Little Red Chevette

I have a recurring dream about a car. Not just any car, either. It’s a dream about my Very First Car. Over the years, I’ve wondered why on earth I keep having this dream. I certainly don’t go to bed thinking about it.

Yet, every so often, I find myself rattling along Highway 5 on the way into Centerville from our farm in Exline. In the dream, I’m trying my damndest to pass a tractor hauling an enormous bale of hay hanging precariously from a giant metal spear.

I’m practically standing on the accelerator, shouting “shiver me timbers!” like a pirate, not in the original nautical sense, but because the car’s quarter panels are engaged in sympathetic vibration with the four-cylinder motor revving at maximum RPM—which, if I’m not mistaken, was roughly forty-five.

I finally slip around the tractor and back into the right-hand lane—my heart pounding—just as a Peterbilt roars past in the opposite direction, lights flashing and airhorn honking, while I see the farmer on the tractor, now behind me, solemnly tip the brim of his Pioneer Seeds baseball hat at me in the rearview mirror.

It’s the same every time. I wake up from the dream, momentarily confused, wondering, “Why in the world am I driving that piece of junk again? What happened to the Mercedes in my garage?”

With age, I have graduated to much more reliable—and reliably bougie—vehicles. The kind with GPS navigation, self-driving capabilities, and cupholders that maintain beverage temperature, lest my coffee go lukewarm or my Coke Zero suffer tepid indignity.

It’s ridiculous that my sleeping brain keeps pulling this rust-bucket out of my subconscious garage and taking it for a spin.

But it was my first car. And, it was bright red.

My little red Chevette.

*

In early 1985, I’d turned sixteen and gotten my first Iowa driver’s license. About a year before this, my father had taken ownership of a large auto body repair shop in Centerville that had been in business since 1968, coincidentally the year I was born. Because of this, Dad had access to any number of lightly wrecked vehicles from junkyards around the region, so he decided to fix up a used 1980 Chevy Chevette and hand me the keys.

It arrived at the shop the previous autumn looking like, in his words, “a four-door dent.” To my sixteen-year-old eyes, though, she was a real beauty.

I recall the nights I’d be serving time as Dad’s after-hours janitor at four bucks an hour. I’d pause by the car, parked next to a stack of old Michelins, and lean on my push-broom. With my index finger, I’d trace little circles in the grinding dust on its hood, daydreaming about all the places I’d go once this baby was fixed up.

The car was held together mostly by Armor All and Bondo—but it did come with Chevy’s optional air conditioning upgrade.  However, if you were foolhardy enough to actually turn it on, it would instantly shave about 10 mph off the car’s current speed—especially uphill. Truckers might call this a form of “engine braking”; in the Chevette it was more like “Freon-based velocity dampening.”

At some point early in my ownership, I discovered that the ignition lock on the steering column did not actually lock much of anything. Oh sure, I could put the key in and start the car like normal. But . . . one day I stumbled onto the fact I could also turn the ignition cylinder without any key in it and it would cough to life as if nothing was amiss.

“Huh. That’s a novel security feature,” I thought to myself.

Thankfully, the key for the door locks worked, so I was not entirely at the mercy of any teenaged petty larcenists who might be lurking around the high school parking lot. When I brought this to Dad’s attention, he just shrugged as if to say, “Well, yeah, but it’s free. What did you expect? A Ferrari?”

*

After a couple of days driving it, I found that if I took my hands off the wheel the car tended to veer to the right, towards the gravel shoulder. Eventually, I mentioned this tidbit to Dad, whereupon he promptly announced he’d take it to the body shop the next day to have the “front end aligned.” I was new to the whole car ownership thing and had no clue what he was talking about, but I accepted it without question.

In order to test the severity of the alignment issue, he decided to drive it to town, drop me off, then take it to the shop to work on. As we both got into the car the next morning, it became clear that Dad had, in fact, never been in the vehicle before—at all. He was a considerably larger man than I, so when he attempted to shoehorn his bulky six-foot frame into the driver’s seat, he suddenly exclaimed, “Jesus . . . room for your ass and ten gallons of gas!” while trying not to garrote himself with the seatbelt.

Ah yes, my father. The poet laureate of Exline, Iowa.

I grinned but said nothing. After a few attempts to coax the engine to life, he finally managed to get it running and backed out of the garage. On the way into town, he’d center the steering wheel and then let it go for a moment, trying to ascertain which way the car tended to drift. He quickly discovered it was more like a swerve—straight for the ditch to the right.

“Criminy,” he muttered loudly, hunched over the wheel. “This damned thing drives like a wrinkle on wheels.”

He didn’t come right out and say it, but I could tell he was wondering why in the world it had taken me several days of driving what amounted to a mechanical sidewinder before mentioning the tiny alignment problem.

Honestly, I hadn’t realized it was a problem. Like I said, it was my first car, so I just accepted it as standard operating procedure that one had to continually steer the car slightly to the left at all times.

*

Once the car’s alignment issue was fixed, for the most part it proved to be reliable transportation. I was always looking for a reason to drive it. Taking Grandma to town for breakfast at the Bluebird Cafe, picking up groceries for Mom, chauffeuring my sister to her gymnastics class. It was adulthood with automotive training wheels.

With my first real summer job as a lifeguard at the city pool, I earned the money I needed for gasoline and minor maintenance.  I learned how to change the oil and oil filter, how to replace a battery, how to keep it reasonably clean and waxed.

During the summers throughout high school, it took me to work and home, but also to the local Pizza Hut and the video rental store at Lake Center Mall north of town with my friends. When I wasn’t working at the pool, I practically lived in that car.

The only minor indignity was having to let my sister ride shotgun to school with me during the school year. I learned to tolerate the arrangement, although she frequently objected to my choice in music. During my senior year, I don’t think my cassette of The Pet Shop Boys album “Please” ever left the spiffy little Kenwood car stereo Dad had installed for me as a Christmas present. After a while, she began to groan every time she heard the opening synth on “West End Girls.”

In fact, that album led to the only time I ever got pulled over by the Centerville Police. On our way to school one morning, as I drove down Drake Avenue, we had gotten into a screaming match over how many more times I was going to play that damned song. I was so distracted by the argument, I accidentally slow-rolled through a school stop.

You might know, a cop just happened to witness this and fifteen seconds later his lights were on and I had to pull over. Jill was dead silent and pale. The officer was quite professional, asking me if I’d noticed the school stop. As I shot Jill the subtlest of side-eye, I admitted I’d missed the sign and apologized for being distracted . . . by my sister.

Luckily, he just smiled and let me off with only a verbal warning. When I rolled the window back up and pulled away, Jill let out a sigh of relief.

“I’m so sorry,” she said with a guilty tone. “I was scared to death. If he’d given you a ticket, I knew I’d have to beg him to take me into protective custody.”

At that, I burst out laughing. Not only because it was funny, but because it wasn’t entirely incorrect. We drove on in silence to school and the next day, I played Fleetwood Mac.

*

In the summer of 1987, a little over two years after I first took ownership, I was driving with my friends who worked with me at the city pool. We were headed into town for reasons that I have long since forgotten, but most likely we were headed to Pizza Hut and then to somebody’s house to watch movies on their brand-new VCR.

As I pulled out to the left from a side street onto 18th Street (one of the town’s main thoroughfares) I was evidently so engrossed in our conversation that I neglected to look both ways sufficiently.

BAM!

The right front fender looked like a wad of red crumpled Kleenex. For some reason, the engine had also stopped cold.

Mercifully, nobody was hurt, but for a moment we all sat in stunned silence as the Kenwood—oblivious to the minor tragedy that had just unfolded—continued cheerfully playing “Suburbia.” The engine was dead, the fender was folded into automotive origami, but the Pet Shop Boys soldiered on.

At least I think it was the Pet Shop Boys in the tape deck, but sometimes I like to imagine it was Prince singing to the tune of his hit song, “Little Red Corvette”:

Little Red Chevette

Baby, you’re not real fast . . .

Yeah. I guess I should have known, by the way the car had popped sideways, that it wouldn’t last.

I ran to a nearby gas station and used the pay phone to call Dad. He said he’d be right there and hung up. The police soon arrived and I paced the accident scene while the officer spoke first with the other driver, jotting furiously in his little book. Probably something along the lines of “teenaged driver strikes again…” My friends sat on the curb hugging their knees, as I imagined the furious lecture my father was about to deliver when he arrived.

Once he did, though, he just got out of his car and sauntered over.

“You kids okay? Nobody hurt?” he asked.

We all nodded mutely.

He didn’t say anything else for a minute, just slowly walked around the car, taking in the damage, his auto body repairman’s brain already silently tallying the cost. Finally he spoke:

“Cripes, you did a number on it son, that’s for sure. But, if you’re ever in another fender-bender, back up and hit it again real good so I can total the SOB.”

He flashed a rueful grin at me and I knew everything was going to work out.

Dad was always that way. If you failed to hold the work light in just the right spot over the engine bay while you were helping him, he’d cuss a blue streak. If you forgot and left the space heater on in the basement overnight during the winter, he’d regale you with the old “you kids must think I’m made of money” chestnut.

If you accidentally set fire to the kitchen while making Eggos in the toaster? Oh well, that’s what insurance was for.

I walked back over to my friends on the curb to see how they were. My best friend Rob looked up and asked brightly, “So? Are we still going for pizza?”

I had to hand it to him. He always kept his priorities straight.

*

Dad ultimately decided the Chevette wasn’t worth the trouble of repairing, so he sold it to a scrap dealer for parts.

Over the years, I’ve owned many different cars. But, out of all of them, the Chevette is the only car I have ever dreamed about.

Maybe it’s because it was the first machine that made the world feel reachable, and because my father’s hands were all over it—in the Bondo, the alignment, the tape deck, the gentle forgiveness after I wrecked it.

Not because it was a great car, that’s for sure. Not really even a good car. I mean, let’s face it: the interior always smelled vaguely like old gym shoes and stale French fries.

But it was my first car. My “’vette.”

My little red Chevette.