My Life With Cars

By Bruce D Snyder

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My first wife’s Uncle David owned a car dealership. A WWII combat vet, he was ‘shell-shocked,’ which showed up occasionally when loud noises like a backfire would cause him to dive for cover. Not uncommon in the 50’s but unusual by ’71.

At any rate, Uncle David, iron grey tight wavy hair, a roundness that belied his solid frame, a bluff and hearty manner, opted to sell Volvo’s and Renault’s, an odd combination since Volvo at that time had a reputation for safety and reliability whereas the Renault was on par with the AMC Pacer, a wretched conveyance that became fodder for stand-up comedians. David recommended the Renault station wagon, the R16, a Kelly-green lozenge with capacious trunk and the hint of an engine. He gave us a deal and off we went on our move to Cleveland.

The R16 provided me with a series of life tutorials: the function of a torque wrench; the advantages of standard wheels and rims; the satisfaction of replacing points, wires, and plugs; the irony of owner’s manuals. Eventually it posed a challenge that even I could not master: an intensifying smell of gasoline in the car. A local dealer told us how the gas tank weld was failing. And there were no replacements in the US at the moment. For some reason repairing the weld was not an option. Uncle David was flummoxed and a bit defensive.

We sold the ‘16 and bought a VW bug and loved it until winter. The boys at VW apparently had not considered the joys of driving in a savage Lake Erie January. Or perhaps Schleswig-Holstein was a land of shocking bikinis, palms, and toucans. Or possibly designers Erwin Komenda and Karl Rabe were seers who were planning automobiles for the Cleveland Climate of the Future when climate change will have rendered Lake Erie a subtropical sea.

With no working heater or defroster and vestigial wipers, the bug’s driver, encumbered by parka and balaclava (the latter frequently confused by Ohioans with kielbasa), bumped and bounced onward with the window rolled down. This was in order to reach out and apply a squeegee to the windshield when the last speck of visible road was obscured by snow, grunge, ice, and condensation.

One frigid February morning we couldn’t find the car. It is interesting how many times two people with advanced degrees can walk around a block before understanding that they didn’t forget where they parked. It had been stolen off the street. I wished the brigands good luck and found a white Plymouth Duster with only 85,000 miles on it and newish tires.

An esthetic calamity, the Duster was actually a great car. Would a Landau roof have made it look acceptable? A question for the aged. Automatic transmission, rear windows that cranked down all the way, a radio, power up the gee-gee, and a trunk that could easily conceal a body or two. After installing a rattling after-market air conditioning unit, the blessed vehicle took us to Fort Benning [now Ft Moore] in Columbus, Georgia.

There the sun-drenched campus of Martin Army Hospital echoed with the cries of Special Forces training. The road to the base, Victory Drive, was known as Victory Dive for its adult stores, brothels, bars, pawn shops, and used car lots. Then there was Hussey’s Tire Jungle, a name, coupled with an image so appropriate, that fifty years later I can remember their tv ads featuring an apparently naked woman, her best features obscured by a post and rail fence.

Viet Nam era Ft. Benningites inhaled air enhanced by layers of exhaust expelled from low flying aircraft, choppers, armored vehicles, hummers, and legions of internal combustion engines pleading for valve jobs and mufflers. Smoking was universal. Lungs needed to toughen up or get out—which many did by turning into a sort of cancerous leather that made their owners x-rays look like mine-fields.

The most popular building on the base was the PX liquor store outside of which ranks of idling pickups and station wagons, bearing irritable motorists hunched over steering wheels, waited to be loaded up with cases of beer and whisky. Wine had not yet been discovered in southern Georgia and in any event would have been considered a soft drink. Cocktails or a pack of smokes were a quarter each at the Officer’s Club. This supported my view that you had to be seriously intoxicated to jump out of an aircraft.

Scholars have since devised programs to calculate and automatically update the average daily consumption of ethanol by Ft. Benning active duty and dependents, but that data was not available to the medical staff in 1972. We used crude indicators, like the numbers of hospital admissions for withdrawal seizures or DT’s, or the frequency of family shootings, to calculate how drunk the base was. We kept a bottle of Il Tramonto Limoncello in the ER. If the patient’s eyes were the color of the liqueur we could confidently diagnose jaundice.

An award ceremony wrapped up my medical corps experience—seven doctors standing in a row given green folders and commendations after some perfunctory remarks by someone—I forget who. I got back home and opened the folder; there was a small green pin and a document signed by Richard Nixon. “Distinguished Service” it said. I stared at it, my wife was out and anyway we weren’t speaking at the time. I ate a ham and cheese sandwich, wrapped the remains with Nixon’s congrats, and made a fine backhand shot into the garbage. I don’t know what happened to the pin.

With two years of medical corps experience under my belt I was ready to buy a suit, tie, a new car, and meet my destiny as a doctor for civilians.

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Bruce D Snyder, a retired physician, lives cautiously near Minneapolis where zinging bullets provide a nice breeze to help with the latest heat wave. He is married with three children and various grandchildren and works on the public health effects of climate change. He writes to try and forget the news. His work has appeared in Spillwords Literary Magazine, Red Rose Thorn Magazine, Literally Stories, Who Let the Stories Out, and Witcraft.