The fervor of automotive brand loyalty in the 1950s must puzzle today’s young car enthusiasts no matter how much they love their Honda tuners. It was an era when the wraparound windshield was considered a major technological breakthrough by the American car industry. So what was the Chevy versus Plymouth versus Fix-Or-Repair-Daily argument about? And partisan issues were intra-corporational as well. There were Impala families and Bonneville families, and there may well have been Eldorado Brougham families, but the kids in my neighborhood would have beaten up the kids from those families. Boys of ten or eleven got in heated arguments about the relative merits of cars that were, even then, largely interchangeable and would soon become completely so. I am trying to imagine how I could explain, to someone born in 1999, the fine shade of difference between owning an Oldsmobile and owning a Buick. And what’s an Oldsmobile anyway?
I was a Buick brat, born that way, no choice in the matter since my dad sold them for a living. My pulse still races when I see portholes on a fender, though I prefer them on the fender of a Maserati Gran Turismo S rather than on the fender of a Special, Super, Century, or Roadmaster. But I’m getting ahead of myself, passing on a curve, narratively speaking.
In the summer of 1977, I was pleased to hear that Tom Sargent, publisher of Car and Driver’s brother magazine Cycle, wanted someone to drive his 1956 Buick Special four-door sedan from Florida to Los Angeles.
I’d never written for Car and Driver, but on the strength of some drinks I’d had with its new editor, David E. Davis Jr., and the inebriated Oldsmobile/Buick quarrel that had ensued, I volunteered. David E. assigned the photography to the late, and much missed, Humphrey Sutton. Humphrey and I met at a midtown Manhattan restaurant to sketch our route. Just as we were entering the restaurant a taxi came to an abrupt halt, and a motorcyclist behind it came to a halt that was not quite abrupt enough. Rider and bike slid up under the Checker. Considering what publication Tom Sargent was the publisher of, Humphrey and I should have taken this event as an omen rather than an excuse to drink at lunch.
The Buick Special had been stored for the previous few years in a hangar at Sargent’s father’s home in Crescent City, Florida. Humphrey and I flew to Daytona Beach where Mr. Sargent, senior, picked us up in his Cessna 180. He took us thirty-five or forty miles northwest and landed on a grass strip, coming to a stop right in front of where he’d rolled the Buick onto his lawn. Rolled, not driven. Tom had neglected, until the night before, to inform his dad that we were coming to fetch the car. We almost got the Buick started a number of times before we removed the mouse nest, and the mice, from the carburetor.
Due to Tom’s tardy phone call and Humphrey’s and my vineous lunch in New York, not much forethought had gone into this expedition. We drove away from Crescent City with an ancient set of filed-down points in the distributor, no tools, no manual, not even a flashlight, and a map of America showing only railroad lines. We did have a Styrofoam cooler full of beer.
“For obvious reasons we called the Buick ‘Sergeant Dynaflo,’” I wrote in my original Car and Driver piece. But the obvious may need explaining to anyone under forty. Buick was noted for its unique automatic transmission of the Dynaflo name. This was a hydraulic-fluid-filled device with variable pitch blades that delivered power from the 322-cubic-inch V-8 to the rear wheels smoothly, quietly, and, most of all, very slowly.
For other obvious reasons it became clear that the Buick was going to have to be driven from coast to coast on two-lane roads. I no longer remember what became obvious first—the Shake ‘n’ Bake front-wheel shimmy at fifty miles per hour, the Dynaflo acceleration that meant an inability to reach freeway speed without using a mile of shoulder as part of the merge lane, or the temperature gauge’s slow but relentless minute hand movement toward hell.
It’s odd to think back and realize that this Buick was only twenty-one years old at the time. A twenty-one-year-old car was an awful lot older then than it is now. Just as, to my mind, a twenty-one-year-old boy is an awful lot younger. At least in the matter of cars, this is not merely old-guy perception. I have a garage full of daily drivers bearing about two decades of vintage. My Porsche 911 will be twenty next year—a few tire and brake pad changes and one valve job and it’s as reliable as it was new. (Never mind that the valve job cost more than my first three cars put together.) My wife’s 1989 BMW 3-Series convertible is the same way. The top was replaced in the mid-nineties and I had a little suspension work done to take out some clunks. A 1984 Jeep Scrambler, bought new, is still my year-round farm vehicle. All its knobs and switches have fallen off, and it leaves grease patches on the garage floor, but you’d have to drop a thirty-foot oak on it to kill the thing. I’ve done that too, and it’s still running. Next time Al Gore complains about the wasteful and unprogressive nature of the automobile industry, tell him to go find the car from his daddy’s days in the Senate and drive it to … I can think of several places.
The Buick Special was, however, beautiful: two-tone turquoise and white with seat covers to match. The weather was splendid. People smiled and waved to us as we rolled through the small northern Florida towns (which, in 1977, snowbirds had not yet left their droppings on). At blue highway speeds the Buick was a big, steady pleasure to drive. We went 150 miles like that, sipping beers and returning salutes. The Buick ran perfectly right up until it didn’t.
When the engine went out we were in a godforsaken stretch of piney woods on County Route 98 somewhere around about, but nowhere near, Tallahassee. All of a sudden the car was too quiet, and we weren’t going as fast as we should have been. We figured it was the old set of points.
There was a shack about two hundred yards down the road with two broken gas pumps and a sign that said BEER. It was half overgrown with creepers in the front and half sunk into what, these days, would be called wetlands in the back. The scene resembled an EC horror comic Swamp Thing title panel, but it was the only building we’d seen for twenty miles, and it did have that sign that said BEER. We pushed the Buick there. I went inside to borrow some tools.
About a dozen hard-visaged, definitely unfriendly, and possibly cannibalistic Southern types were in there, all eyeing me suspiciously. The bartender was a big, nasty-faced old guy with an enormous paunch, a flat-top haircut four inches high, and a cigar turned backward in his mouth. (I assume, but am by no means certain, it was unlit.) I got the idea he didn’t like my looks either, but he loaned me a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench.
Humphrey was all business under the hood, tinkering with this and tapping on that. I thought maybe he knew what he was doing until I realized he couldn’t find the spark plugs. Buick used to put these lid things over them. After we’d pried one off and given ourselves some spark-plug-wire electrical shocks, we figured maybe it wasn’t the old set of points. Maybe it was vapor lock. If you leave vapor lock alone it gets better. This was exactly the kind of mechanical problem that Humphrey and I were good at solving. We decided it was vapor lock and went inside to get a drink.
Humphrey was from England so he thought this bar was quaint, charming in its primitive way, a real piece of Americana. I’m from Ohio and I thought we were going to get killed.
The South was still The South in 1977. And the Florida piney woods weren’t full of good ole boys in Ralph Lauren Polo shirts who’d made it big developing gated (and de-gatored) golf course communities. The Florida piney woods were full of the kind of rednecks who were beginning to fill that bar—none of them an improvement on the rednecks who had been there already. This was only five years after Deliverance hit the theaters and only eight years after the premiere of Easy Rider, which I had seen three times when I was trying to be a hippie (and which—from my present perspective of a dad with daughters, surveying the good-for-nothing young men on motorcycles who might want to date them—has a happy ending). I mean, Jimmy Carter had carried the South in ‘76. They were so primitive down there that they hadn’t even evolved into Republicans.
And then there was Humphrey’s English accent, a posh accent, one might even go so far as to say a plummy accent. It was a nice accent to have—in England. In the Florida piney woods it was an accent that might not sound, well, you know, manly. And Humphrey, after he’d had a few drinks, began to speak—as English speakers the world around do, especially in foreign climes—more loudly. When Humphrey started talking a little louder, people started to look at us a little funny. The louder his talk became, the funnier the looks we got. And just when I was sure we were going to get killed somebody asked if that was our old Buick out front with the hood up. We said yes. The room went silent. Then there was, I swear, an audible sound of cracking smiles (revealing a good number of missing teeth). Even the bartender’s expression turned faintly cheerful.
“That old Buick quit on ya?” someone else asked. We said yes. There was a rush out the door. Trunk lids popped up, tool cases snapped open, and in minutes our engine compartment was packed with fearsome drunk Florida crackers undoing fuel lines, pulling off plug wires, and wrenching on things that I couldn’t see while beer bottles piled up in front of the grille.
Not that any of them were able to get the car started. Humphrey and I went back in the bar and began drinking at a table with the local game warden and José, an immense half-Indian, half-Mexican who’d been the 1959 and ‘60 Rocky Mountain Professional Wrestling Champion and whose presence in the Florida panhandle was never adequately explained. The game warden said that he himself had had a ‘56 Buick. “Had one just like it,” he said. Several other people said the same thing. In fact, on our entire trip, it was hard to find a man over forty-five who said he hadn’t had a ‘56 Buick. And they were fondly remembered, to a car. “You couldn’t break ‘em with a stick,” said the game warden. “That car’ll run forever.”
Humphrey said he’d settle for tonight.
I asked the warden what the BEER place was called. “Well,” he said, “sometimes we call it the 98 Inn and sometimes we call it the 98 Tavern, but mostly we don’t call it anything at all. Hell, you’re thirty miles from nowhere and forty miles from nowhere else.” Then he went off and got into a fistfight.
By midnight Humphrey and I were very drunk. We were talking to a fellow named Jack who was twenty-two and looked like he robbed gas stations to get his heart started in the morning. He had a sharp Appalachian face with various scars and a row of absent dentation. He’d recently shot himself in the stomach over something to do with an estranged wife. He showed us where the bullet had gone in and where it had come out. Now he was living in a trailer with another lady and her five kids, but they were all off at her mother’s canning something, so he invited us to stay with him. We were sure he was a homicidal maniac but it was that or sleep in the car.
Jack turned out to be a perfectly amiable guy. It was all we could do to keep him from persuading us to take a little vacation and spend a week down there bait fishing for razorback hogs, or whatever it is they do on vacation in the Florida piney woods. And he did persuade us to share his quart jar of moonshine.
Ouch, we woke up. Our friends of the night before had done a fair amount of damage helping us out. There were a lot of loose hoses and wires. Fuel lines were draped over the fenders and the contact arm on the points had been bent double. Humphrey decided that he’d better work on this himself, so he squatted atop the valve covers and sweated and diddled in the distributor for the next two hours. Finally, Jack rounded up yet another local, who took a big screwdriver, jammed it once into the points, slapped on the distributor cap, and started the car first try. “Had one just like it,” he said.
Humphrey and I drove south until we found the ocean. We rented a motel room for the day and had showers and a lot of Bloody Marys. And then, God knows why, we went to a water park.
Humphrey thought this was quaint, charming in its primitive way, a real piece of Americana. I thought, between our hangovers and all the Bloody Marys, we were going to drown.
Then we went to Sears and bought some tools that must have seemed at the time as though they would be useful: a large hammer, three unusual sizes of Phillips screwdrivers, a pair of tiny Japanese pliers, and a pry bar.
Just after sundown we got back in the Buick. It was running perfectly now. We drove to Mobile with no problems except that Humphrey turned out to be scared of insects they don’t have in England, which is most insects. He nearly put us into a ditch when he got a June bug down his shirt. Also, we couldn’t figure out how to work the instrument panel lights so the driver had to open his quarter-ton door every time he wanted to check the speedometer or the gas gauge and this would cause the driver to accidentally yank the steering wheel, sending the car careening across the road into oncoming traffic and making all the water that had leaked out of our busted Styrofoam cooler slosh into our shoes.
We figured that if the points weren’t screwed up before, they certainly were now, after being jammed with a big screwdriver. But only one junkyard in Mobile had a ‘56 Buick, and it had kudzu growing up through its engine compartment, and the distributor was missing anyway. Eventually the junkyard owner found a garage that had a new set of points. We were on our way there when the car quit again. This time we knew it was the points. I hitched to the garage and came back with their tow truck. The driver (he’d had one just like it) unhooked the fuel line to the carburetor. There was a vicious reptilian hiss. “Vapor lock,” the tow truck driver said. We had a new set of points installed anyway and spent the rest of the day battling vapor lock all across Mississippi.
Back in the 98 Tavern, José the wrestling champion had told us that the one surefire cure for vapor lock was to put wooden clothespins all along the fuel line. We thought that sounded pretty stupid, but by the time we got to Hattiesburg we’d bought two bags of them and had stuck on as many as we could fit. When we stopped for gas in a little town, the station owner opened our hood to check the oil and the half dozen loafers hanging out at his station burst into hysterics. So the clothespins had to go. I thought we should give them another chance. Maybe they’d start to work or something. But Humphrey said he drew the line at getting laughed at if we died in a wreck.
We now had the process of unhooking the fuel line and curing our vapor lock down to about one minute, but we’d quit getting vapor lock. And we were just congratulating ourselves when the water temperature hit the bad peg and wouldn’t come down. We had to spend an hour and a half cooling off in Louisiana’s Kisatchie National Forest. There is absolutely nothing to do in Louisiana’s Kisatchie National Forest except sit around and look at the one kind of conifer that grows in the Kisatchie National Forest. Let us call it the Kisatchie cedar. Whether it is rare or endangered I do not know. I do know that after an hour and a half it cries out to be clear-cut.
The engine overheated again as soon as we started the car, and we limped into Clarence, Louisiana, where the proprietor of the sole filling station told us that the Buick’s thermostat had “shit the bed.” He didn’t have any parts or even a garage but he gave us the phone numbers of all the local mechanics and the use of his phone. I called everyone in a thirty-mile radius but no one had a hand free to do the work. Finally, I got one fellow who said, “Hell I had a ‘56 Buick, and I just tore the damn thermostat out. Threw it away. If you ain’t got a gasket, slap some damn cardboard in there. Damn thing’ll run forever.”
I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know where thermostats made their home. But the filling station owner did. He made a gasket out of the back of my reporter’s notebook and bolted it into the water hose connection where it stuck out on every side, little spiral binding holes and all.
The overheating was fixed, and while we drove toward Dallas that night Humphrey and I debated whether to have the thermostat fixed as well. Buick must have had some reason for putting a thermostat in besides cold mornings in Kansas. Even in Africa or Southeast Asia, where it’s always hot, cars have thermostats. At least we thought they did. Maybe thermostats provide back pressure or something in the water pump or somewhere to prevent, you know, surge and gurgling in there. Maybe we’d really need one in the desert where surge and gurgling could be expected to be at their worst. Without a thermostat all the water might swish around too fast in the cooling system, running through over and over again at hundreds of gallons per minute and turning into superheated steam until the whole car blew up like the steamboat Sultana. We didn’t know.
The new thermostat—plus labor, fresh antifreeze, a radiator flush, a “water pump inspection,” and several other things I couldn’t make out on the bill—cost almost (2009 readers, prepare yourselves for a Dr. Evil moment) fifty dollars.
Out beyond Dallas somewhere we came upon something called the Cadillac Ranch. A sculptor (soi-disant) had planted ten Cadillacs nosedown in the empty prairie. The Caddys—1951 through 1960—pretty much covered the history of tail fins. About half of each car was sticking out of the ground, on a slant calculated so that the truly enormous fins of the ‘59 Coupe de Ville formed an equilateral triangle with the earth. Voilà, art. Humphrey and I inspected this cultural treasure and found beer can and condom package indications that the backseats of the sculpture had been used for traditional backseat purposes. You don’t see that so much with, for instance, a Rodin.
When we got up toward Wichita Falls we realized we needed a drink and, also, the engine was overheating again. So, as it turned out, was the air-conditioning unit in my motel room. And the desk clerk told us that this was a dry county, and it was fifty miles to the nearest bar or carryout.
The Texas panhandle has to be one of the most featureless landscapes on earth. They have sightseeing buses that take you into Lubbock to see the tree. Or they should. For lack of anything better to do we stopped at a junkyard in Quanah or Goodnight or someplace where the owner had a lot of old Buicks parked in a field. He said our overheating problem had to do with the cylinder head design. “They’d all overheat,” he said, “all those ‘56 Buicks.” The next person blamed it all on hot oil in the Dynaflo transmission. Somebody else said the radiators were “too thick and not wide enough.” Another said they were “plenty thick but too high.” And one man in Barstow claimed that the problem was “this shitty weather we’ve been having for twenty years.” But not one of these people was shaken in his belief that a ‘56 Buick would “run forever.”
Actually, just then, our ‘56 felt like it would. The temperature gauge was strangely somnolent, and we didn’t have a single major problem all day except for the hour or so when our fuel pump was spraying gas all over the hot exhaust manifold.
For thirty miles, approaching Amarillo, Humphrey and I were complaining that the city stank of gasoline. And Amarillo does have a lot of refineries. But the gas smell kept getting worse for thirty miles, leaving Amarillo.
When it eventually occurred to us to stop and look under the hood we found that the tiny rubber gasket under the bolt that holds the fuel pump cap in place had collapsed and gas was squirting out and boiling up in little spitballs on the headers. I have no clue why this didn’t turn us into a rolling Hindenburg, not even after Humphrey gasped in dismay and let the cigarette drop out of his mouth and fall right in there. I forget what we used to stop the squirting until we’d bought a small rubber washer for two cents at a Tucumcari hardware store. Very possibly it was chewing gum.
There’s a beat-up old road, Route 104, running northwest out of Tucumcari through the desert to Conchas Lake, then up into the Cornudo Hills and across a grassland plateau to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Sante Fe. I’d flown to the West but I’d never driven over it. This little 150-mile byway awed me to imbecility. Humphrey said I was dangerous behind the wheel—bouncing up and down in the seat and jabbering about purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain and pointing out all the cows. We had to stop in Sante Fe to have a beer and settle me down.
Other than that it was just another day, with the engine overheating all the time and a new vapor lock problem that happened only on the edge of precipices or in the middle of blind curves. And even when the Buick was running right it was, truth be told, a very ordinary car. Once the museum-piece novelty had worn off, driving it was about as exciting as driving a new Buick. Or it was until we got lost down some lousy dirt roads south of Sante Fe and the car just sort of fell apart. The shocks and springs got Parkinson’s disease, and all four wheels broke loose and headed every way but straight. At twenty miles per hour you would have thought we were racing the Baja 1000.
Humphrey had a theory about suspension harmonics or something and claimed that everything would be much better if he just drove faster, which made everything much worse. At least the Buick took to getting vapor lock in front of bars and taverns in all the little towns we went through, and that was good. But by the time we arrived in Albuquerque we were beginning to doubt the wisdom of this enterprise. In fact we were sick to death of the trip and the thing it rode in on.
Saturday we were drunk all day in Albuquerque.
Up in the Nacimiento Mountains we had a truly perplexing mechanical problem. We’d stopped for lunch in Cuba, New Mexico. When we came out of the restaurant the car wouldn’t start and there was no vapor lock hiss when we opened the fuel line. Humphrey thought maybe the fuel pump had lost prime and was pumping backward. This seemed as likely a story as any. When we took the top off the fuel pump it was blowing bubbles in there. That, Humphrey told me, was an indication of backward fuel pumping. I took his word for it. Humphrey tried to suck some gas up the fuel line. That didn’t work so I tried until I began to giggle from the fumes and get sick.
Speaking of which, the restaurant where we were stalled was halfway along a mile of road between an Apache reservation and a liquor store. The Apaches coming from the reservation paid no attention to us. But the Apaches returning from the liquor store found our huffing and puffing of gasoline fascinating. After an hour we had a John Wayne movie’s worth of Apaches surrounding us. Whether they considered us harmless lunatics or thought the opportunity to sniff Mobil premium was a prize worth capturing we could not determine. In fact, we couldn’t get much dialogue going with the Apaches at all. Every now and then one would come from the liquor store to our engine bay and announce, “Me, Indian.” Then he would act like I had and giggle and get sick. (I realize that “Indian” was, even in 1977, not the sensitive term of ethnic description. But my code of journalistic ethics forbids me from reporting that any Apache said, “Me, Native American.”)
Humphrey found a length of radiator hose, which he put over the fuel filler neck and blew into. What this was supposed to do I don’t know, but it certainly made him look funny. More Apaches giggled and got sick. After that Humphrey insisted on taking the fuel pump apart. I’d never seen the inside of a fuel pump. (It isn’t wildly interesting.) Humphrey claimed that the fuel pump was doing all a fuel pump should. He put it back together. Giggling, sick Apaches were closing in. I tried the starter and the engine caught and ran like nothing had happened, thank God.
We got out of Cuba, over the continental divide, and into the huge Navajo reservation that takes up almost a quarter of Arizona. The landscape opened up, impossibly vast and void, and it dawned on us, for the first time really, that when the next thing broke we might be in serious trouble. We’d go forty or fifty miles without seeing another car and the Buick was overheating worse than ever. We’d bought a five-gallon jerry can in Tucumcari and whenever the gauge went all red we’d stop and one of us would get out and splash down the radiator while the driver gunned the engine. This would hold us for two hours, or one hour in the midday heat, or ten minutes on an uphill grade. We had no business being away from the amenities and attentions of the interstate in this car. We knew that. But we’d started out driving on the back roads because the Buick couldn’t make turnpike speed, and these little bypaths had been so quaint and charming in their primitive way, and with such quaint, charming people and so many quaint, charming places to break down in front of and buy beer in that we’d forgotten ourselves and now we were in a real piece of Americana indeed.
Between Kayenta and the Grand Canyon we went a hundred miles without seeing any sign of human life besides each other—and the signs of life in these two humans seemed precarious. Then the sun went down and for the first time since we’d left Florida the temperature fell below seventy degrees. All of a sudden the Buick was a different car. It seemed to exude an aura of strength and dependability, almost as if it might run forever. I was driving, so I put my foot down and—in a Dynaflo way—we took off. If I pushed the old Buick enough past fifty mph all the jitterbug and hootchie-kootchie in the front end went away. Maybe Humphrey was right about “suspension harmonics” (whatever they may be), at least on smooth pavement. And upon smooth pavement we were. We went sixty-five, seventy, eighty miles an hour down these twisting roads, whipping along for all the world like a freshly minted Mercedes-Benz.
We were pulling out onto Route 89 just over the Utah border when some fellow in a late 1960s Datsun Fairlady roadster, of all things, buzzed by doing eighty-five or so, and I lit out, lumbering after him. It was wholly dark by then, and a misty night, and I wonder what the guy thought when he saw that wall of chrome well up in his rearview mirror. He was being overtaken by the past. And the past went by at a hundred miles per hour with door handles higher than his head and two inches of travel left under the accelerator. For me it was a truly exhilarating moment of rapport between man and machine. Then we got vapor lock and the engine conked out.
We had to go almost a hundred miles up into Utah to find motel rooms. I celebrated America’s birthday by awaking in a condition that those who’ve spent much of their lives on the road in America will recognize. I had no idea where I was. I looked around the anonymous room and there was nothing—no notepad, no matches, no phone book, no area code on the phone—to indicate my location. I turned on the TV. It wasn’t working. Usually such disorientation is momentary, or, at worst, you just can’t remember the name of the woman snoring next to you. But there was no woman in this case, and my amnesia lasted through shit, shower, and shave. I was beginning to suspect I’d died in my sleep and gone to motel purgatory when I thought to open the door. There was the Buick. Purgatory was not an option.
It was raining. The Buick wouldn’t start for a while. Something had gotten wet under the hood and we had to wait for the rain to let up and mop around under there with a motel towel before we got it going. Ten miles down the road it began to rain again and we discovered that we didn’t have any windshield wipers. We’d been hearing obscene sucking noises from the brake pedal for a couple of days and we knew there was a problem somewhere in all the tubes and hoses of the Buick’s Medusa-head vacuum assist mechanism. But everything seemed to work and we didn’t realize that the windshield wipers ran off this system too. I could get the blades to move a little when we were headed uphill and acceleration increased the vacuum pressure. But downhill deceleration did the opposite. The only way to maintain any vacuum pressure at all was to keep my right foot pressed on the accelerator while using my left foot to try to slow down. Since the drum brakes on a ‘56 Buick are about three times more effective in front than they are in the rear, the back wheels began to slip around. It was not a recipe for safe driving. And, naturally, we were treated to clearing skies up every incline and drenching squalls down every slope until we got back into the desert and began to overheat.
We played it safe through Arizona and Nevada, sticking to Interstate 15 almost to Las Vegas. Then Humphrey insisted that he had to see the Valley of Fire. So we filled the jerry can and headed down a maze of gravel roads into that red sandstone wasteland. I suppose it’s very beautiful, if you think you’re going to live to tell anybody about it. We were completely alone, and it was 110 degrees in the shade. I was sure that when they found us—our bones picked clean by whatever it is that bothers to live out here—they’d think we were left over from some 1956 Vegas mob slaying. And we did manage to get lost. To add irony to probable death, we’d had a CB radio with us all along. But we’d kept forgetting to have it installed. It was a glum moment out there in the desert when Humphrey and I realized we would not be able to figure out how to connect that radio. Not, literally, for the life of us.
Fortunately we got unlost. Then I decided there was a quicker way to get to Las Vegas than the interstate and we got lost again for a while. Quite a while, actually, so that when we pulled over the top of one more hill and saw the city glistening below us we were almost out of gas, completely out of water, and totally out of patience with each other.
Dirty, half-naked, and our car covered with dust and grit, we weren’t sure they’d take us in at the Sands. But the doorman had “had one just like it” and bent our ears for twenty minutes about how nothing ever went wrong with a ‘56 Buick.
Humphrey and I drank a few drinks in the lobby bar. I went to my room, exhausted. Humphrey ordered a nightcap. This apparently turned into a morning sombrero. (He was drinking tequila sunrises.) I came out of my room early in the a.m. and there was Humphrey, more or less where I’d left him, but now accompanied by two scantily sequined young ladies of the type who may be said to have “a rich and varied social life.” I must say they were quaint and charming in their primitive way, and each was a real piece of Americana.
There’s a 2,400-foot climb up the Barstow incline on the California–Nevada border, and we knew that if we didn’t make it before ten in the morning we wouldn’t make it at all. So I had to pry Humphrey away from his bosom buddies and pour him into the car. Besides, we were three days overdue in LA and practically broke. (Humphrey had been luckier in love than at craps.)
Somehow we made it to Barstow without seizing up. The temperature gauge was half in the red at exactly fifty miles per hour and if I went even two miles per hour faster the radiator began to boil from engine heat while if I went two miles per hour slower the radiator began to boil from lack of cooling air.
Humphrey was flopping all over in his sleep, flailing at me and falling against the steering wheel. Once, when we were completely boxed in—trucks fore and aft and a car in the left lane—his leg shot out and he stamped on my accelerator foot. We would have crashed if I hadn’t given him a swift kick and caused him to curl up on the seat.
It had taken eleven days to cross the country, and we’d had some kind of breakdown every one of those days except this last one. When we got to LA we missed Sargent’s home address, went to turn around, and reverse gear gave out. Gave out completely—the Buick couldn’t even be pushed backward in neutral. We had to make a circle through the neighborhood and come back to Sargent’s house.
I suppose I still love old Buicks. I remember thinking I probably wouldn’t try to drive another across the whole grocery store, A&P, Atlantic to Pacific. And I never have. And I never have found out how Tom Sargent got that car out of his driveway.