A young woman who lives in Chelsea writes:
I have a friend who comes from the Midwest, and he is very upset about two things: that soon most cars may come only in economy size, and that soon he may not be able to afford the gasoline even for these economy-size cars. My friend likes to drive around for no reason at all in a big car that uses up a lot of gasoline. When he gets into his car and drives off, he isn’t going to the hospital to visit a friend, or going to the beach for a day of swimming and sunning, or going to the shopping mall to do some shopping, or even going somewhere to see some historic natural wonder. When he gets into his car and drives off, he heads for a highway; then, when he is far enough away from the city, he finds a less travelled back road, and then he drives and drives at about fifty miles an hour for hours; then he takes another road back to the highway and he comes home. My friend calls this cruising. Sometimes he will say to me, “I’m going cruising. Wanna
come?” I always say yes. I like to do it, too, but I would never get up by myself and go off in a car with no destination in mind.
When my friend goes cruising, he takes with him a six-pack of Schaefer beer in the party-bottles size and an eight-pack of Miller beer in the pony size. The beer is always very cold. He takes these particular brands of beer because he has noticed that these are favorites among the Spanish-speaking people on the block where he lives. He keeps remarking about the difference between these people and the people he’s seen in the television commercials for Miller and Schaefer beer. In the car, he never speaks except to swear at a careless motorist, or to point out something that is interesting to him and that he thinks will interest me, too. He turns on the car radio or puts a tape in the tape deck the moment he gets into the car, and the music is never off until he gets home again. He sits behind the wheel with his legs slightly apart, his right foot on the accelerator, the leg crooked at the knee and resting sidewise on the seat, his right hand looking as if it were casually holding the wheel, his left hand on the armrest. He can afford to look this relaxed because the car has power steering.
When I am in the car with my friend, I think of other times I have been in cars with people just for the fun of driving. When I was little, my mother would say, “We are taking a motorcar trip to …” and she would name some place hours away from where we were. Then we would pile into the car and drive to the place and turn right around and come home
again. At the time, my mother was in love with religious music, especially if it was sung by Jim Reeves, and she would turn the car radio to a radio station that played religious music, mostly sung by Jim Reeves. On the night of my sixteenth birthday, my godmother and her husband took me for a drive in their gray Hillman (an English car), and on the car radio I heard the disc jockey say that my mother had requested that “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” by Neil Sedaka, be played in honor of me. I didn’t know what to make of it, hearing my name on the radio, but what was worse was that my mother would think that just because I liked rock and roll I liked Neil Sedaka. Then, when I was in my early twenties, I had a boyfriend who would take me for long drives in the country, and while we were driving he would play over and over, on the tape-deck machine, the song “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procol Harum. Afterward, we would go to bars that had electric-blue-lighted jukeboxes. I have known, in fact, many boys who like to drive around and listen to tapes or to the radio and drink beer. I have never known any girls who did this. Not even one.
My friend from the Midwest has told me about some of his driving adventures. He says that he once drove around the state of Wyoming with a friend for five days with only eight dollars between them, plus his friend’s father’s oil-company credit card. He says that the state of Wyoming is the best for driving. He says that he knows every driving inch of the old logging roads in the state of Michigan. He says that driving around in the summer in an air-conditioned Buick in the flatness
that is Nebraska is the only boring thing he has found to be a complete pleasure. He says that stretches of Ohio were made for driving around with nothing in mind. It is the memory of these things that makes him hate a future of economy cars and gasoline shortages. He curses the modern age and people with too many children. In the meantime, he continues to drive around for no reason at all in his big car that uses up a lot of gasoline. Just the other night, a nice summer evening, we went for a drive up around the Woodstock area. Suddenly, on the car radio we heard “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” by Marvin Gaye. My friend turned to me and he smiled, because he knows that I know that this is one of his super-favorite driving songs. At the end of the song, he turned around and we came home.
—July 18, 1977