Scratch the Car

There were many adventures that took place in the cars that sat under the carport and many tales to tell about that little white car. It wasn’t fancy or cute but it cruised town just fine and got me from place to place. Cruising, by the way, was the main occupation of every teenager in Longview when I was a kid. I don’t when, why or even if it went out of fashion, but in the mid-sixties, it was the thing to if you were in your teens and you had any kind of four wheel transportation at all. I am very sure that in the new millennium the term “cruising” has a completely new and different meaning than it had when I was a teenager. Way back then by “cruising” we meant a bunch of kid, didn’t matter what gender usually just the group that you happened to be hanging out with at the time, would pile into a car and drive from one drive-in restaurant to another. I know it sounds completely purposeless, but behind it all was a very important social structure and meaning. The main purpose was to see who was in the other cars driving around town, and the social and economic structure of both local high schools could be discerned by who was driving around with whom. There seemed to be a circuit that everyone drove that was unique to the town you lived in, in our case it was fairly precise. There weren’t that many drive-ins around town but you had to at least hit the main one’s: Captain Yobi’s on 15th in Longview, A & W Root Beer on Commerce, DJ’s, and finally ending up at Captain Yobi’s in Kelso. And then came the real inventive part, once we’d hit all of those places we’d turn around and replicate the same trip over and over again until we either ran out of gas or found something more interesting to do.

One night I was the A&W Drive-In when I was supposed to be at the library studying.I was with my friend Diane and we were waiting to meet up with a guy she was dating. I had told the boy I was dating that I had to go to the library to study for this big test (same as I’d told my folks), when all of the sudden the guy I was dating pulled into the parking lot. I was lucky that we were parked facing the street where cars entered so that I could see him long before he saw me. My quickest response was to throw the car into reverse and head for the alley in back of the Drive-In as fast as I could. This was a great escape plan until I heard (and felt) the passenger door scrape the orange post as I scurried out the back way. I knew that would be the end, I’d have to ‘fess up to the folks and figure out a way to pay for whatever damages I’d caused. Diane and I were both befuddled until we pulled into a well-lit Safeway parking lot and saw that the scrape wasn’t anywhere near as bad as we thought it was, no dent, no major damage. So we slunk home. I dropped her off at her house and drove quietly through the alley and into the carport . Since the car sat with the driver’s side exposed to the world and the passenger side next to the fence, it was easy to just leave it be for the night and wait until daylight to assess the damage and fix what I could prior to any explanation that would have to be presented to my parents. The next morning Mom and Dad went off on some errand or other and I crept out to look at the car. It took a went rag and some detergent to get the orange paint off to where I could finally see that there was no major damage, just one tiny little scratch that could easily be explained away. So I cleaned up the car, and crossed my fingers. It took about a month but eventually Mom came in the house one day and said, “did you see the scratch on the passenger door?” I said I had no idea where it came from and that maybe it had been there for a long time (a month is a long time isn’t it?) and Mom just kind of shrugged and said she hoped Dad wouldn’t see it and get upset. He didn’t to my knowledge because I never heard another word about it. I think those were always the major kinds of lies that I was prone to, the omission rather than the commission kind. Leaving out information about an accident was less of a sin than deliberately causing a catastrophe and then lying about it. Is that denial or what?