It was Al Spark's Texaco Station near the East Side Dairy Queen I meet my first car, a 1963 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88, brown and I paid $200.00 cash I had saved up for it. It had a body that was pristine and the inside was clean. So big back then, six people could sit in it and not even touch, you could lay down flat in the back seat for a good snooze if you liked. Powerful, 120 on the speedometer and the price of gasoline was well under a dollar.
So many times I would cruse East and West and North and South of my familiar hometown. I use to hit the Idle Hour Bar just South of town for Pool, dancing and drinking, not much luck with the girls there. I sometimes would go across the road to Bill's Gold Nugget for dancing and looking for girls. One night I did find one with a fiery head of hair and a volcanic personality named Kathy. We danced, I was interested, but when I told her my age she said I was too young for her but suggested her sister. This really didn't sit to well with me but when she lead me back to her table and introduced me to her sister, Sheri Lynn McBride I was sold in an instant. We drove around awhile and I finally took her back to her families home in Milsap.
Milsap is a small town not much of a population but fairly large in size for farming and raising horses. It's about ten miles from Mineral Wells and is where my great grandfather A.F. Garrett had his homestead. Ken McBride was a volunteer fireman at Fort Wolters and Sheri's dad. Sheri and I sat in front of her parent's house, kissing till 4AM in the morning until she said she had to go inside to sleep. I had to be at work at Buddie's Grocery at 8:30AM but my mind was in a hazy world of young love. So much so I backed out on that moonless night into a bar ditch, front wheel dangling in the air. I went back to the house, used their phone and called my mother and her boyfriend to pick me up.
Not sure how long I had this car maybe a year but the transmission was going out on it so I sold it. I think maybe it was from when Sheri's father pulled it out of the bar ditch with his tractor that might have caused the damage or my ignorance with working with cars. I still managed for awhile with the problem and visited Sheri and my great grandfather in Milsap as often as I could.
It was coming back from these visits that my youthful piss & vinegar had me try my car's power and speed on the old Milsap Highway. Back in those days there was a straight stretch of road with no turn-offs, just uninterrupted driving. I had no fear and no sense of my mortality in those days so I put the pedal to the floor, steaming along, God was with me no farm tractors pulled out in front of me. The speedometer just kept creeping forward until I could push it no more to the speed of 110 miles an hour. I felt like Ben Gazzara in the 60's TV series "Run for Your Life". It's a wonder I didn't crash and burn.
Today I have the hardest time wedging my head, neck and body into cars and miss the room of my first love. I miss drive-in movies I saw in it, girls I took for rides and cruising my hometown like that little dot in the Pong game for girls. I guess I miss just being young most of all and would do it again in a heart beat.
No comments:
Post a Comment