; and (b) an older co-worker suddenly sees a way to rid himself of a problem for just the amount of money you happen to have--well, you do the math.

it started smoking before i even got it home, but i didn't care--i washed and waxed it with loving care, started it every morning and counted the days until i turned 16 and got my license.

meanwhile, there was driver's ed to get through--and that particular summer, it was held not at the high school which i would attend in the coming fall, but at the other one way on the other side of town.  my friend bruce and i carpooled--his mother took us one week, my mother the next.

and lemme tell ya, that shit started early.  and while bruce's mother was invariably made-up and dressed to the nines in the morning, my mother generally was not--with her, it was usually pajamas, a bathrobe, hair wild and askew, coffee cup in one hand and cigarette in the other--not a pretty picture under the best of circumstances.

i don't remember which week it was when i talked her into driving us over in the simca--she didn't want to do it; she hadn't driven a stick in years and she mistrusted the damn car, but she did it for me, god love her.

we made it over there fine; it was only after she dropped us off, turned around and attempted the climb back up the hill that the thing died.

it took all eight of the boys in our driver's ed class--each one reassuring my mortified mother that she looked beautiful in her bathrobe--to get the simca going fast enough so that she could pop the clutch and get it started.

she put-putted off in a cloud of smoke and i forgot all about her.

it was only later that i found out that the simca died again halfway home, and that she had to get out and walk two miles--barefoot, in pajamas and a bathrobe, hair wild and askew, coffee cup in one hand and cigarette in the other--over to rachel and j.c.'s house and call a tow truck.

the simca never recovered, but my mother (mostly) did.