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| The car for hairy-chested he-men. |
Louis Shalako
Insecurity. When I was eighteen years old, I was
working at Fibreglas Canada. It was in Chemical Valley, a union shop, and my
old man, the epitome of fiscal restraint, had co-signed a loan for me at the
Polysar Employees Credit Union.
This is how I knew he was proud of me—finally. For
however long that might last, and it probably wasn’t all that long, looking back…
The loan was for fifteen hundred dollars, to be paid
off at the rate of $75.00 per month over two years.
This is how I got the 1971 MGB which plays such a
prominent role in this memoir.
Willy was the most insecure person I ever met,
although Stoney might have run a close second with the whole James
Bond-slash-Casanova ethos going on there. Some of the real criminals had
somehow accepted themselves, which was interesting—the whole lifestyle had
become natural to them and they didn’t worry what anyone thought of them
anymore.
Poor old Willy had real bad acne as a teenager. He
wasn’t real big, he was not an athlete, he wore thick glasses from an early age.
The thick and frizzy red hair, parted on the side and piled up on top, swept
over in a big slanting wave, did nothing to help. His nickname in elementary
school was Fungi, a name he hated and
which would provoke a fistfight every time it was used…it was one he could not
just let slide, and so the real bullies, who are basically just cowards that
are bigger than their victims, knew after a while that they could always
provoke him to a fight, a fight which they would almost surely win—especially
when there were two or three of them.
Which he surely should have known, but that part
didn’t seem to matter.
A more confident person might have been able to
control that, or to get over it, but Willy couldn’t.
As a friend, we learn where all the buttons are, and
avoiding those buttons becomes second nature after a while. We got along
fine—what with all the model rockets, and airplanes, and cars and sailboats and
kayaks and stuff. We had our common interests.
When I bought the MG, Willy was still driving his
parents’ Chevy station wagon. He’d cracked up their 1973 model. This is how
they ended up with a later model of the exact same car…
He and Johnny had borrowed the thing out of the
driveway. His mother didn’t drive, his dad was out on the Imperial Sarnia, a
small oil tanker plying the lakes for many years, where he was the pump master.
He’d be gone for weeks at a time, even when he was home, he was still pump
master, so it was a quick visit, one where the man still had to do 12-hour
shifts down at the Imperial Oil docks along the St. Clair River. His mother
would take a cab to bingo, where she would be until at least ten or ten-thirty
p.m.
Willy was showing off, and doing a burnout just down
the street and around the corner, he ended up going onto someone’s lawn and
smashing into the front porch, there the car hung up and there was just no
getting away. Johnny ran home, at first I thought he was joking, but no. No, it
was true—
His mother never believed that I was basically just
sitting in their living room, watching colour television and cable TV, which we
did not have at home at the time. It was probably easier to blame me. Right?
Yes, for two hundred dollars, Willy had bought a
motorcycle. It was basically just a power unit, a frame, and all the bits and
pieces, wheels, forks, handlebars, clutch and transmission, a handful of
cables, from the shop teacher at the old Central Public High School. This was
located on East Street back in the day—coincidentally, just across the street
from Germain Park and well within walking distance for pretty much all of us.
Hell, even I went there for a while. About three weeks
as I recall.
Willy wasn’t stupid, far from it. He put that thing
back together, he had it running, and he got his motorcycle license before very
long.
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| Built from parts, all in black. |
He was so fucking proud of that thing, he somehow got
it over to our house on Christmas Eve, this with ice and snow on the roads. He
admitted he’d gone down once or twice, but
oh, well, eh.
It was a two-stroke engine. It was a Kawasaki 500
triple, which may have been a marvel of power and efficiency at one time, but
he was too impatient to prove himself, to ever bother with properly breaking in
the newly-rebuilt engine. With predictable results, in the sense that the rings
weren’t properly run in and it puffed a blue, oily smoke that really was
excessive.
Willy couldn’t help himself. When he came over to my
place, he’d turn from Russell Street onto Bright St, eastbound. He’d pop
wheelies—seriously, winding her out for two blocks, jamming on the brakes as
late as possible. He’d sit there at the intersection of Bright and East Street,
blipping the throttle like it was the World Championship or something and the
start flag is all set to drop…
When the road was clear, he’d pop the clutch, do
another two or three wheelies, blapping out big clouds of blue smoke all the
way, and then do a full-acceleration run, on the 400-block of Bright Street,
before jamming on the brakes and pulling up into our driveway.
It was the same thing when he left…here’s this guy,
revving the piss out of this horrible old black motorcycle, which was the
biggest thing in the world to him. He’s doing a big burnout and popping the
front wheel off the ground with every shift, certainly in the lower gears. And
the fucking neighbours hated him—and by extension, they weren’t too fond of me
either, but no one could control that guy. No one ever talked any real sense
into a guy like that, and Willy was no exception.
***
Bob had bought himself a Triumph TR-6, I had the MGB.
Willy’s parents finally agreed to co-sign a loan, only two conditions: he had
to keep a job, (any job), and it had to be from General Motors and the local
dealership.
Willy ended up with a Chevy Vega, which on the face of
it, had an overhead cam engine, an aluminum block, and 140 cubic inches. He
ended up working at an auto body shop in Petrolia, which sort of justified the
need for a car, right.
We were talking cars one day, and he asked why I had
bought the MGB. I told him I liked the styling. When you looked out over the
hood, you saw the gently rounded hood, the tops of the rounded fenders…the view
is very similar to the TR-6, or a Spitfire, or a GT-6, a Fiat Spyder, or any
number of cars from the era. My mistake was to tell him it was a like a
beautiful woman, and from that point on, the MG was a ‘girl’s car’, but really,
it was just a little more civilized than the rather flat-planed TR-6, (which I
also liked), and if truth be told, the Vega had all the same styling
influences. The Vega had all those same soft curves and fairly good proportions
for a small car…none of that mattered to good old Willy. I learned to take it
all with a grain of salt with that man.
I had my little girlie car and he had his big,
hairy-chested Vega…right.
When I went looking for cars, there were no TR-6s to
be had. Also, Bob paid a lot more to get a 1974, he paid $2,995.00 from a car
lot somewhere. The TR-6 was narrow, noisy, leaky, and built on a frame. When
you went over railroad tracks or hit a bumpy corner, the car would flex, the
doors and hood and trunk would rattle, whereas the MGB had a unitized body, a
monocoque with small sub-frames, but it was a much stiffer and much more
liveable vehicle.
None of this meant anything to Willy, my best friend
for many years.
He was the one with the world’s second largest
inferiority complex, after all, he was the one with all the little
insecurities, sexual or otherwise.
Where one person, such as myself, might be a bit shy
around girls and women, guys like Willy took it way the hell in the other
direction, thinking that being a lecher was somehow proof of their masculinity.
Fuck, Willy, everybody likes sex—it’s not like you
invented it.
In that sense, he had a touch of that same vanity that
obviously plagued Stoney, in the dark hours of the night, when surely even he must
have had the occasional moment of introspection. He was wildly overcompensating
for something. Both of them, really.
More than anything, Willy craved a kind of attention.
***
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| Bob got himself a pretty nice car, his was in British Racing Green. |
In some old documentary, it was said that a
well-trained pilot in an inferior aircraft could beat a badly-trained pilot in
a superior aircraft. That’s true enough in aerial combat, with the Japanese
naval pilots of WW II arriving at the front with less than a third of the hours
of training of those who had attacked at Pearl Harbour. While the Japanese Zero
was initially superior to the Grumman Wildcat, U.S. pilots were getting
hundreds of hours of training. They had learned superior tactics, their planes
at least had armour plating and self-sealing fuel tanks. The analogy only goes
so far: there were also a hell of a lot more of them.
It is also true that in Formula One and other racing
series, drivers have won races in cars that really shouldn’t have won. There
was some attrition in the front rows. Some other cars were badly set up, and
someone at the rear of the pack had gotten everything just right, including
proper pit strategy and a few lucky breaks along the way.
But for Willy, it was not the machine—it was the man, and of course he was referring to
himself when he said that. At some point, this is the guy who’s in an Austin
Mini, which he’s built up with bolt-on parts to produce a little more power,
he’s chasing and trying to pass a BMW M-1, north of Oakville on Appleby Line.
Sure, you can catch up on the corners, but then that other driver clearly isn’t
an idiot, and it’s not worth stuffing an exotic sports car into a ravine just
to impress some young guy in a clapped-out Mini. In spite of the roll cage,
reclining bucket seats and four of the Mean Mother headlights across the front…it’s
still a piece of shit, Willy.
Yes, Willy was the man, the better man, racing his scruffy
Kawasaki 500-triple through a new subdivision, right here in Sarnia, trying to
pass his buddy Rick on the inside of a turn, for surely Willy had the guts to beat a brand-new Suzuki GS-1100.
For after all, it is the man that counts…not the machine. There
was a real streak of jealousy in that guy, but when he hit a patch of sand and
gravel, slid into a fire hydrant and ended up with three steel pins in his
ankle, even then I doubt if the man
ever really learned anything from it…
All that blue smoke coming out of the engine must have
blinded him to the truth. All that vanity got in the way of having a smidgeon
of common sense.
***
A few years have gone by. My old man and I are sitting
on the front porch, and there’s a familiar roar down at the end of the street…
It’s Willy, in that fucking Mini of his.
Uh,
oh,
says my old man…here comes Mad Dog.
I had to laugh.
It was a good name for him, and of course he loved it.
Sure enough, he’s racing up through the first two or
three gears…approaching the house…cranking the steering wheel to the left, he
pulls real hard on the handbrake, the car spins, now going backwards, and it
slides to a stop at the curb, in front of our house, and just tucked in behind
my old man’s latest Volvo, a 1980 sedan with all the options, including
overdrive, a sunroof, leather seats.
Of course the fucking neighbours hated Willy.
What a fucking nut-case.
***
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| ...still trying to outrun Mad Dog Willy somewheres... |
Please don’t think I don’t have a few insecurities of
my own, because I have, and I did, and I probably still do.
I struggled for years, and I also failed for many years.
I failed to even try, for some years. We beat ourselves up for an awful lot of
shit, ladies and gentlemen, and while some of what happens to us is within our
control, there’s a few things we can’t control, and of course our attitude,
towards ourselves, is extremely important. I say that, without being able to
explain just exactly how that works, but trust me—it does. It does.
The way we talk to ourselves is pretty important to
our overall well-being, and I suppose, in some way, it will be reflected in our
results.
One has to wonder just what exactly was going on in people’s heads, sometimes.
So. How did Mad Dog Willy drive that 1974 Chevy Vega?
How do you think he drove it—
And I promise not to bore you to death.
END
Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. He’s always got something up for free, for example The Handbag’s Tale, the original short
story that inspired The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series.
Grab yourself a free copy of One Million Words of
Crap, available from Google Play.
My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).
My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due
to content. 18+)
My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Fourteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Seventeen.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
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