Fast Cars and Fast Women, Okay A “Fast” Young Woman- With Josh Breslin’s Film Review Of Nicolas Cage’s “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2002) In Mind 

By Laura Perkins

I loved fast cars as a young girl, young woman, still do. I will give details in a moment about why and what happened but let me tell you how that youthful excitement came on the radar of late. You never know what kind of conversation you will get into around the water cooler at this publication except maybe if you are there when my fellow older writers are sipping it will center on some youthful adventure back in the prehistoric 1950s and 1960s. That time frame important since that era was something like the golden age of the automobile and certain rites of passage around cars went with it for young men and women. Today’s generation apparently in the age of the lime bicycle, Uber and Lyft don’t have anything like the same experiences we had when car was king and to be a queen, to be seen in some cowboy’s “boss” care (a lost term of art which every other older writer I mentioned the term to immediately recognized as such) you had to have some respect for the vehicles. Otherwise you would find yourself, especially as a young woman sitting frantically by the midnight phone while others were cavorting in the night. That cavorting can best be left to the reader’s imagination not because of any prudery on my part but because the demographics of the sustaining readership tells you we all know what that meant whether it was out on some back country lovers’ lane road, up on Eagle’s Pass far from prying eyes and the snooping authorities or down by the shore shifting sand watching as Sam Lowell put it ‘watching the submarine races” the local term for the why of those fogged up cars along the boulevard. Of course, Sam my long-time companion and fellow writer have spent many hours regaling each other with our kid’s stories but I still say that down by the seashore for a farm brought up girl sounded very interesting, very interesting.     

(By the way, speaking of today’s generation, the so-called millennials, a couple of my grandchildren don’t even have driver’s licenses and they are in their mid-twenties. Damn, we were out learning how to drive even before we could legally do so and thought nothing of it, especially in my growing up farm country where maybe you learned to drive a tractor or truck at fourteen before you ever got behind the wheel of a car, boss or otherwise.)

But getting back to the water cooler talk after my little intergenerational pithy social analysis one day Josh Breslin was talking about his latest assignment, his latest film assignment Nicolas Cage’s 2000 car boost classic Gone In Sixty Seconds where the legendary car thief Memphis Raines, whose photograph was up on my bedroom wall when I was a kid because a boyfriend had given it to be as a present, as a sign of his affections, such things meant a lot to an isolated girl, me,  had to steal something like fifty cars in a short period or else his brainless brother would be toast on the say so of the villainous enemy gangster character in the film, some nefarious Brit. Josh mentioned he was not sure why site manager Greg Green had assigned him the film since he had not been all that much of a car freak when he was young.

Josh did mention that he knew that his boyhood friend Peter Paul Markin had been, against all form, against his nerdish absent-minded professor appearance the greatest “hot wire” guy he had every known. After viewing the film and in his review Josh declared that Markin, always reverently called Scribe by the clot of older writers who work here and who knew him before he fell down at a too early age back in the 1970s over some busted drug deal that nobody to this day knows why went awry down in Mexico, could show old Memphis a thing or two. He mentioned a time when he first met Scribe out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 and he went up to him to ask for some dope, and got it, starting a too short lifelong friendship while Scribe was sitting in a boss Camaro. It was not until much later that Josh found out that car turned out to belong to the mayor’s son and he had boosted it right in front of City Hall Plaza with a half dozen cops looking on. (By the way for the stray Generation X and millennials who might have found this publication the “boost” was a term of art for stealing cars and “hot wire” was the way it was done without keys and without muss or fuss by grandees like Scribe.)

Back at that cooler I startled Josh, and maybe Leslie Dumont (an old flame of his, and maybe they have rekindled from what I have also heard at another water cooler conversation and by my keen powers of observation when they seem to be constantly smiling at one another for no apparent reason a sure sign known since childhood on my part) who has just retired from her big by-line at Women Today and is once again a contributor here now and young Will Bradley, fresh from his “wars” with Seth Garth over who is who in the film noir detective world, who were also privy to the conversation when I mentioned that I loved cars growing up, or rather loved to be seen in cars, or better sitting beside some guy in a “boss” car ready to do battle for me, for my “favors” in a “chicken run” (another “term of art” to be explained below).

They were astonished given what they have long known of my personally quiet adult demeanor and all that they know about me and about my very sedate lifestyle of late. Here’s where looks and style are deceiving. Where an ex-professor’s look hides more than one would think. I was raised in farm country in upstate New York outside of Albany in Mechanicsville, Dutch country, Dutch country as they came up the Hudson from New York City, then New Amsterdam, and populated the area once the wonder of the first load of sailors who saw that Fitzgerald “fresh green breast of land” got themselves land-locked and moved up river. (That Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby final paragraph courtesy of Sam Lowell who is crazy for the guy’s works and who smiles at me for no apparent and me back too.)        

Yes, so I knew how to drive a pick-up truck before I ever knew how to drive a manually- clutched automobile. Knew how nice it was to be mobile like that. Of course, that all had nothing at all to do with the social scene among the young in that country atmosphere in the 1960s when all hell was breaking loose elsewhere. What it had plenty to do with was getting out of the farmhouse, getting out on weekends. See every guy who was anything also knew how to drive, how to “soup-up” a car and how to have some young thing sitting next to him come that Friday or Saturday night. That was how I started to be seen with Indian Jack, the “king” of the chicken run night out our way in the back roads of roads leading out of Albany. (Indian Jack was for real an Indian, or part Indian, now Native American or a member of an indigenous tribe, in his case the Mohawk tribe which had been in the area long before those land-locked Dutch sailors ever saw the place.)

Indian Jack prided himself on two things, always having the fastest car in the county and always having a pretty girl sitting next to him in that fast car. Not that I was the prettiest girl Indian Jack ever had although I was “Queen” of my Senior Prom at Half Moon High but that was as much my sociable personality and intelligence as beauty but I did keep up my appearances since that counted and I wanted to be counted in. Thelma McGraw was the prettiest girl Indian Jack ever had sitting next to him but she was an “ice queen” and kind of stuck up so nobody missed her when I took over her seat. You should also know that the average “chicken run” won girl was not like me, not like me at all. They ran to buxom big breasts, tight cashmere sweaters, short revealing tight skirts, heavy mascara, chewing gum and serious reputation for sexual activism to put the matter politely. I was something of an outlier, was not liked by that part of the tribe, although I was by the regular country girls who just wanted to get off the farm, get out of the house and breathe whether they liked fast cars or not. They as it turned out were happy that I was Indian Jack’s girl (although that did not stop them from trying to beat my time with Jack, trying to get their young asses in that passenger seat).        

I might as well stop and tell how I got to be Indian Jack’s girl since I mentioned how he “won” me which will tell a lot about the social milieu among the fast car set (the fast women aspect can be left to your imagination although I was pretty naïve about sex both before Indian Jack and afterwards too). See I had started out as Moon Mooney’s girl, a guy in my class in high school who was also a farm boy from the next farm over whom I had known since kindergarten, and who had a great 1956 Chevy Impala if I recall correctly, two-toned white and green with those aerodynamic wings and very comfortable cushy seats (not the bucket seats of today but a one piece operation which allowed a girl to sit right next to her guy, maybe head on his shoulder or to have three across but who cared about that on date night when it was one on one).

Moon, real name Jeffrey, was crazy for cars, was crazy to race too although the few times I had seen him do so did not seem like he was built for heavy running the roads. But that is where the “culture” comes in. Guys were always egging each other and themselves on about who had not only the “boss” car which might only be the best-looking car like the vaunted 1957 Chevy when that was king of the schoolboy night but the fastest.        

Moon was no exception to that draw. Thought he could take on anybody after beating “Wreck” Phillips and “Dink’” Monroe on the “chicken run.” Strictly amateur stuff as it turned out but the stuff that dreams are made of as Humphrey Bogart said in some movie which I don’t remember the name of. This chicken run business is just what it sounds like and whether they are still doing it in the back- country roads it is still the same. Pick some Two AM weekend morning back road like New York 146 in my youth or after U.S. 87 took a ton of traffic away U.S. 9 near my house and let two guys start from zero and beat the other guy no matter what was in the road ahead, especially what might be on the road ahead. That was what we spent our late-night times as much as working the lovers’ lane wrestling matches we found ourselves in.

Sometimes this was for money, sometimes for the other guy’s car (a trade-off) and sometimes for a guy’s girl. That latter was the way Indian Jack swept me off my feet. He had heard that Moon was looking to race him and had heard that I was pretty so one Saturday afternoon when Moon and I were at the A&W for hamburgers Indian Jack came up in back of us in his souped up 1949 Hudson. Moon made the mistake of sort of, only sort of, guffawing when he saw Indian’s auto and that was enough for Indian to make the wager the winner takes the girl (in those days the girl was strictly window dressing in the decision department but truth be told I was very interested in big handsome Indian and got some funny feeling when the whole idea of being the prize swept over me-like I say truth to tell). Needless to say that Thelma was not happy about the matter but like I said no girl was asked about the matter and I never heard any girl refusing to be the bet, or not walking away with the winner if it was not her current guy. And needless to say Indian Jack blew Moon’s crate off the road (literally with me in the passenger seat).

When the dust settled and Indian Jack came back to claim his “prize” I got out of Moon’s busted up car, Thelma got out of Indian’s and I slid nice as could be beside him. I am not sure how Thelma got home or how Moon got his jalopy back home but I did see him several days later after school at the Dairy Queen talking to some freshman girl.  As for Indian Jack he was my first guy, my first serious sexual experience, and while he could be rough-handed he also could be gentle. It was only by way of an armed robbery of the Midnight Diner that broke us up since he was going up for two to five and my parents practically kept me locked up in the house until Senior Prom night when Wayne Sellars escorted me to my throne. I can still feel the wind in my hair when those cars were going full out, still turn my head when I see a classic car on the road or at a show.