We stole a car once, my brother and I. Technically we didn't steal it, I guess. It was my mom's car, a 1972 Ford Pinto with a Cosworth 4 cylinder. She'd purchased it in 1980 or so from our friend's dad as a gas saving measure; the previous car was a late 60's Ford Galaxie that got a few miles per gallon but could outrun anything on the road, and do it loaded with a family or two plus picnic supplies.
Anyhow, my mom and stepfather used to leave town a lot. Pretty much every weekend my brother and I were left to our own devices, starting when my brother hit 15 years old. So one evening, my brother says "here's what we should do...."
So we decided to hit the local cruise. I don't know that this translates anywhere outside of the western US, maybe it does. Las Cruces had (still has) a street where high school and college age kids, mixed with some hot rodders and low riders and Harley drivers, would cruise. Up and down the street. Drive maybe two miles or so, turn around on one end at the Sonic parking lot, the other end probably at Burger King or wherever. Gearheads hung out in the auto parts parking lot with their hoods up, waiting for a race. Lowriders usually hung out in the parking lot of a closed mercantile. The street would be jammed, bumper to bumper, until about midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, with nothing but people-watching youths and the sorts of people who never give up on their youth. Guys in their thirties with their letterman jacket from high school, that sort of thing.
My brother had figured out how to drive the same way I did: dirt bikes, motorcycles, and short runs around the block in the Pinto when my parents weren't around. So he knew enough to get from point A to point B in a balky, creaking, complaining, prone to exploding Pinto. We climbed in and he unhooked the speedometer (to prevent the odometer from reading the miles we were about to rack up and thus alerting my mother to our nefarious evening), rolled down the windows (no A/C) and cranked the AM/FM radio to the local station (rock, at the time), and off we went.
Cheap vinyl that has been baking in the sun has a particular smell, a chemical goodness that makes me think of a thousand miles in a hundred cars over twenty years. The windows down, we drove down the hill (we lived ten miles out of town up highway 70, which is a bit of a climb from the valley) and almost hit 80, the four speed four cylinder complaining mightily. I remember the evening being cool, that creosote / just rained smell filtering into the windows as we descended into the valley. Then to the drag, El Paseo Street on a Friday night.
My brother was only 15, but he was in football, and had his letterman's jacket on, one arm out the window, sort of flashing the JV Football patch to anyone who looked. Few 15 year old brothers would take their 12 year old little brothers with them on such a trip, so I endeavored to be as cool and as non-dorky as possible. Quite the struggle.
At one point we pulled up next to a late 40's Harley, the long haired biker type driving it looking over at me with that hard biker look. "Nice '48," I sort of yelled over the noise of his motor. He smiled. "Thanks," he said, "you wanna trade?" We both laughed, though I did fear for a moment that he was serious. How would I explain the sudden conversion of Pinto to 1948 Harley to my mother?
My brother found friends, and we hung out with them for a while, me being the peripheral little brother. We found some neighborhood friends who were hotrod types, and hung out with them, hood up on the Pinto for a laugh. Hey! Check out our 68 horses of Ford fury!
The entire evening was spent cruising back and forth, trying to burn off the 1/8th of a tank of gas we'd added. The very concept: illegally driving (my brother may have had a learners permit, but I doubt it) in a stolen car (my mom would have been the first to press charges and turn us in) up and down the cruise (which was haunted with cops and gangs and high horsepower fiends)....goddamn. I can still smell that heady combination of sun baked vinyl, leaded gasoline, burning oil, and creosote. It's like this: every high I chased after that night never approached what I felt in that stupid blue Pinto.
The drive back up the hill hours later, the car struggled to maintain 40 and started to overheat a bit. Windows down again, my brother turned the heater on to help cool the engine (a trick I'd use many times in the future through successive Fords). We passed the turn off for the house and headed up the pass, then U-turned and headed back down, not wanting the trip to end.
The valley below us was carpeted with pinpoints of light, a thousand incandescent fires from a thousand lonely porches. The sky in New Mexico when it is clear is never black, but more of a dark blue illuminated by the universe. The car's motor evened out as we headed downhill, quiet, cool air roaring by at 70. It occurred to both of us: we could just keep going. We were already pointed west. The horizon a black ruler against the blue black night sky, we could just....go.
Our lives to that point had been trouble. Hard, lonely and poor until my mother remarried (at which point replace poor with not-so-poor), my brother and I were our only support. I like to think that the many times we repeated that night in the years after, we were practicing for the eventual escape.
One day years later, my brother, back from the Marines, twenty pounds lighter and a hundred years older than I'd left him, climbed into that stupid little blue Pinto and drove west, finally. It dropped it's clutch outside of Stockton, and he drove it the last fifty miles with no clutch. It died in California.
I stared out the windshield of my 1968 Ford F100 the night he left, stared at the western horizon, at the blue black brilliant diamond-studded sky. Stared at the gigantic imaginary EXIT sign that he and I had conjured, inadvertently, some five years previous.
I never held it against the car for taking my brother away from me. Years later I'd be in a stupid little blue Ford product heading down the same road, and I'd spend a year with him finding that blood bond again. But nothing, nothing in the world is like the night we stole the Pinto.
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