The Old Gray Ghost February 24, 1986
My old car is dead; I can’t get it through my head. Don’t believe it’s already gone; but my old car is dead.
My 60 chevy sat like this for a long time behind Donald’s warehouse
in Fairfield, breaks shot, rods rattling, engine and transmission groaning each
time it moved.
I drove Donald’s van while waiting for my new Pinto to
arrive from the factory.
Eventually, I had the chevy towed away for junk, feeling
then as I feel now, as if losing an old friend.
The Pinto, or “The Old Grey Ghost,” as Bob Adams calls it, is
dead ten years later.
We went up there to try and revive it yesterday, bagging on
the starter, putting water in the battery. But the heart and body of the old
creature has begun to fade.
I remember picking up the car from the dealer in the snow –
my new car straight from the factory. It didn’t have snow tires. So, I had to
stop off at the tire place on Passaic Avenue in North Caldwell, where I found I
could not get the key out of the ignition. I drove all the way back to the
dealer in the snow to have the salesperson show me where the button I had to
push the release the key.
I managed to get the car home to Passaic, only to wake up
the next morning when the car wouldn’t start – the battery having died in the
cold overnight, leaving me cursing the whole way down the Paulison Avenue apartment
stairs, complaining this was the reason I had purchased a new car in the first
place. I found a pay phone and called the dealership. They sent a road crew.
But by the time they arrived, the car mysteriously started.
That summer (1976) I drove the Pinto to Pennsylvania,
searching for where my ex-wife had absconded with my kid, pulling up to her
place like a rich uncle, her hillbilly neighbors angry at me for showing up
like I did.
My first major repair occurred a year and half later when
the muffler fell off.
the only time I got the car towed was on Route 80 by the
police in May or June 1977. Pauly and I were driving down the highway with the dome
light on. He was looking at pictures I had taken of Hank performing in a play
at the Red Barn. One of my headlights at burned out. I had made the mistake of failing
to renew the registration on the car. The cops searched the car looking for
pot, then towed it away, leaving me and Pauly to walk to the next exit to call
Garrick to pick us up.
I had only three payments left on the car in late 1978 when
I got fired -- the second time in one
year – but managed to get on unemployment. In 1979, I made plans to go back to
college, hoping the car would survive long enough for me to graduate, although
as it turned out, I had a number of small and large auto disasters during that
time, including one that required the girl I had just broken up with (Susan) to
drive me to and from work one night – saying she was unhappy about it is an
understatement.
My ex-wife used the Old Grey Ghost to get her driver’s license
in 1982, and in November 1982, while Fran and I made love in my apartment, some
drunk driver swerved around the corner at 8th and Passaic Street, smashing the
grill and denting the left fender.
After that, it was only a matter of time, although the car
did survive another two years.
The worst came in August 1993 when my life took a disastrous
turn and the car sputtered into obscurity, making me hunt around for a
replacement, which I found in 1885 when my poet friend moved west and gave me a
used Datsun B210. I traded the Old Grey Ghost to Pauly for two guitars when he
moved to Lake Hopatcong and needed the car to get to work. He didn’t use it for
long, parking it near the Fotomat booth where he worked, leaving it to rot as he
took up a moped.
After much ado, Bob Adam’s pronounced the old ghost dead and
we sent it off to the junk yard, something that makes me completely sad.
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