I used to know a girl in HS, she had a 57 Mint metallic Green with white interior. Was a pretty sweet ride Leon. I like the 55/56 better but it was pretty cool with the fins and all.
My first ride was a '57 Chevy, lavender with a while top, fat whitewalls and full moon hubcaps and white rolled and pleated leather interior. My girl friend at the time even painted the interior lights lavender and when I'd double date and go parking, the back seat couple kept asking me to open the doors so the lights would come on. My crew referred to it as the (slang term for a part of the female anatomy) mobile.
As my Dad would later remark "that was like giving a Zippo to a pyromaniac". My 2nd speeding ticket resulted in the criminal car being sequestered in the back yard, in complete view from my bedroom window. He thought this was psychology. I was 16, he should have already known psychology didn't work on me better than common sense and sound advice. He'd been failing at that for years.
So, I get the criminal car back (I always blamed the car, if it didn't want me to go lickedy split, why did it have an extra 4 barrel?) I was tooling through The Heights, my haunt and my hood, when the red lights came on. The dastardly devil was hiding in plain sight in Halls Drugs parking lot, the place of my employment as an auteur of the soda shop inside where I uttered the lines "of all the soda shops in all the towns in all the world, you have to walk into mine". That was my official greeting and at best got a puzzled look from most people. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the red light starts flashing and I quickly thought 'do not ask for whom the light flashes, it flashes for thee' and I made a split second decision that rivaled all of my previous well thought out bad decisions combined, I decided to out run him.
That invoked the need for the siren as he took off after me as I hummed Robert Mitchum's "Thunder Road" as my co-pilot sat wide-eyed in disbelief that he was first of all in a car with me and I was outrunning a cop. He was only 14 and the drummer in our band and I was taking him home. He was also the only witness, save the one in pursuit, to quite possibly the worst of many poor decisions made by the driver. So many things could have gone wrong that night.
As an aside, that young man became a real estate broker in Little Rock and owns the condo in Hot Springs that we rent when we go to the races and he still tells that story because he told it to my cousin who first contacted him about the rental. He told her that was the scariest night of his life but it was also the most fun.
I take all of the back streets thinking to myself 'this is my turf, I own him' while he is thinking 'this is my turf, I own him'. He is also more correct than I am as he is the cop that gave me my last ticket and once again, I haven't thought this all the way through. The same impulses that grab me in Costco had me back then. That little voice that keeps telling me 'think first, then act' gets ignored like all of the other common sense voices that tried to help me.
I drop Steve off and head back making all the cut throughs, turning my headlights off and on as necessary and make it home and drive into the back yard to hide my criminal car. I have done it, I have fought the law but, cue the song, the law won. Bright and early the next morning, there was a cop at the front door talking to my Dad and in the back yard was another cop, two cop cars at my house and finally the neighbors predictions were coming true as they awaited me being hauled off in shackles and beaten with a phone book for a confession and wishing Little Rock was a larger city.
However, they were to be disappointed because my Dad knew both of the cops and he made a deal with them. Don't arrest me and he will sell the car and they agree to that but not without a stern lecture about how dangerous what I had done was and they could have left out the "clocked me at over 70 mph in a residential area" and I could sense my Dad's eyes narrowing as the "failed to capture me alive" cop described the chase.
The car was sold the next week and me and my crew mourned her passing and it was months before I was allowed to drive another car. The next car was a Chevy Nova II, why oh why did they make the first one? I entered her in the wheelchair races and lost every time.
