My Life in Cars - an AUTO-biographical Tale by Umberto Tosi

Meghina Maria Pastore

My granddaughter Meghina was telling me about her driving lessons on the phone the other day. She's in her twenties, taking the wheel just a little late for someone living in California, but in determined fashion. 

I count that as a blessing, having spent a good seventy years on the road starting at an eager age 14, learner's permit in hand, when I got to chauffeur my dad on summer business trips in his sleek, black, fifties, Oldsmobile Rocket 88. I could barely see over the genuine, polished bone-and-chrome steering wheel. 

"No instructors in those days. No seat belts. No air bags. No air-conditioning mostly. My father would give me a few tips, then nap in the passenger seat," I said. "Do you like your instructor?" I asked my granddaughter.

"I guess so. He asked me if I was from England because I keep driving on the wrong side of the road," Meghina responded.

"Yeah. Scary if you're an American driver."

"Did you ever try, Grandpa?"

"I drove a Fiat 1100 around London when I about your age. That's how I got this white hair." 

 My ride: (r) model 1934 Chevy Coupe, Alicia's gift

Pressed, I told her that I had been there on a fellowship. I had purchased the Fiat in in Amsterdam, tax free.

I ferried it across the channel. White-knuckled by Piccadilly and drove it all over England from the jolly-old passenger side. Left turns and street parking were bumper car nightmares.  

 (Later that year I had the "millecento"  shipped to New York from where my by-then expectant first wife and I drove it  ("suicide"  doors and all) cross-country to  San Francisco on an adventurous jaunt that including blowing a head gasket in western Pennsylvania. I had just read Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." Italian cars and touchingly naive, aspiring beatniks were quaintly subversive then. American oddities. But that's another story.) 

I'm not a car guy, but the subject has come up in conversations lately. So much so that I'm toying with the idea of pegging a memoir on the cars that I have owned through significant periods of my life. 

 

It would be my AUTO-biography. Groan!

 

That would also be California of me. I still drive, but I haven't owned a car for the past dozen years. (What a relief!). I depend on deliveries, the kindness of strangers, friends, Chicago's fine public transit system and my inamorata Eleanor's plucky Prius.

 Renzo Tosi, c.1958, Lake Tahoe

The other day, my Montana mountain-poet daughter Kara asked about the first car I owned. I sent her a photo of a 1934 straight-six Chevrolet "Master Coupe." I almost forgot that her elder sister, Alicia Sammons had given me a scale model about six years ago as a stocking stuffer. 

The model accurately depicts the old Chevy that fell into my eager teenage hands circa 1953 - by then a redoubtable junker that growled like a dyspeptic Basset hound.

"It's beautiful," Kara said when she got the photo. Those were great cars back then."

"Beautiful, but death traps," I responded. (The Chevy had "suicide doors" like the  Fiat 1100, by the way!) "Cars today aren't near as stylish, but way better engineered. Their engines last at least five times longer." (Another "golden age" myth punctured.)

By saying the car "fell-into-my hands" I mean fell. My father, Argentine-born Renzo Tosi, won it in a poker game. This was during a BBQ at the California, Los Gatos Mountains ranch home of a specialty canner with whom my father did business. I remember having a crush on our host's daughter who was a high school senior - too mature to give my peach-face a glance.

"Does it run?" I overheard my father ask when our host bet the pink slip of the old Chevy junker in his barn. Our host assured him that it did, My father tossed me the keys later that evening as we left. 

"She's all yours if you can get her home." I was to tail my father's Oldsmobile through winding canyon roads, down-shifting into the Central Valley -  seventy miles home to Stockton, "Flash the headlights if you have trouble." 

Driving that car down the mountain was a rite of passage for that 1950s American adolescent, bookish though I was! I dreamt of dating Miss Rhinegold and the Doublemint Twins - cool at last with my hair Brylcreem-waved into an Elvis pompadour. "The gals will pursue ya!" 

 

First there were predicable old-car repairs I could not afford to a mechanic to fix.  I laboured for weeks under the Chevy's greasy chassis in my fathers driveway. I changed oil and spark plugs and pulled out the drive shaft to replace a broken universal joint.

My Chevy wasn't exactly slick, but it had an AM radio for moonlight levee necking! Decades later I got deja vu watching American Graffiti, George Lucas' paean to teen passage set in Lucas' hometown of Modesto, only half-an-hour south of Stockton where I had lived with my single father. 

A Chevy on the levee failed to transform me into Stockton High School's Mr. Stud Bunny that autumn. But it did make me a couple of friends with whom I car-pooled to class and cruised drive-ins.

For a while, Dolores, Keith and I became Three Musketeers on the front seat of my 1934 Chevy. Dolores - sharp, warm and witty squeezed between us swapping wise cracks as I pumped the clutch and worked the floor shift. Keith, a new friend who lived across from my father's house, high-strung, muscular, quick. I remember laughter taunt with tensions.

Wm. Kapell, 1948

Dolores and Keith made out and squabbled for two hours all the way to the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz one Saturday. Too hot not to cool down. They worked up to a huge row towards the end of the fall semester. I dropped Keith off first, then Dolores. Neither uttered a word all the way home.

After that day it was only Keith and I back and forth from school in my Chevy. No Dolores.

I saw her a few times on campus, giving me what I thought were steamy looks that I gave back in time. After a while I worked up the courage to ask her out. She lived just outside of town on a rural road. We dated. Drive-in movies, rides around town and along the nearby Delta's lattice of levees. 

We talked, kissed, necked (as it was called) - everything short of you-know-what.

We kept our dating on the down low. I was waiting for her to either tell Keith or get back with him. I had other preoccupations. My mother was having another bout with depression. She pleaded with me over the phone to return home to her Los Angeles for my next semester. I didn't need any more guilt than I already felt about that. I told Dolores I might be going south soon.

One Sunday morning, alone in the house, I was listening to a recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, full blast on the stereo, featuring the legendary pianist William Kapell. It was something of a cult record at that time owing to this extraordinary American pianist's tragi, 1953 demise. He perished when a British jetliner on which he was returning from an Australian tour crashed into a mountain south of San Francisco, only about 90 minutes' drive from where my father lived in Stockton.

I barely heard the insistent doorbell and knocks. Finally, I paused the recording and opened the front door. POW! I was thrown back and blinded by a sucker punch to the nose. "Keith! What the f__k!" I fell back against the open door as I dodged a second punch just in time to shove him back. 

Blood everywhere.

His enraged voice came at me through a fog. "A__hole! You stole my girl!"

I held one hand out and the other on by bleeding nose as I backed into the hallway. He stepped forward as I slammed the door against his ankle, just enough to make him back off so that I could slam and lock to door. 

 "She's not your girl!" I yelled through the door. "You broke up. Anyway, she's not your property, or mine either, or anybody's."

I don't know if he heard me. I found a towel for my nose and a baseball bat as I scrambled to lock the back door too. I sat down in the kitchen. I thought about calling Dolores, but I had misplaced her phone number and couldn't remember it. Too new.

 1940 Studebaker Commander

Then my mother phoned, talking through barely suppressed sobs. She said she had resolved things with her second husband, a charming Bluebeard from Naples prone to jealous rages. I'd punched him in the nose after he'd slapped her and we were out back of the house. He kicked me hard between the legs and we scuffled - a big reason I had moved in with my father the year before. 

"Everything will be different now," I heard my mother saying on the phone as I tried to get over the buzzing in my head. "All your friends have been asking about you."

I wanted to ask what friends.

I started my next semester at Hollywood High School a few weeks later, back in L.A. living with my mother - through I soon moved out on my own. I got another car - a royal blue, 1940 Studebaker Commander whose seats made into a bed for camping and other fun, and another, racy, powder-blue Ford V-8 convertible, followed by a red, 1952 Pontiac Silver Streak convertible that I drove up scenic Pacific Coast Highway 1 to San Francisco for my honeymoon with Ora, wife No. 1 who also graduated from Hollywood High and drove cross-country with me. We had two children, Alicia and Kara. 

I'd like to find some moral to this story, but life's weave is too fine and elaborate for me to have confidence in conclusions, only pointers, maybe.

I never heard from Dolores again but often wished that I had. I named the enigmatic, rags-to-riches film star protagonist in The Phantom Eye after her.

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Umberto Tosi's novels include his highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous. His epic historical novel Ophelia Rising continues to earn kudos as does his holiday novella, Milagro on 34th Street. His nonfiction books include High Treason (Ballentine/Putnam), and Sports Psyching.  His short stories have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His stories, essays and articles have been published widely in print and online since the 1960s.

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Enjoy Umberto Tosi's Hollywood noir detective thrillers: The Phantom Eye  and Oddly Dead.

 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Dog of the North, The Portable Veblen and managing editor of Chicago Quarterly Review.