Last month at work it was suggested that we code-name a nascent software product "MG", after the British sports car. Coincidentally, I had just been conducting relevant research. I'll present my findings here and you can decide whether they are sufficient to nix the idea.
* * *
As a teenager, I lived in Livonia, MI and attended Detroit Catholic Central High School (CC), 12 miles away. There was no school bus, and the Detroit city buses didn't go out to the suburbs. (The Motor in Motor City referred to passenger cars, not public transportation.) Thus, a few of us Livonia CC students banded together to form a carpool: Nick (not his real name), myself, and sometimes Ray and Bryan - decreasingly frequently as they became more familiar with Nick's and my driving.
* * *
I'd never even heard of the book Seventeenth Summer, so how did a copy of it materialize in my house? Could it be that Maureen had tracked me down after all these years and stolen into my basement, to deposit the book in one of my boxes of old stuff? Naw, that's ridiculous: Maureen and I barely knew each other, and we didn't hang out, so there's no way she'd have gone to the trouble. So it must have been Ray who had slipped into my basement to squirrel away the book. But why? Clearly to freak me out, but what could he hold against me after all these years?
* * *
Of Nick, Ray, Bryan, and myself, only Nick and I had a car, so Nick and I shared the driving duties. (Bryan's father, an architect who had designed St. Maurice's unusual octagonal school building, may have driven us a couple of times.)
I was driving an ancient, huge, and exceptionally ugly Ford Custom 500. There was nothing custom about it, and nothing 500 about it. However, the car was pretty reliable, and it held 4 high school students with no problem.
There was one oddity about the Custom 500: its automatic transmission had two Drive settings. One was normal drive, which started in first gear. The other started in second gear, and was to be used only in slippery conditions, when you wanted to reduce torque to avoid spinning the wheels. Unfortunately, early on, I mixed up the two, and for a year I proceeded to drive in the wrong gear. Thus my driving was even more sedate than it otherwise would have been. (When I finally figured out my mistake, that Custom 500 seemed to peel away from stop signs like a Pantera. But I'll have to leave discussion of the Ford Pantera for another day.)
Though my wheels weren't cool, I was punctual, and the guys had little to complain about with me driving - at least when I had the Custom 500.
There's usually an exception that proves the rule, and the exception to the 500's reliability came during exam week at the end of a semester. On the way to school, the driveshaft of my car fell off. I stuck with my car to get it towed to a garage, while my buddies hitchhiked the rest of the way to school so they could take their exams. (Kids, don't try this at home today, at least not if home is Detroit.)
My sticking with the car to make sure it got towed correctly, and then staying at the garage to supervise the repair, was not due to my concern for the car. I didn't care much about cars one way or the other. Frankly, the problem was my math exam. I had let my 100% score in Math go to my head, and hadn't really studied for the final. The likelihood that my perfect record would survive the Math final exam was extremely low. I swear that I didn't stage the driveshaft incident - but it was very convenient.
To avoid the hassle of having to administer a makeup exam, my teacher afterwards made me a deal: I wouldn't have to take the exam, but he'd give me an A, rather than an A+, in the class. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.
Now, I didn't always drive the Custom 500. Sometimes, for reasons I don't recall, my mother needed the car, possibly to ferry around my little brother Tom and his friends. On those occasions, I'd have to drive her car.
My mother had a Ford Mustang. A classic vintage year, and very clean-looking. Its coolness factor was about 1000 times that of the Custom 500. My friends were, at first, really juiced about the idea of riding to school in that car.
But I hated the Mustang. It had a manual transmission, with a clutch that had a razor-thin friction point. I was still shaky on my technical driving skills even with an automatic, and that clutch was really pushing it. I stalled the car about 1 in 5 times when starting from a stop. Left turns were the worst: I'd often find myself stalled out in the middle of an intersection in rush hour in Detroit, with the light having changed and cars bearing down on me. The stress factor was high, both for me and for my helpless passengers. Bryan and Ray - members of the debate team - starting finding rides with other debate team members.
* * *
 |
| Representative MG B - same color as Nick's |
Also unlike my mother's car - and no surprise to those knowledgeable about British sports cars - the MG B was not fully operational. The speedometer didn't work, so Nick't couldn't directly see by how much he was exceeding the speed limit. However, the tachometer did work, and Nick had derived a formula for calculating his speed based on the number of RPMs (while in fourth gear). So when patrol cars were in sight, Nick, normally an enthusiastic driver, could stick to the speed limit. Nick also had a personal rule: never pass a police car. This led to a couple of bizarre occasions where Nick inched along behind a cop car when the officer had slowed down while looking for something.
Additionally, the windshield wipers didn't work. So if it was raining or snowing hard enough, Nick would stick his head out the driver's side window to get a look at the road. Sometimes the passenger would give Nick a break and stick his head out the passenger's window and tell Nick where to steer. That wasn't very reliable, but it never prevented us from getting to school alive.
The MG B was a two-seat convertible with a jump seat. You could fit a couple of sacks of groceries in the jump seat, or alternatively, a skinny high school student wedged in sideways. We went with the latter. To the best of my knowledge, we never tried to fit all four of us in that car.
One day, Nick had loaded some extra stuff in the jump seat - I think it was materials for decorating his car for the annual football parade - leaving insufficient space to cram a passenger in the back. It was Bryan's turn to sit in the jump seat (or was it Ray? Hmmm.), so he had to sit on the trunk of the convertible, with most of his body outside of the car, anchoring himself with his feet on what little space was left on the jump seat. This was a notch or two less safe than riding in the open bed of a pickup truck, which itself is not too safe. (In the Madison dog-owning community nowadays, this is considered unacceptable even for canines.) I'm not sure what I would have done if it had been my turn. I like to think that I would have found another way to get to school, but we'll never know.
We were halfway to school when a cop pulled us over. Both Nick and Bryan (Ray?) got tickets. Nick was smart enough to be polite, but inwardly he was seething. After the policeman drove off, Nick let us know what he thought of the situation, and of the law enforcement community.
But then Nick found that the officer, taken in by the clean appearance of the MG, had assumed the car was the current model year and had written that on the ticket. Nick was always trying to find a way to subvert the system (he had once taken a competitive math scholarship exam as a way of getting excused from History class), and this looked like an angle he could use. (Unfortunately, Nick's angle didn't pan out, and he did have to pay the ticket.)
What's more, the cop had left his aviator sunglasses on Nick's dashboard. Yes! Suddenly the world didn't look so grim after all.
Bryan/Ray didn't say much. He may have been starting to plan something.
* * *
It was an icy winter morning. Nick had the MG's top up and it was my turn to ride in the back. "Say, Nick," asked the guy in the passenger seat. (From Ray's evident hard feelings toward me now, this must have been Ray.) "Don't you think you're going a bit fast for the conditions?" "Nah, I know what I'm doing," replied Nick.
Suddenly I felt the world spinning crazily. Hunkered down at the bottom of the jump seat, able to see nothing but the canvas roof, I could only guess as to what was happening. BAM! The car struck something and came to an abrupt halt. Nick jumped out of the car to assess the damage. Uninjured, I pulled myself up to look around. Somehow, at rush hour in Detroit (back when there were people in Detroit), we had managed to spin across six lanes of traffic on Telegraph Road without hitting another vehicle. The vehicle had slammed sideways into the curb, scraping the tires a little but causing no significant damage.
Ray was pissed. "Aren't you going to ask how we are?" he demanded. (Truthfully, it was pretty obvious that no one had been hurt.) Perhaps he turned back and glared at me, wondering why I hadn't driven that day.
Satisfied that his precious vehicle was intact, Nick got back into the car and proceeded to school, perhaps a bit more cautiously.
* * *
After high school, I went on to study Computer Science and develop software. Nick got a job as a reactor technician on a nuclear submarine. After leaving the Navy, he landed a decent job as a nuclear reactor safety inspector - just the job that the other three of us had pegged him for. Debaters Ray and Bryan became attorneys, the better to plot and fund any retaliation schemes they may come up with. And until now they've been quiet - perhaps too quiet.
No comments:
Post a Comment