DESERT OLDS PART TWO- SEATTLE, WA

Writing and Photos copyright Double Dragon One Owner Collector Car Ltd. Protecto Plate image copyright GM Canada.

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THE CAR

Nantucket Blue 1967 Cutlass Town Sedan built Dec 20, 1966 (a Tuesday), Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. 330-2bbl-250 HP, two speed auto, 2.78:1 axle. To read a history of the Cutlass and check out its MPG look in the GAS LOGS subsection of the TRAVEL STORIES drop down menu. Below is the second protecto plate warranty service from Feb 20, 1968. The first (6 month) entry was torn off but lacked a dealer stamp in the validating dealer section.

The Cutlass was still in Penticton. BC at the time of the 18 month service. The faint stamp reads Folk's Auto Sales and Service, 2020 Main st S, Penticton.

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THE TRIP

Martin rode shotgun. He stowed the old Gousha road atlas under his seat for easy access. Leggy promptly fell asleep in the back seat, a procedure he faithfully maintained for the duration of his stint with us. The Cutlass started instantly with an idle like glass. The AM radio was tuned to the oldies station. The rest of the dial was infested with call in shows.

I remember when you could turn on a radio and not have to listen to some bore sitting in a bathrobe in his living room trading banalities with a DJ. Commercial free subscription radio shows, MP3 and CD players in most cars killed regular AM advertising revenues. Lack of ads creates a vast nightmare wasteland of drab droning cheap talk shows.

Luckily for us Red Robinson, a Vancouver legend was on the air. Red seems to have an anecdote about every performer. Eric Burdon’s bass voice echoed through the car, “There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun…” Thanks for the send off, Eric!

The Cutlass looks rough but it sucked up the empty highway, effortlessly gliding up over 90, then 100 mph despite hauling over 1,500 extra pounds. The ride was solid and smooth without a hint of a rattle. I lectured Martin and Leggy about the car despite Leggy’s snores and Martins total disinterest in cars,

“This is the an advantage of four door post cars. They seal out noise, dirt and vibration. Look at the way the windows are held snug in a steel frame- that reduces wind noise. The body resists creaks and squeaks because of the post here. Collectors disdain these cars because they aren’t as sporty and clean looking as a two door hardtop. But all Cutlass two doors and four doors built in 1967 use the same 115 inch wheelbase; thus sharing the same body lines except for the roof. We have a bit more headroom in back.  It’s not quite so awkward looking as most four doors tend to be.”

Martin was focused on the road, alarmed at our speed. I reassured him,

“This suspension could handle high speeds back in the day even though it was designed for skinny little bias ply tires set at 24 PSI. We're running larger modern Michelin radials pumped up to 35 PSI so they don’t overheat at high speeds. We’ve also got new heavy duty shocks. Look at this. It’s holding the road like it was riding on rails! I have one finger on the wheel and it tracks straight. This car has never been hit, the frame is perfect. This car has accurate, tight steering. The brakes have new linings and virtually no pedal travel – everything is tight in this car.”

Martin grunted in agreement. A minute later he felt compelled to say something when I loosened the reigns a bit more and let the Cutlass run at an indicated 110 mph.

“I thought we were going to stay at a 70 mph cruise.”

I got the car back down to 70. We had to stretch our gas money and preserve the tires. The Cutlass felt like it was parked as we cruised to Seattle at a steady seventy.

We arrived in Seattle at night, parking outside an old house in the University district around 45th NE. It had been converted into a rooming house. Martin’s friend Theo let us inside. The living room was filled with disparate characters watching TV. Martin got a nice spot upstairs while Leggy got the couch. I took a space underneath a table on the living room floor. I fell asleep instantly dreaming of motion, the way you feel when you are traveling on a bus rocking its way through the night.

I awoke in a travel mindset, “What city am I in? What did we do yesterday?” The day was fresh with endless possibility. We’d been gone ten hours and our old lives were already forgotten.

I ate breakfast and met The Guys.

A tall thin Expert Guy, Bernard, stood over the dining room table pronouncing definitive verdicts on any topic, upon which he was the undisputed expert. He orated in his proper English accent about a video game:

“The graphics of the Mickey Mouse segment are of far superior quality to the Daffy Duck sequence. IN FACT, the Daffy Duck work is of such an inferior grade as to render the entire program substandard…”

Leggy humored him by nodding and stroking his beard reflectively as if he was hearing profound statements.

“The programmer for this segment has created THE FINEST example of color contrast extant in any modern video work you could care to mention…”

A small chain smoking Broke Guy referred to as The Weasel edged downstairs and cadged a cigarette. He made funny facial expressions behind Bernard’s back mimicking his overly pompous stance before scurrying back upstairs again to continue working on a novel that no one had seen.

Theo came downstairs. He was a Deadpan Guy with old 1960s black frame glasses, tattoos and a beatnik goatee. He’d come here from California after a romance went wrong. He was just marking time in this madhouse. The Guys however, were all lifers. The living room was full of The Video Guys and their sidekicks. It looked like a comic book convention. They were playing video games and staring at the TV. The problem with The Guys was that they were in their late 20s, but lived like teenagers with nothing to do. They were destined to seamlessly metamorphose into SRO embittered old men who argue with the other old men about changing the channel.

Then we met one of the Angry Guys- Curtis, a black, booming voiced New Yorker stormed into the living room,

“What the Hell! Lame-ass shit! Someone stole my chicken! It was right here in the fridge last night… here I be coming home from a long night and ready to eat something and some behind the back sneaking chicken thieving bastard eats up my breakfast!”

Curt’s best friend, Billy was the other Angry Guy. Billy was a skinny white guy with frizzy dreadlocks. He screamed over Curt’s rant,

“You idiot! You ate it all last night. You were wolfing that greasy shit down on the bus last night.”

“Bullshit! I bought KFC last night! This was store bought chicken!”

The Guys in the living room didn’t pay the slightest attention, automatically adjusting the volume on the TV to compensate for the Billy/ Curt argument. Somehow Bernard continued his lecture without missing a beat, although he registered a flicker of annoyance when Leggy’s attention wavered to the screaming.

After screaming at each other for five minutes, Billy and Curtis came over to talk with Martin and me. They enthused about Seattle and its’ natural vegan hippy peace and love ambience, which they contrasted with the mean streets of New York that they had escaped from 6 months earlier. That was the only thing they agreed on for the rest of the day. Billy then presented us with his problem.

“My piece of shit VW bus crapped out and I have to move today.”

Martin and I loaded up the Cutlass with Billy’s stuff and drove across the city. Curtis and Billy squabbled about any subject that you could imagine from women to fried chicken, to the correct sequence of past events, racism, to who was “sitting bitch” in the car. Their battles reminded me of the Spock-McCoy feud from the classic Star Trek series. Leggy amiably took the middle seat to defuse the ‘sitting bitch’ argument.

Curtis got enthused about the Cutlass, so I launched into my now too familiar to Martin patter about the great deal I got on the car. My set routine: first, pump up my audience by extolling the virtues of the car; second, let everyone guess how much I had paid. The estimates varied from $800.00 to a $1,500.00. The third step was to announce the $100.00 price. The fourth stage where everyone professed genuine incredulity didn’t happen this time. The performance went bad when steam started to pour out of the hood.

Luckily for us, Billy worked at a gas station and was friends with a mechanic there, Rob.

We rumbled up to the Texaco station. Rob saw that sinister looking car roll up jammed to the roof with The Guys and thought, “Drive by shooting!” He was very relieved to see Billy step out. Rob fixed the car for free in 15 minutes flat. The coolant leak came from a tiny bypass hose on the water pump that Rob said was the original factory hose. The hose was old and brittle with ancient clamps that fell to pieces when removed. The tiny hose had been overlooked when a Vancouver garage changed ‘all’ the hoses.

With the car fixed Martin and I took The Guys with us to the downtown Seattle core where old buildings and cobblestone streets awaited. The land at the water’s edge is reclaimed land, created by filling in the water. The city is built up several feet above the original streets, leaving a network of tunnels beneath the sidewalks. The highly rated TV show Night Stalker was set in these tunnels. Martin and I naturally had to take the underground tour exploring a very dusty and musty network of tunnels.

The Space Needle, built for the 1962 World’s Fair theoretically provides a good view of the city from 520 feet up. Martin complained to me,

“If it wasn’t raining we might be able to see something.”

The Needle was inspired by the Stuttgart Tower in Germany. Stuttgart would later take on special significance for me on this trip but that’s jumping ahead of things.

By night time this area of Seattle comes alive with bars and cafes on every corner. We started in The Fremont Triangle Bar, ending up at The Frontier. Dozens of girls were walking around in Cat woman outfits. The best looking of the Cat girls told me her name was Amazing Grace. My progress with her was crushed when she took one look at The Guys. The Guys kept cutting off my flow with their bumbling attempts to ingratiate themselves to her and her friends.

I said, “Let’s go.” I impressed The Guys with outrageous driving maneuvers as we made our way back to the University district. We dumped the car at the house and went on foot to local University bars.

Theo had a crush on a waitress at The Monkey Bar. He stood outside hoping for a glimpse of her through the main window. Curtis tried to give him advice that actually made sense,

"Yo Theo, what is with this weird ass stalking shit you be doin? How you gonna get down with this chickie doing lame ass shit like this? You're never going to pump this chick crying outside her work. You gotta log your hours on her meter. You got to put in yo time with her. Soon she's saying, "Oooh Theo you're such a good friend" and then BAM you are in, man..."

We dragged Theo inside to talk to the waitress. After he struck out with her we finished off his Jagermeister outside.

Theo went home despondent over the waitress, while the rest of us went to the Blue Moon Tavern, which has been around since 1934. Popular with the beats back in the day, it had a worn in feel to the wood booths. Pool tables afforded Martin the opportunity to lose to me by sinking the 8 ball, which was a specialty with him. We left at closing, drunk but still facing the full bottle of Whiskey that Martin had in his jacket. Curtis, Billy, Martin, Leggy and I got down to business. We were drinking the bottle wrapped in the regulation paper bag on a corner, watching girls go past.

Curtis drunkenly told us, “Hey, we four dudes are the Beatles…” He somehow didn’t count Leggy. I started to suggest we were the Rolling Stones which would give Leggy his usual Ian Stuart Standing In The Shadows status. Curtis flashed his July bus pass at a passing girl and announced,

“Officer Ringo July! This here is my badge. “

His romantic overtures went south as he started telling her about New York,

“You walk around and it’s just miles of wildass mutherfucking barbwire and badass mofos looking to take you down. Bitches there be motherfucking cock-strong ass bitches! Then we come here and the bitches are all la de da hippy this and vegan that, and the houses don’t have bars on the windows.. . Shit. I can’t believe this place. Like a paradise!”

The girl was edging away when Billy cut in,

“Let’s go.”

Curtis immediately launched into an argument with Billy about when to go or not, and the girl saw her chance to escape.

“Now look what you did! I was doing good with that chickie and you come along and fuck it all up! You act like a jealous bitch! Why couldn’t you be nice to that little hippy chick?”

“Jealous? I never said anything to her! What the hell is your problem? You’re totally paranoid! All I said TO YOU was that it was time to head home!”

Martin and I slipped away with Leggy in tow leaving them to squabble alone.

I started chatting with two cute girls walking back to the campus. I made a date with one of them, a very sexy law student named Jane, who The Guys thereafter referred to as “The Lawyer Girl”.

After a few days in Seattle, it was time to move on, but I wanted to keep hanging out with Jane. Martin and Leggy acquiesced and settled into the inertia of “life” with The Guys while I gallivanted about town. Martin was restless as TV was watched and long lectures were delivered. The Billy/ Curtis feud ran nonstop in the background, “That’s bullshit! You never did that!”

The one Guy thing I did was watching The Fugitive. I can identify with the formless life of a fugitive drifting around, his life subject to whims of fate. Every turn of the steering wheel was akin to the roulette wheel. Interestingly, only Martin, Leggy and I were hooked on The Fuge. The Video Guys all avoided any show that wasn’t sci fi or animation. The Video Guys probably couldn’t relate to the Fuge because their entire lives promised to unfold in this very room or one indistinguishable from it with beeping video games as the permanent soundtrack.

Jane and I went to the university district. She brought me to nice old buildings and we watched a film in The Neptune Theatre. The main strip has some good used bookstores and cheap food. A bookstore specializing in movie books held me captive until Jane got antsy.

 The actual campus, on top of a hill, is huge and full of greenery. A ‘hippy’ atmosphere prevails even though the movement is long gone. The university bookstore comprises several floors packed with non-academia as well as course material. I burnt through money I couldn’t afford to spend eating out with Jane. Normally Martin and I ate a monotonous cycle of cereal, sandwiches and spaghetti at the Rooming house.

After Jane went to class, I ventured west along NE 45th down to the bridge spanning I-5. I stumbled into a Chicano area with a still operational drive in burger joint, old record stores, and tattoo parlors. Coincidentally the next day Curtis needed a ride to see some friends who lived and breathed political theory. They lived in the heart of this Chicano area I’d just discovered the previous day. One of the radicals heaped disdain on Curtis when he admitted that he lived in the University district. “Are you one of those Polo Shirt Yassur Uncle Toms or you just like the white pussy?”

Curtis shot back, “Hey man, after all the wild ass fucked up shit in New York I survived, your revolution central here is a motherfucking white bread nursery school!” Billy didn’t even bother involving himself in the conversation. One of the other political guys took a liking to Curtis and they sat off to the side discussing societal programming and philosophy.

Billy ridiculed Curtis all the way home when he tried talking radicalism.

“You’re not political! You’re just repeating some bullshit you don’t even understand!”

“Hell, I’m the one who’s black here! I UNDERSTAND THAT!”

“The only reason you talk this shit is because you think it might get you laid with the hippy chicks!”

“So?”

“So, if you don’t believe in any of this shit how is anyone supposed to believe you when you try to talk it?”

“Hell, I’ve been the victim of racism before!”

Billy let out a huge groan,

“Oh, no- Don’t start with the fucking Jeep again!”

“That crackerjack redneck was trying to kill me! I got lifetime disability from that! NO ONE gets that for nothing! Even the Army believed me.”

“You idiot! You were stoned! That’s why you crashed the jeep. NO ONE tried to run you off the road. It’s all in your mind!”

“You weren’t there! I’m telling you some racist freak tried to run me down!”

“Yeah, right. And the reason you lost your disability was because you were discriminated against.”

“Yeah! Damn straight! They had it in for me.”

“You lost a lifetime army disability because couldn’t NOT smoke pot for the 10 minutes a week you had to report at the vet’s building. You could have smoked pot 6 days, 23 hours and 50 minutes a week but that’s not enough for you! NO! You had to light up in an ELEVATOR IN THE VET’S BUILDING! That’s not discrimination, that’s just stupidity!”

“You’re just mad cuz you can’t borrow money off me no more! I think you were madder about me losing the disability than I was! Hell, you probably spent more of it than I did! And besides it WAS racism! That General hated my guts from way back!”

“No, he walked into an elevator in the vet’s hospital and sees his worst nightmare- some whacked out stoner toking away in an army elevator! That’s his turf, man! He couldn’t care less if you were white, black or green!”

“He sure hated my guts!”

“Not because you were black, because you were smoking dope in a Federal building!”

“Did you ever think that maybe he was racist AND he hated me besides? Why do you always act like it has to be this way or that way- all one way or the other?”

That question even left Billy silent for a moment.

The need for them to argue about something at all times simply shifted to a new topic where they didn’t have to get bogged down into grey areas. They screamed at each other the rest of the way home about The Hippy Chick at The Radical’s house and which of them she had responded to.

That night Jane called me. “Come meet me for dinner and that movie you wanted to see.  Afterwards, I’ll show you where I grew up.”

After an early meal and a Ray Liotta film we drove to her parent’s house on Mercer Island, which is a small wealthy community east of Seattle on the lake. I hit the gas and the Cutlass flew over top of Lake Washington on a floating bridge. The bridge is very tight and low to the water giving you the sensation of being on the water.

There are two floating bridges spanning Lake Washington, and one is the longest such bridge in the world. The other one, I-90 is the second longest. The 1-90 segments were built in 1940 and lasted until 1990. It sank in a storm and had to be rebuilt.

As Jane and I entered the Mercer Island roadway I looked in the mirror: flashing police lights. The cop started to question me then he recognized Jane and his tone became friendly. The second cop came over and joined the conversation about her schooling. After some chitchat they left us, “Have a good evening.”

Jane explained, “Mercer is an insular, upscale place.  They know all the cars in the area, so this old car stood out a mile away.”

The road circles the island in a long loop. Homes are built into the steep slopes overlooking the water. Jane was reliving memories of her rebellious teens,

“Growing up, peer tensions were pretty intense because I was from Mercer. The other kids called it ‘Mercedes Island’. They really hated rich kids. They think you’re spoiled. But I didn’t fit in with the Mercer crowd either. Our house wasn’t as ostentatious as the others. The Mercer kids subtly slighted me. They weren’t openly cruel like the other kids, but they looked down at me. To this day, if I sense that someone is judging me it infuriates me. I trace it back to those high school years. Back then I started smoking pot and getting into trouble. It didn’t prove anything, and I finally figured that out. Now I realize that it only matters what I think, but I also know you can't escape the consequences of other people's thoughts. It shapes the world we live in. I was very idealistic, and I guess I still am, even now. So that’s how I went from being the bad kid to a square law student! I’m still a rebel, I guess. It’s just that Law has a lot of potential for someone who wants to influence the status quo.”

I found a ten dollar bill on the ground as I was saying goodbye to Jane. That seemed like a good omen.

We’d overstayed our welcome. Roommate rumblings had prompted Theo to give us the boot. We crept out quietly in the middle of the night. There was a mountain of junk jammed into every inch of the Cutlass trunk. It only fitted if a particular sequence was adhered to like a Tetras exercise. In addition to the regular spare mounted on a rim, there were two other spare tires. There was a gas can, oil containers, transmission fluid, snap on tool set, oil filter wrench, wood tire chock, screwdriver set, spare headlights still in the packs, spare fan belts, gallon jugs of water, coolant, cans of food, pots and pans, plates and bowls and so on.

The really crazy stuff that made no sense was Leggy’s artist table, boxes of computer paper, an unwieldy printer, extension cords, a bulky monitor, winter coats, sweaters, boots, hiking gear, cutting boards. If it was of no use on this trip, it was there.

I had a really cool old wooden suitcase that looked identical to the one The Fugitive used in the early episodes. It was silk lined and tough enough to keep my books preserved. I loaded it into the trunk atop the two spare tires that were rammed up under the rear window package tray area. I slung my small bag of clothes on top of the crap piled up in the back seat.

Leggy woke up for exactly the few seconds it took him to stagger from his slumber on the couch to burrow into the junk in the back seat like a hibernating animal packing in for winter. The engine came to life and we were back on the road.

> Chapter 3