WHERE YA BEEN?

It’s not easy to be a car geek if you spend your winters in the Midwest. Snow, obviously, is a problem, since it makes all cars equal in terms of acceleration, braking, and cornering ability. But it passes, soon as the snowplows do. Then you have to worry about the salt, the great consumer of sheetmetal, leaving its icky white patina upon everything.

And it’s not like you can wash it off yourself. Your hose bibb is frozen solid. As is your hose, since, like the genius you’re not, you forgot to drain it before packing it away for the season. So you can’t even run a hose from the sink–not like there was any danger of your wife standing for that in the first place.

It’s even tough to get anything done under the hood, particularly if your garage is a one-holer like mine, where your car must share space with the recyclables, the lawn chairs, and the bike that somebody’s still a little too bwauk-bwauk to ride.

So the tundra-bound car geek is stuck indoors with little to do except look back and look ahead. The cruel powers-that-be know how to manipulate this sad turn of events. All the new-car shows in the Midwest are in the first two months of the year. Ohh, this is a cruel trick. You spend all day ogling and fondling the finest new machinery on the market, then step back out to the parking lot to fetch your years-old salt-roasted flivver, a bag full of sales brochures in your hand. An enterprising finance company should set up a booth about halfway back to your car. They’d get away with usury.

Then there’s always the great, festering blob of literature you already possessed. I’ve been picking through some of it and, well, let’s just say I now know more about the US auto market from 1974 to 1993 than any human being ought to.

But that’s not really any fun, either. Winter, for the Midwestern sheet-metal addict, is the time to engage in a little fantasy buying–not of the Barrett-Jackson variety, but rather, it’s a time to sharpen up one’s personal automotive lust list. After all, spring is coming, and soon the roadsides and classifieds will be littered with everybody’s spring garage cleaning.

For most enthusiasts, the “want list” is so long that, if you bought one car off the list every six months, you’d still have to live to 170 just to get most of them–and that’s assuming that you’ll be able to find an Audi Quattro a hundred and forty years hence. So I suppose it’s fortunate that most of our lists are filled with cars which fit one of three categories:

1. Cars we couldn’t afford if we lived to be a million years old;
2. Cars we probably could afford, but could never shoehorn into our lives; and
3. Sensible, affordable cars which we somehow inexplicably still want.

My list in category 1 is somewhat endless. Category 2 includes all the pre-safety law cars that I couldn’t justify owning, since a severe lack of parking means that I’m stuck owning only what can be driven to work every day. Also, the old van I want is out, since most pre-late-80s vans don’t have rear shoulder belts, and the Spousal Unit won’t permit such a vehicle until the kids are old enough not to need car seats.

Fortunately, my particular enthusiasms fall mostly into Category 3 anyway. You see, I have a predilection for uncool cars nobody wants. In fact, I’ve only had one car in my entire life that anybody ever gave a second look, at least in an approving fashion: a 1982 Pontiac Grand Prix, which was my first 2-door and my first rear-drive car. And it did look great. But several symptoms of imminent mechanical disaster led me to trade it on an ‘86 Grand Am, which was pretty much a chronic mechanical disaster, though I did once give a ride to an Aussie gerontologist who thought it was wonderful.

Otherwise, my driveway has traditionally been the Mark Hasty Home for Wayward Automobiles. And there are still several forgettable, regrettable cars that I can’t dis-jones myself from.

Through it all I’ve come to realize that what you drive says nothing about who you are, but it says a lot about who you think you are. Thus I’ve come to regard my enthusiasm for boring, unloved cars as an extension of my love for trash culture. Anybody can love a ‘65 Mustang; it takes a special person to tend to the needs of a ‘83 New Yorker.

But today something came to me which has changed all the rules of this game. I saw a news clipping about a small metal-fabricating factory in my home town which just got a contract to build some products they’ve never built before. I know this place well; I’ve been driving past it most of my life, since it lay almost halfway between home and my grandparents’ house. And I always knew that, when I saw that sign, the trip was half over, no matter which direction we were going.

Even today, not having lived in that town for a decade and a half, the sight of their white flourescent sign makes me feel good. And why not? It’s something I’ve been seeing my entire life. It connects adult Mark to pre-school Mark, and there are danged few things left in this world which can do that. But one of them is a ‘73 Ford LTD station wagon. I saw a picture of one the other day and instantly my “want it” meter was pegged.

Why? Even though any family can use a beast of burden to haul home things just too big or too messy to fit into the “good” car, a ‘73 Ford wagon is way more Category 2 than Category 3 for me. It comes out of that dismal time period in which Uncle Sam had smacked every car with the Ugly Stick, while tying their engines down with battleship chains. Not only does this dream wagon of mine handle like a boat, it goes through petroleum products faster than anything since the Exxon Valdez. Seriously, they were good for at most 12 miles per gallon. Highway. And that’s if you drove it like a parade float.

But it was my dad’s company car when I was 4 years old, and sometimes on Fridays he woould bring it home and we’d all pile in and go to the steakhouse out by the Target store and sometimes we’d go shopping afterwards and we wouldn’t get home until 9 dang 30, which needless to say was way past my bedtime. The Greeks call this cathexis, the process by which a mundane object begins to acquire extraordinary value to a person because they have extended their very selfhood to make a place for this object in their lives. And obviously, I’ve cathected this road yacht because it has the power to remind me of being a very small child excited about a night out with the family. What’s ordinary and regrettable to most of the world unlocks the powers of the trans-mundane for me.

That also explains why I’ve got a thing for ‘73 Gran Torinos, since one of those was the first Category 3 car in my life. Right after I got my driver’s license I found a gorgeous ‘73 Gran Torino 2-door hardtop for sale in the town where my grandmother lived. It was copper with a chocolate-brown vinyl top and a light-beige vinyl interior, mag wheels, a 351 Cleveland engine, and I probably could have bought it for $1200. If I’d had $1200. Which I didn’t. Now, 15 years later, when it should be the cars of 1990 which take me back to my senior year of high school, it’s actually the ‘73 Torino which gets me there the fastest. It was, after all, the first car in my life that I could almost afford.

I’d gladly take back the car I actually drove back then, a 1987 Chevy Nova which my dad had bent twice. (I don’t think he liked being reminded of his mistakes every time he got in the car.) That thing accepted all the abuse I threw at it–passenger overload, constant full-throttle acceleration, the flagrant use of excessive amounts of paste wax–and never complained. If the Torino reminds me of what could have been, the Nova reminds me of what was, most particularly that wonderful experience of getting in your car and driving to a distant place all by yourself just because nobody could tell you you couldn’t. You can only experience that for the first time once, but a Nova would probably help me remember what it felt like a little more clearly.

There’s still a lot of inexplicable Category 3 stuff on my list, cars I’ve never owned and have never had any significant interactions with. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a late-80s Mercury Grand Marquis, de-chromed, stripped of its vinyl top, lowered about an inch and a half, painted jet black from stem to stern. It’s beyond my technical capabilities, however, which are pretty much limited to checking the air in the tires. But I imagine that I’m not the only person who’s got this idea. As cheap as late-80s Detroit iron is right now, somebody’s working on a lowered Merc with an attitude.

And I suppose some day I’ll see a picture of one, and it’ll take me back to the winter of ‘05 when Serena was just a tiny baby who’d only recently learned how to giggle . . .