Ride: Lincoln Town Car (Also Rusty Camaro)

I never thought I would be a car person. I always spent all of what money I made on art projects. I drove an increasingly rusted out Camaro for years. When I used to take it on road trips through the deep South, I would be able to tell the depth by whether people at gas stations were asking, “hey, yew all wanna sell that car?” But then I moved to Los Angeles. I loved the city, but I was baffled by the car culture here. People who liked me would avert their eyes if they saw me in my Camaro. The Camaro might have been the ugliest car in the city, but it had a fast engine under the hood and most of the time it ran. Only I got parking tickets all the time. For parking violations I’d never even heard of. Basically, I think they all added up to, if you are going to park a car this ugly on our street, we will charge you accordingly.

When I was a kid, my paternal grandfather used to buy a new champagne Lincoln Continental every year. This was back in the days when it was the size of a continent and the Town Car was a little bit smaller and perhaps more feminine. When I was six, I heard somebody or other saying that the Continental was awfully big and I said that I thought I would perhaps get the more practical Town Car when I grew up. I think this may have been viewed as cute. I was never cute enough to convince my grandfather’s chauffeur to let me play with his gun. When I complained about this to my father, he told me that my grandfather’s chauffeur did not have a gun.

My grandfather grew up very poor in a tough neighborhood and was the only member of his family to get an advanced education. He claimed to have been Golden Gloves in college and, as an older man, he still had a powerful boxer’s build in his pinstriped suits. He drank scotch and smoked cigars. He planned to take a few hundred people on a weekend cruise for his seventieth birthday. He told me duckling with black cherry sauce would be one of the menu choices just for me.

When my Camaro finally gave up the ghost and could not be repaired and could not be driven above 35mph without certain death, I was at a loss. I didn’t know what else to get. I was a disenfranchised artistic punk rocker. But I was also in Los Angeles. I know people in LA will judge you on your ride. But I am not from around here and I do not know the code. I don’t know what a certain car says about a certain person. I asked everyone I knew what they thought I should have. I think maybe they could not tell me because then how could they judge me on it.

My Camaro was ugly. It was rusty. My clothing often got torn getting in and out of it. It had such deep-seated dirt, it was impossible to really clean. It had no working A/C and I often got heatstroke in it. My neighbors would throw smoothies on it because they didn’t like it being parked nearby. Once I actually got pulled over and the police forced me to remove the little voodoo doll which had hung from the rearview since before I bought the car. It stopped working shortly thereafter. I surprised myself by crying when it was towed away for the last time. That Camaro was such a symbol of my chosen road less traveled.

I live three blocks from a Lincoln dealership. After the Camaro breathed its last, I was paralyzed for a month on the vehicle issue. I finally decided to go over to the Lincoln dealership and just test drive a Town Car. I probably wouldn’t even like it. The fleet manager thought it was weird that a little purple-haired girl wanted to try that one. He tried to steer me towards an LS which is the sporty sedan Lincoln is trying to position against BMW and Mercedes. I didn’t even want to try one. I wanted to get in a new Town Car, see that it was not what I wanted, and then go buy another beat up big car from the seventies.

But the second I slid behind the wheel of that black gleaming Town Car, I wanted it so bad my stomach hurt. It smelled like leather and the A/C worked immediately and I drove the fleet manager all over Hollywood and cracks in the pavement which had once caused my Camaro’s bent wheel well to cut the tire below . . . well, I couldn’t even feel those bumps in the road.

My grandfather started a trust fund for me at the same time he began making plans for his seventieth birthday party bash. My grandfather worked very very hard for everything he had. He died of a heart attack before the birthday he was so looking forward to. The trust fund I got when I finished university was eight hundred dollars, not even enough to make a dent in my student loans. But there were more than four hundred people at my grandfather’s funeral and I know he would have liked that, even if it was not quite the party he’d planned.

When I sat in my Lincoln Town Car for the first time, I had the most intense sense that maybe some of the life I had once expected could happen. It made me feel optimistic. I still have no idea what Los Angeles natives make of it. They mumble about it not being the car they would have expected, but they still can’t tell me what would have been the right choice.

And I’ve finally got the car I wanted when I was six-years-old and anything was possible.

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Posted by Amelia G on July 14, 2006. Filed under Blue Blood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry