What A Drag

                Both my brothers loved car racing when they were in their teens and early twenties.  Our grandfather owned a professional race car and I guess that’s why so many in our family love the sport.  But my brothers Bill and Terry not only were early spectators, they eventually got into the game.  And God help anyone or anything that tried to come in between their beloved auto racing.

               

  Drag racing is a sport for those without millions of dollars to pour into stock car racing.  Our grandfather’s stock car racing hobby cost him a few dimes, but you can be a part of drag racing for almost nothing.  All you need is a car and the willingness to see it crash into a million pieces.  Bill and Terry had no money, so drag racing was where they started their hobby.

                I don’t remember when drag racing “season” was when I was growing up, but I do know it was warm weather, so it must have been spring and summer.  Almost every Sunday my brothers drove their piece of crap Pontiac to one of the tracks in and around Louisville, and about once a month they would drive an hour and a half, all the way to Lexington.  The cars were better, there, and the winnings were higher. 

After the Pontiac blew an engine, they pooled their money and bought another hot rod.  I don’t remember what that car was, but it didn’t last too long, either.  I think the transmission fell out of the car onto the race track.  They went through several cars this way, until Bill set his sights on his dream car: a ’65 Ford Fairlane.  Ahh, what a car.  At nine years old I knew almost nothing about cars (and wasn’t really interested, truth be known), but I could tell the way Bill treated that car that it was something special…especially to Bill. 

                That car was in mint condition.  It was cherry red, with white sidewall tires, which were all the rage, then.  Bill parked it in our back yard, neatly tucked up against the back of our house, covered with a tarp.  That car was not for the street.  Oh, no.  The ’65 cherry red Ford Fairlane had a 289 bored over 30, 4-speed on the floor, and a chrome gear-shift knob.  Even 9-year-old little brothers knew it was exceptional (well, at least the gear-shift knob).

                Bill owned this car outright.  Terry would still go with him to race it, and with this car they more often than not drove to the racetrack near Lexington.  I loved it when I was able to tag along with my brothers on Sundays because Mom always gave us the money to stop at Kentucky Fried Chicken to get a bucket of chicken to take to the track.  It was her little bribe to Bill and Terry to take me along, and it was her little bribe to me to agree to go along. 

                Little kids were very popular at the drag races.  Young guys who had their own pesky little brothers at home suddenly matured by about 10 years when they were at the track and treated us like we were cool.

                “Hey, man (“man” was “dude”, then), you gonna’ race today?”  Then they’d laugh at their own joke.

                I was pretty backwards, socially, and only stared at them, chomping on a fried chicken leg.

                The first five times Bill raced the cherry red Fairlane, it won.  The car could do no wrong, no matter who drove.  At first Bill was so nervous with the car that he let Terry race.  When he won three times in a row, Bill got behind the wheel and continued the streak.  My unathletic, short, stout brother Bill, who had always suffered from asthma and was a very bookish kid, seemed in his element with that car.  Everyone envied him that car, and he was elevated from being Terry’s brother (my brother Terry was a local football hero), to being pretty cool in his own right.  For a time he even dated an Italian bombshell who lived down our street.  And he owed it all to that car, so he treated it better than I’ve seen him treat anything since.

                The problem with having something everyone envies is that someone else is going to want it, too.  Bill knew this.  Even though we lived in an upper-middle-class, safe neighborhood, he was very cautious with the car.  That’s why he always parked it in the back yard against the house covered with a tarp.

Except one night.

                Returning home Sunday evening after another successful day at the races, Bill decided to park the car in front of our house…on the street.  Now who could have guessed that that same night one of those people who envied Bill his car would try to make it his own?

                At about 6:00 AM the next morning all hell broke loose in our house.  Mom was running to the back of the house to Bill and Terry’s room, screaming, “They’re stealing your car, they’re stealing your car!!!”

                Terry, already in his pajamas, was out the back door in a heartbeat, down the steps, and running towards the car to stop the theft .  Brother Bill was a little slower.

                Clad only in white boxer shorts, Bill jumped out of bed and reached under his bed for the nightstick he kept at the ready for just this occasion.  He then ran for the bedroom door just as Terry was out the door and throwing it closed behind him.  Bill hit the door with his face, fell back, then quickly shook it off.  Someone was stealing his dream car and he was not about to let anything stop him from making sure they weren’t successful.

                Bill ran through the house toward our front door.  Mom was standing there with the door open.  Bill leaped across the threshold, turned right for the stairs, dove down the stairs, landed about halfway down, lost his footing, and tumbled down the rest of the way, smacking his head and breaking his right ankle.  Not realizing he was hurt and still focused on his car, he jumped up, and with his first step knew something was amiss due to the bolt of pain that shot down his leg and foot.  He began hopping on one foot, in his white boxers, nose swelling and red, a trickle of blood running down his face, and with the night stick raised high in the air ready to smash down on the thief.

                By the time he reached the car, which had only moved a few feet, Terry had grabbed the guy out of the car and had him pinned over the left front fender.  Bill managed to get in a couple of hits with the nightstick before Terry said, “I got him.”

                When the police arrived to take the guy away, Bill was still standing in his underwear next to his cherry red Fairlane.  He looked like he could have been the inspiration for “The Walking Dead”.  We didn’t have smartphones with cameras back then, and that’s a real pity because all we have left of this incident is family lore.

                But maybe that’s even better.

                

Humpty Dumpty

A Facebook post on a page about the city in which I grew up brought back a memory that fairly illustrates growing up with my father in the 60’s and 70’s.  Not a deep thinker nor calming influence, he.

                Throughout the 60’s the Big Boy franchises were very popular.  As soon as teenage boys got hold of their licenses they headed to our local Frisch’s Big Boy.  The glass-front building was trimmed in red.  In the rear was the drive-in area.  You parked your car in the best spot you could, one that would make sure you were seen and also that you could see everything going on.  The best spots were pretty much “owned” by one or two guys; whenever they arrived on the scene, whoever was in “their” spot vacated immediately to make room for the man in charge.  My brother, Terry, was one of those men.  He was athletic, tall, and was given the best genes in the family.  He was a naturally gifted football player and the local public high school competed against the local private Catholic school for his attendance at their schools so he could play on their team.  Whenever Terry and his friends arrived at Frisch’s, they were guaranteed a spot in the drive-in.

Through Terry my father learned about Frisch’s Big Boy being the local teen hangout.  This is important because my father thought he was way more clever than he really was, and thought he understood teenagers more than he really did (if at all).  So when one night we endured an onslaught of eggs from a carful of local kids, he was certain he was going to catch them and make them pay.

My mother worked 35 years for A&P.  She began in the meat department shortly before the store, just 10 blocks from our house, opened, and retired as head cashier when it closed.  Most of the time Mom walked to work and home again.  But once in a while my father took a night off getting drunk on beer to pick Mom up.  He spent a lot of time at the little grocery store behind the Sears store where he worked, drinking with other Sears employees and L&N railroad employees from the next block.  We got to know the grocery store owners very well.  I used to call, anonymously, and ask them really clever, funny questions, such as:

“Do you have pickled pigs’ feet?”

“Yeah, we got ‘em.”

“Well, put some shoes on and no one will notice!”  Then I’d hang up the phone and roar with laughter.

Another good one: “Do you have Sir Walter Raleigh in a can?”

“Yes, we got it.”

“Well, you better let him out before he suffocates!”  Again, roars of laughter pealed through our house.  Really, I should have been a writer for ‘Saturday Night Live’…I’d be a Billionaire!!!  (Actually, I have the “Hee-Haw” television show companion magazine to thank for these zingers.)

I did this, not because I disliked the store’s owners (actually liked them very much), but because it was one way of dealing with my anger at my father’s drinking.

Anyway, on these nights my father wasn’t holding up the little store’s meat and cheese display case, he, my sister, and I would pile into the car to go pick up Mom after she got off work.  My father always parked on the street, out front of the store.

One very hot summer evening we were all getting into the car.  Dad jumped into the driver’s side, I slid into the middle, and my sister spread out in the back seat.  Mom had some groceries and was putting them into the car when another car, full of teen boys, pulled up alongside ours and lobbed three fresh eggs through Dad’s open window.  The eggs smacked open on top and on front of the dashboard, slowly dripping down into the heater vents, onto the floorboard, and, of course, all over us.

My Dad’s first reaction, as usual, was to blame Mom. 

“If you weren’t so goddamn slow we’d have been gone before they drove by.”

Mom just took it, as usual.

Mom’s first reaction was to clean things up.  She wanted to go back into the store to get some rags to clean up the car, and us.  But Dad would have none of that.

“Get in the goddamn car; I’ve gotta’ go find these little sons of bitches.”

“Oh, Glenn, how are you going to find them?”

“I know where they hang out.  They’ll be at Frisch’s in a few minutes, probably bragging to Terry about what they just done.  I’ll bet they’re friends of his.  Hell, he prob’ly put them up to it!”

Terry and my other brother, Bill, are children from my Mom’s first marriage, so of course they never could do much right, as far as my father was concerned.  My Mom was forever trying to take up for them; my father was forever blaming them.

Dad drove us home, practically shoved us out of the car, and took off for Frisch’s to catch these local snot-nosed thugs who pelted our nice Ford station wagon with chicken embryos.  Mom wanted to clean the car, first, but Dad said no.

“I’m going to make those little bastards pay.  They’re going to clean every inch of this goddamn car and make it look brand new.”  We stood on our front-porch steps, watching Dad frantically throw the car into reverse, practically taking out the utility pole that stood in front of our house, jammed the gear shift down to D, and took off towards Frisch’s.  Wow. 

I pictured a carload of bloody teens, returning home and trying to explain how some man had beat the living shit out of them.  Because if my father had found those kids, that’s exactly what he would have done.  He had an irrational temper, and many times in my life did I witness it come to its tempestuous fruition, not the least being the time he was playing football with my brothers and fell and cracked a rib.  He broke a coke bottle against the house and threatened to slice both my brothers open at the necks.

“They did that on purpose!” he said, finishing off another beer.

The car sped up Grandview Avenue, barely slowing down at the busy intersection with Breckinridge Lane. 

Two hours later Dad returned home, dejected and exhausted from all the anger.  He couldn’t find the kids that perpetrated that heinous crime, but he had threatened about a dozen kids to call him and tell him if they learned who had “destroyed” his car.  Yeah, he understood teenagers really well.

He came into the house and went right to bed. 

The next day was a Saturday, so everyone was off work or out of school, except Mom.  That’s when Dad decided the car should be cleaned.  But by then the eggs had dried solid, almost melding into the plastic of the beige dashboard.  We scrapped and scrubbed, scratching the dashboard in places, until we had removed as much as possible.  It wasn’t until the following winter, when Dad first turned on the car’s heater, that he realized we hadn’t completely removed the eggs from the car.

“Goddamn kids!”

Merrily We Roll Along

                If you want to get to know a place, its people, learn the customs, etiquette, mores, then take the bus.  A bus may not be the quickest method of transportation to your destination, nor the most direct, but there is no quicker way to immerse yourself in the local community and learn about its people.  From the drivers, the routes, even the buses themselves, to the bus riders, taking a bus may be the single best way to know a place.  And it’s ALWAYS an adventure.

                Whenever I get on a bus I try to have my seven pesos in the palm of my hand.  The bus drivers are so experienced at the payment transaction that they have the bus ticket in their hand before I reach them, so I press the peso coins into their hands as they hand me the ticket while simultaneously entering the flow of traffic and shifting gears.  If I have coins smaller than pesos (which I often do in order to get rid of them), then I am prepared for the less than thrilled look I get from the glaring bus driver.  Money is money, right?  But when you see the wobbly, open coin box in which the drivers must organize the coins, you will understand their dislike of these tiny centavo coins. 

The coin box is a simple square box with dividers running up and down.  The various coins fit in the various columns made by the dividers.  This box sits on a metal stand attached to the bus floor.  Many the time I have seen coins go flying after the driver took a tope with too much speed.  So then he steers the bus with his left hand, keeps the pedal to the metal, and bends over to collect the silvery specks from the bus’s floor.  I have more than once seen my life flash before my eyes during one of these occurrences, certain we would end up splattered across the back of the bus directly in front, becoming a gruesome addition to the Julio Iglesias concert ad, or being thrown through the window of the corner OXXO.

When we first arrived in Merida and began taking buses to the mall, the movies, or Costco, there we many times when my lunch did not remain firmly seated in my stomach – nor my own body, for that matter.  Some of the drivers are downright loco!  I’m never surprised when I see a bus accident.  Combine a large, metal bus with a powerful engine, the narrow streets of Merida, and a driver doing his best to get us all into heaven a little early (okay, I’ll probably go to Hell, but you get the idea), and you have a situation fraught with fright. 

There are basically two types of bus drivers:  The first is methodical and slow.  He stops at stop signs (a rarity for many Yucatecan drivers), keeps both hands on the wheel except when shifting, and makes gentle arrivals at his stops.  He is Ward Cleaver from “Leave It To Beaver”: Confident, kind, smiling, and all-knowing. 

“Do you pass Walmart?”

“I’ll stop right in front for you.”

Just the kind of driver you want running things.

The other is Jack Black on acid.  This guy must be paid by the fare, because it is his sworn duty to get around as many other buses as humanly possible, swerving the bus in and out of traffic as if he were driving a Maserati in his attempt to be the first to reach the next bus stop and its waiting riders.  He has a CD player belting out Techno-Pop from a very loud speaker on the dashboard.  He’s got a gallon of tea sitting between his seat and his side window, a bag of pork rind skins between his legs, and he’s steering the bus between all available lanes while stuffing skins in his mouth and taking a swig of tea as he grind-shifts gears and talks to his buddy sitting on the dashboard.  And when he stops to pick up or let off passengers (and he HATES to stop to let someone off the bus – such a waste of time!), he hits the brakes 10 feet from the stop;  the bus’s metal brakes screech like the best horror-movie scream queen and the bus hits its mark like it hit a brick wall.  God help anyone standing and not strapped to one of the hold bars.  I’ve seen women experience instant facelifts as their bodies were propelled forward and their skin left at the back of the bus. 

For the most part I seem to be oh-so-fortunate enough to always board a bus with a Mr. Black driving.  And I know that when those exit doors open I better hurl myself onto the sidewalk or the doors will quickly close and I’ll be stuck, half in and half out of the bus as the driver slams the gas pedal to the floor and I’m left hanging there, my head slapping every street sign as the bus speeds down the street.

These buses are something in and of themselves.  They are basically metal boxes sitting on a metal frame.  Whether these boxes are actually bolted to the frames I cannot say for certain.  One time we had to swerve around a bus in the road whose rear axle lay about 50 meters behind the rest of the bus.  I was not in the least surprised.  Some of these buses look and feel as if they have been on the road for 20 years.  The seats are graffiti-laden plastic sitting on metal frames that are usually bolted to the floor.  I say usually because I have actually sat in a seat that rocked back and forth as if I was on a roller coaster.  The entire two-seat assembly should have given up the ghost long ago, but, no, it kept rocking back and forth as the bus again and again jack-rabbit accelerated and brick-wall stopped.  One time there were no seats in a space where clearly there should have been.  I sat in the following row and when I looked down I was looking through the floor of the bus to the street. 

Windshields are often…no, usually broken.  (Don't let the photos fool you.)  Some have a crack or two while others are downright shattered.  Between the broken glass and the bus’s stops painted on the glass, I cannot see how the drivers can see through them.  And when it rains the drivers must be going on memory. 

The passenger windows are also often broken, and sometimes pieces of cardboard have replaced the missing glass.  And air conditioning?  Forgedaboudit.  If you are fortunate enough to board a bus with a/c, it will either be dripping water down onto the seats below it at the back of the bus, blowing hot air, and/or making so much noise that you’d rather be sitting in a classroom in the open desert as someone pulls their fingernails down a chalkboard. 

Recently a new bus company put 82 brand spankin’ new buses on the streets of Merida.  The first morning, one of them was totaled.  That afternoon I think I rode that bus to Costco.

I often wonder about the economics of city transportation in Merida.  I mean, who can make any money on just seven pesos (about 40 cents) per rider?  I suppose the city subsidizes the bus companies, who are all private, and I am very grateful.  We go to the movies for 40 cents each.  We go to the mall for 40 cents each.  We can even go all the way to a little pueblo, Dzitya, for 40 cents each.  So it is a service we appreciate.

The best part of riding Merida’s buses are the people.  They are wonderful.  High school students ride the buses home after school.  They are never impolite, loud, or rude.  When an elderly woman boards the bus they will rise and offer her their seat.  We also see a lot of young mothers with their babies.  The babies are never, ever crying or unhappy.  I can’t figure it out, but it is the truth.  Not like when we get on a plane and see a baby come on board and we have that “oh, no” dread.  The babies on the buses in Merida are content, happy, and full of wonder.  They look around to take in their surroundings and will smile at you if they make eye contact.  I wonder why they are different.

And no one stinks!  How can that be, you ask?  Well, I don’t know.  All I know is that I have been on many a bus that was crammed with people.  Every seat was filled, and the aisles were shoulder to shoulder.  The drivers will cram as many riders onto his or her bus as humanly possible, and often as inhumanely as possible.  But I have never had a bad experience with my nose.  I might have a case in court for frottage, but at least they smell good.  Everyone is very clean – perhaps more so than me – and almost everyone wears perfume or cologne.  Now I know a lot of people do not like perfumes or colognes on people in public places, but I very much appreciate it.  Makes for a very pleasant experience.

One characteristic I find very endearing and enlightening about people in the Yucatan is their generosity.  About twice per month we happen onto a bus where a street performer will be performing on the bus for coins.  We have seen singer/guitarists, magicians, and clowns, and I am always astonished as to the number of riders who pull out their coins and drop a few into the performers’ hands.  And that is true everywhere in Merida; Meridians who don’t have much themselves are very generous with what they do have.

We have learned several bus routes in our years in Merida.  We tend to use the same routes as we tend to need to go to the same places.  Our next goal is to expand our knowledge a bit and discover what other parts of Merida we can travel to on a bus.  We just have to make certain we bring our cups and hard hats.