(first published in 2007) Once I crossed the line and became a fifteen year-old driving addict, there was no turning back. Nothing could stop me from using my drug of choice. Like most addicts, I was willing to cross any line to get my fix. If my supply was cut off, I found another. Needless to say this is not my auto-biography’s most innocent chapter.
After my first illicit drive in the family’s 1965 Dodge Coronet wagon, I couldn’t stop. On the day after Thanksgiving, with a load full of classmates, we cruised Towson Plaza. A sale-crazed woman coming out of the Hutzler’s parking garage ran a parking lot stop and hit me in the rear. Panicked, I drove away. It was just a dent, but returning the keys to my parents was not a Kodak moment.
I returned home before my parents, and tried to talk my older brother into taking the hit. But he was tripping on LSD (this was 1968) and just couldn’t muster it. I had to ‘fess up when they arrived in the Dart. It was an ugly scene, and I was officially inducted into the hall of criminality.
My punishment: a two year postponement of my license. Ouch! But did that stop me? Did that even slow me down? Hell no. They might as well have banned me for life for all the difference it made.
I cultivated other sources of wheels. And in a pinch, I still took out the family Dodges. Locked? A Popsicle stick opened any Chrysler product vent window. No keys? A single piece of wire (from the battery to the ignition) and a big screwdriver that crossed the starter solenoid posts and I was ready to roll. Oh, and I also unhooked the speedometer cable; my father had a photographic memory for (odometer) numbers.
I decided I needed more independence, an income, and other sources of wheels. A friend’s older brother worked Saturdays at a tiny two-pump Sunoco gas station on York Road, and I heard that he was quitting. So I walked over there and asked for the job, which was promptly given to me. The good old days…
I worked the Saturday shift solo, opening it in the morning and closing it up at night, recording the day’s sales, and locking the cash in the safe. I was essentially managing a gas station. This was some months before I turned sixteen. Would you give the keys to your gas station and safe to a fifteen year-old?
I only had some twenty customers a day, but many drove high-performance motors looking for their un-cut Sunoco 260 fix, the highest octane gas available. I eagerly popped the hood to check fluids, especially if a Jag 4.2 or 426 Hemi was lurking there. I vividly remember the crackling of a hot 327 fuel injected Corvette engine as I checked the oil and added a quart, and then checked his tires and topped them up to. The guy gave me a $10 tip, which was absurdly large, like $100 today.
It was a great way to spend Saturday: listening to The Doors blaring on the radio, doing the odd oil change, running next door to Smetana’s for a meatball sub, and (mostly) staying out of trouble. AND I got paid.
The boss owned a fleet of taxis (Coronets!), which he parked behind the station. Most had tired slant sixes. One ’67 still had a semblance of vitality, holstering the new LA 318 V8. I always went to work an hour early and treated myself to a therapeutic “wake-up drive.”
In the fall of 1968, I was a sophomore in a Jesuit boys’ prep school (Loyola). It was destined to be my last year at that august institution (I flunked out). The school had a fresh-out-of-college French teacher who drove a ’65 VW bus. He was way too friendly with his students.
I learned to drive a stick shift (car, not tractor) on that 1965 VW bus, on the grounds of the Maryland School for the Blind. It often wouldn’t start for him after school, so I fiddled with the carb (held it wide open because he flooded it) to get it going. One evening he was driving some of us to the Maryland School for the Blind to perform our allotment of community service. Payback time: that evening, my social contribution was to not hit any of the blind students walking the campus roads with their sticks as I mastered the VW’s stick.
Pretty soon, I was the new designated chauffeur of the so-called “Smokemobile”, into which a number of us would pile in order to indulge our nicotine habit as we rode through the neighborhoods around Loyola between classes. As the bus labored up Chestnut Avenue, trails of smoke poured from the flip-out windows.
I ended up driving that bus on all sorts of trips, including a ski trip up to the mountains of Pennsylvania, in fresh snow no less. Nothing like a supple fifteen-year-old brain to rapidly master the various dynamics involved in hurtling a loaded bus through snow-covered winding back roads. Teach ‘em young, even before they get a license.
Mysteriously, the facilitating teacher’s tenure at Loyola was cut short after only about four months.
To honor its name, the smoke-mobile eventually blew up in a cloud of…. smoke. The ex-teacher’s grandfather gave him his pampered 1962 Olds F-85 Cutlass coupe: black, bucket seats, and the four barrel 185 hp version of the immortal Buick-Rover-MG-Morgan-Land Rover aluminum 3.5 V8. Those ’61-’63 GM compacts were sharp looking and light. With the V8, the Olds was no slouch.
We went to Ocean City. Late at night, somewhere between Cambridge and Salisbury, I opened up the Cutlass. The speedometer needle’s progress slowed above 95. I was on my way to my first century. It kept moving: 96, 97, 98…
Damn! Puffs of steam erupted from the front of the hood. The thermal challenges of the aluminum V8 had stumped the GM engineers. “Hot as they go” as in the ad above indeed. Maybe that’s why they sold it cheap to Rover: the weather’s always cool in England, no?
After his dismissal, the ex-teacher (and accelerative enabler) tried out the monastery. Driving back late from an outing, the police pulled me over going a little too fast on the Beltway. I shook the intoxicated sleeping novice awake.
While Maryland’s finest got organized and out of his car, we scrambled over each other and changed seats (no joke in the little coupe). The fogged-up rear window was a blessing. The dazed-looking theologian in the black Olds presented his religious-affiliation ID, and was instantly absolved. Praise the Lord! My, how times have changed.
Even though in 1968 most of Baltimore was still living in 1959 (think “Hairspray”), I embraced the psychedelic late sixties fully. Hallucinogens opened new windows of auto-perception. It was like being five again; cars became living, breathing entities. We communicated, and I gained new insight into their personalities as expressed through design. I almost solved the mystery of the ’61 Falcon grill. I couldn’t understand the Marlin. And I doubt I would be standing in streets today endangering my life trying to get the right shot of a clapped-out Datsun if it wasn’t for Albert Hoffman.
Although my fellow mind-travelers were generally freaked out at the idea of dropping acid and driving, I never had problems driving in drastically altered states of consciousness. One just had to know how to talk to cars and ask them for their help, when needed. That always worked for me.
Sounds like Albert Hofman would be featured on Dateline NBC these days…just how much DID you enjoy driving that Olds?
Before we had our licences my friends and I would go down to the local new car dealers to “look” at cars…which just happened to have all the keys in the ignition!! We would swipe the keys and then go back on the weekends or at night when they were closed and drive the cars all around the lots. Most of the time we took the used car keys…guess we figured less chance of getting caught. We had a huge big key ring with about 30 sets of keys all marked with dealers name and car type and colour!! I do remember the 69 Z28 was blocked in so we never did get to drive it. Lots of fun and we never did get caught either!!
The only way to drive a VWKombi is slow,they dont do fast, I had limited access to a 54 beetle at skool a real gutless wonder but it was mobility you could easily outdrive the lights in town legally the two 6volt glowworms up front were crap in a modern world such cars would not pass certification. Still being 15 and licenced I thought it was ok at the time, I have an idea NZ had the lowest licence age around it just got raised to 16, too many teen drivers in turbo JDM imports going splat, once licenced there was no restriction on what you may buy/drive
You’re a better man than I. My few drives on mushrooms scared me enough to never try that again.
Granted, one of them wound up with me getting a free-drink bracelet at the 2006 Eugene Celebration. The next five hours were simply biblical. Good times.
Never tried driving in an altered state unless you consider the cars we had to choose from..
Aries K, Diplomat, Cavaier coupe, Custom Cruiser wagon, Mercury Lynx and once a 70 Impala(Might have been a Caprice).
Not exactly driving excitement but it fed the addiction well enough.
The most mind-altering experience I had while driving my 1960 Plymouth Fury 4dr hardtop was getting a blowjob from my girlfriend one night while heading to Chicago on I-80. By the time I saw god I realized I was only doing 45 mph. Good times.
If ever there was an addiction, I’d rather it be a car addiction, and driving. 🙂
Some girls we knew invited us to crash a “church camp” up in the San Bernardino mountains. They would sneak us into their cabin. We piled into my 66 Bus and found the camp. Everybody, and I do mean everybody in the “church camp”, was blazing on acid. The first person we saw was a girl painted green in a Peter Pan outfit dancing around in the forest playing a flute! All was well for about 2 days until the Sheriff came barging into the cabin and pulled us all out in our boxers in the snow covered 5:00 am parking lot. All three of us had dropped about an hour earlier. My Bus was searched and a pipe and roach clip was found. I was told by the cop I could go to jail for a lot of reasons. By this time I really was starting to come on to the acid. He told us to get into the VW bus and he would follow us off the mountain. By this time my bus was floating on a cloud and my friends had turned into green dragons. As I drove down the hill with the Sheriff car 20 feet behind the bus, three identical roads appeared in front of me, I chose the center one to drive and it was the correct one. I was followed for about 45 minutes and finally the cop was no longer behind us as we reached the bottom of the windy mountain road. I pulled off the road and we all spent the next few hours so high we thought we were dead and had discovered all the mysteries of the universe.
Brings back memories of seeing Iggy and the Stooges (Raw Power tour) open for Slade at the Agora in Cleveland, OH. There were four of us, Steve who was my cycling buddy and hallucinogenic sidekick, his date (who annoyed the hell of out me but had incredibly big tits on a 5 foot, 100lb frame), and my ol’ lady Mary.
We dropped in the lobby of the Agora as we walked in. Mary and I being sensible and cautious, did one hit apiece. Steve, being Steve, did two. Miss Tits either dropped two or three. As our seats were in separate areas, we split up, rejoined in the lobby after Slade’s final encore.
It was probably one of my better trips in life. Clean, crystal, and absolutely wonderful. Mary was in the same condition, wasted, but with a real comfortable rush. Steve and Miss Tits? Absolutely wasted, to the point that we thought we were going to have to carry the two of them out of there. They could barely stand. Meanwhile, we’d been joined by a fifth, a total stranger looking to hitch a ride back to Erie, PA (from whence we had come).
We get out to the car (Volvo 144 sedan in blue – Steve’s), and Steve can’t even get his key into the door lock. It keeps melting on him. Not knowing the fifth guy, nor having any idea what he was one (he had to be on something to be willing to ride with us), I get responsible, take the keys from Steve, and point us east on I-90.
It was a good drive. I wasn’t driving the car, I WAS the car. No close calls, a steady, safe 15mph over the speed limit, we blended into traffic and made the 90 mile drive back to Erie without the slightest problem. On the outside, anyway. There was this matter of Miss Tits . . . . . . . . .
To this day, I can’t remember what it was that she was doing to annoy me, but damned if she didn’t. In spades. Which I handled by going into a low-volume, almost sotto-voice monotone monologue about how I was going to stop the car, pull Miss Tits out and tie her ankles to the rear bumper and drag her home. And it there was nothing left after 90 miles of friction than her feet and ankles tied to the bumper, so be it.
To say she freaked was putting it mildly. The more paranoid and scared she got, the more I laid it on. By the time we got back to her house, Steve had to pull her out of the car, laying on the floor in a fetal position, whimpering and gibbering like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. She never annoyed me again after that night. If anything, she was incredibly compliant, especially at the time when she had stopped by my place and Steve wasn’t with her.
My girlfriend was doing me a “favor” in the 77 Rabbit with the sunroof open. After a while I noticed a semi truck was next to me, matching my 70 mph speed. I looked up through the sunroof and got a thumbs up and a horn blast from the driver.
I had nearly the same thing happen, although it was at a crowded toll plaza in New Jersey. I was driving my girlfriend’s car, which had dark tints and there was no way anybody could see inside, but we had the sunroof open. Out of nowhere I heard a semi horn and nearly jumped right through it. Look up and there’s a truck driver laughing his ass off. We just smiled and waved!
Interesting to read but not my thing. No youthful borrowing cars or using drugs. That first picture of using the hypodermic needle is in my opinion ,way over the top.
Real life ain’t like the Disney channel, my friend. More often than not, it’s our very mistakes and indiscretions that help us grow and mature as individuals.
As a teenager, I went to school in tha ‘hood and ran with a rather tough ( but not incorrigible ) crowd. In college I hung out with nerds, hippies, future yuppies, grease monkeys ( like myself ), rockers, and gangsta wannabes. And due to my varied interests and past life experiences, I fit in equally well with ALL of them. Starting in my mid 20s, I dabbled with strippers, escorts, massage parlor chicks, and even a few semi-famous porno actresses. Fun times- all of it.
I have enough fond and colorful memories to last me two lifetimes 🙂 .
Wow Paul! Talk about flashbacks… Perhaps that smoking VW van was the inspiration for Cheech & Chong’s “Up in Smoke” (one of my favorite movies btw). I do remember driving with, let’s say enhanced perception. I was ‘one with the machine’ as my buddies would say.
KM – a bj in a 1960 Fury… it just can’t get any better than that!
A much more colorful age 15 than the one I lived. That 6 years between our ages was pretty big insofar as what kids were into. LSD seemed to be pretty much gone in my world.
I’ll check back when you get your license. That was when my inner rebel came out.
My first accident (one of only 2 in my life) was not so innocent. I lived out on a farm, and had just got my drivers license a couple of months earlier. With the license, I had my permission to use my family’s 1963 Rambler station wagon for short trips. This is AZ, and there were plenty of farms mixed together with plenty of desert. My cousin Mike, also 16, but with no access to a car, and I had driven to a house out in the desert to visit the local “troublemaker” family and party. There were 6 boys in that family And I mean party. We were all drinking and smoking “weed”. About 3:00 in the morning, Mike and I decided to head home. I was going to take him home, then go home myself. It was about a 35 mile drive back into the little town we both lived close to. I was doing pretty good most of the way. I had the pedal to the floor (about 75 mph in that car) and the lights were not that great. It was a dirt road. All of a sudden a sharp 90 degree right turn appeared in front of us. I had grown up there and knew about it, but wasn’t paying much attention. There was a deep ditch on the outside of the curve, followed by a high bank, made out of the dirt that had been plowed out of the ditch. I panicked, locked up the breaks and spun the wheel hard to the right, but at that speed we never had a chance. The back end of the car did come around, but as it was doing so the whole car was sliding to the outside of the curve. We skidded down into the ditch, up over the bank, and rolled over a few times out into the desert. No seatbelts or anything. The car came to rest on it’s wheels, all the windows were broken, the top was smashed but not actually caved in. We actually crawled out through the passenger side window, with no broken bones, just a few cuts and a lot of bruises, along with a lot of muscle, tendon, and ligament damage. We were out there in the desert for several hours, unable to walk very far. There was no “evidence” in the car, and by the time someone found us and called the cops, we had totally sobered up. We were taken to the ER, where both mine and Mike’s parents showed up. I told my dad that I had lost it in that curve, which was the truth, but left out the other details. This was 1975, in the middle of nowhere, and there was only one deputy sheriff in the whole area, whom we both knew. My dad was pretty upset that I had destroyed his car, and wouldn’t let me near his next car, a ’63 Chevy Nova. But what amazed me beyond belief is that nobody ever found out about (or at least mentioned) the drinking and pot smoking. About a year later, without driving, I got a part time job and bought myself a ’73 Pinto. My mother signed for the loan. As for the drinking and smoking, I learned quick. Didn’t drink for years after that, and then only a little once in a great while. Never smoked any pot after that either, unfortunately I spent over 20 years smoking regular cigarettes. That one incident completely turned me off to the party scene. But not to my love of cars.
Holy sh*t Paul. I’m assuming the statute of limitations has well and truly expired on some of these exploits.
My father was about as Irish as one could get and not be in Ireland. He had a total disrespect for silly rules and regulations. He taught me to drive on his 1974 Corolla 1600 very soon after he got it. This means he taught me to drive when I was nine. I can still remember craning my neck to see over the steering wheel.
Like I said, Dad was Irish, and he drank like the Irish. When I was little, my Mum would always send me along with Dad, so he wouldn’t end up in the bar all day. By the time I was 13, I was driving him all over the place. I could take the Corolla out any time I wanted, he just said of I got stopped, it “Is only a small fine, I’ll pay it, so don’t worry.” When I was about 14, I remember putting his GMC half ton in the ditch when he as badgering me to move over to let another car pass. A local boy pulled us out with this truck and Dad drank a beer with him on the side of the road. Try that these days!
By the time the 1979 Impala was in the family, I was fifteen, and regularly drove it on trips more than 80 km. The next year I had my own licence. I took the written test on my birthday and did the driving exam exactly 30 days later, the minimum at the time.
I still enjoy a good car and driving on a nice road. I guess Dad had a lot to do with that. I have taught my kids to be free, too, but I can’t help but think that I had a lot more fun when I was young than today’s generation.
This one is difficult to comment on, Paul.
I was never fond of the pharmaceutically enhanced lifestyle. Probably because my older brother was smoking tobacco. The cheapest tobacco available was “Gitane” purchased at the “magazin” of the local French military base. His daily cough was enough of a turn off for me. Therefore I never had much exposure to the starter drug nicotine, except for second hand smoke and the occasional trial of a Camel.
Now I have a son with a specific set of issues. He has taken to that innocent THC in the weed. The weed itself may not be the real problem but it worsens other conditions to a point where I fear he will never have something like a “normal life”.
Paul: you had your fun and you survived, like so many of the Woodstock generation. But I experience not a high but a major, major low and therefore I lack tolerance for glorifying even the memories of a pharmaceutically enhanced lifestyle.
Ah Gitane’s. In America, not at all a cheap cigarette, or easily purchased (limited to the local tobacconist which is where I purchased my pipe tobacco) but a symbol of class, style, and being a fan of David Bowie and Roxy Music. Of course, the cigarette was held like Brian Ferry (Roxy’s lead singer) did, between the third and fourth fingers. An affectation that sticks with me today on the occasions that I do smoke.
+1, Wolfgang.
FWIW, 99% of my youthful drug taking occurred between the ages of 15 and 18. I decided that I was bored with drugs at that point, and was ready to move on and learned to meditate. That’s became my “drug of choice”, and undoubtedly had a positive impact on my life from that point going forward.
Having said that, I don’t have any rigid feelings or judgments about cannabis and psychedelics. There are pros and cons.
To quote the Drive-By Truckers, “I’d like to say I’m sorry but I lived to tell about it”. Looking back it is a wonder that me and my contemporaries actually made it to adult-hood. Apparently God does take care of drunks (stoners) and fools; of course there is quite a bit of overlap in these two groups.
Almost all of my childhood friends died behind drugs & alcohol before they were twenty .
I began driving before I was 12 and had my share of screwups , lucky for me I survived .
All though High School I had my own place and cars , many of my peers Mother’s didn’t know how to drive so I’d teach them in my old beat up 1960 VW Beetle , VW Beetles prolly the best car to learn to drive in because once you learn that , you can drive any car easily and safely .
I’d teach them to drive for the full tank of fuel they’d buy me ~ about $3 back then .
Being a Die Hard GearHead I knew my Son would at least try the same things I was interested in so he began learning to drive at about 7 Y.O. sitting between my legs in my 1946 Chevy pickup truck , soon I took him to a large parking lot in one of the many VW Beetles I had , he learned to be a rapid , competent driver and when he was 12 he accompanied his Mother and her new hubby to San Fransisco where they were overwhelmed by the hills & traffic so he drove them around a few days and then back to Los Angeles .
I know he took my old 750 C.C. BMW Moto out in the Mountains at least once , he raced a Porsche with his G.F. on the back and beat the Porsche but seriously over speeded the engine and blew the push rod seals doing it .
Glad I’d sprung for top quality Metzler ” Lazer ” tires ~ they stopped making those tires 25 years ago .
It’s always fun seeing someone tell my Son how fast their ride is , he’ll innocently ask them if he can try it out and always ask them to ride along , they always come back white as a sheet and say ‘ DANG ! I had NO IDEA it’d go that fast ! ” .
He has a real gift in his driving ability , I don’t but then I don’t like to go crazy , I just like to Motorvete rapidly .
He needs to go 125 + MPH commuting in Los Angeles .
I’m enjoying reading the stories and glad so many made it , so many others died .
-Nate
I’ve got a story that’s mainly about hallucinogens and only slightly about cars, but I’m gonna share it here because I think it’s in the same spirit of youthful recklessness and experimentation and I know a few of you guys will get a kick out of it. Or be disgusted by it, or something. If this is totally inappropriate, by all means please delete. I’ve gotta go anonymous on this for obvious reasons, not trying to hide from any of my fellow CCers – just search engines/background checks!
The scariest experience I ever had while being in an automobile on psychedelics, and I’ve had quite a few, was under the influence of Salvia divinorum, although I wasn’t driving and it was only scary in retrospect as I was having my only out-of-body experience at the time. Salvia is a batshit crazy hallucinogen which, up until a few years ago, could be purchased at gas stations and head shops (still can, in some places) often coyly marketed as “legal weed” – which is not at all an accurate description. I had smoked it a few times previously and it was either bogus shit or I just wasn’t doing it right, so while hanging out one night with my ex-girlfriend Katie, I thought nothing of her suggestion to pack a bowl with Salvia instead of weed and fully expected it to do nothing at all.
Wrong! Suddenly I felt my body being sliced into tiny pieces from the feet up by enormous, invisible fan blades rotating in time with the opening crescendo of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” (yes I know that’s incredibly cliche, but she was a hippie and it was actually on her radio at the time – wouldn’t have been my choice of soundtrack). As it reached my neck I felt every component of my body start to scatter into every corner of the room and I could experience all of them simultaneously.
Then Katie touched my arm and I “came back”, but the words coming out of her mouth didn’t make any sense. She was laughing uncontrollably and then I started laughing uncontrollably and then just kinda sat there staring into space for a few minutes, trying to make sense of the whole thing until the Salvia wore off (the trip only lasts 5 minutes). I should also add that we had just come back from the bar and still had a mountain of cocaine that we hadn’t finished via key bumps in the bathroom (we were both doing lots of coke at the time and essentially alcoholics, very stupid). We decided the smartest thing to do would be to snort a few more lines and then try hitting the Salvia again, because that would “sharpen” it or something. I don’t know.
Well, it fucking worked like gangbusters. Trying to describe hallucinations is extremely difficult, but these were not the type of hallucinations that routinely accompany psilocybin mushrooms or LSD. There were some of those same elements, but I felt as if I could also stick my hand out and feel the texture of time, I felt like I could see existence itself swell and ebb like the sea before my eyes, like I had unlocked several other dimensions and was sliding between them continuously. It was all terrifying but also very exciting. We kept packing the Salvia bowls and snorting lines for the next hour or so and at some point I totally blacked out and exited consciousness entirely. When I came to, my body had taken the form of a small cog-like component in a gigantic blue machine – the exact light blue color of AMC engine blocks – and I was communicating with all the thousands of other blue components telepathically.
Does that sound insane? Yes. It is! But this was all absolutely real to my mind at the time. Perception functioned in this state much like it does in reality, and at the time my perception was that this was actually what was real; that I had just exited a truly effed up dream about “being a human” for 24 years and that I was now back home safe and sound in the enormous blue machine of unknown purpose. I can’t stress enough how absolutely convinced I was for a moment. It was like nothing else before or since. I communicated this sentiment to my fellow planetary gearsets, spindles, transistors, capacitors, etc. and they collectively fired back “dude, wtf? what’s a human? what’s a year?!”
It was then that I was sucked back into our actual known reality. Drooling on myself, staring through the windshield of a very slow moving Toyota Corolla at a tree line and the pre-dawn light rising behind it. We were in a field somewhere, bouncing along the grass at <5MPH. I looked next to me and Katie was staring dead ahead in a trance, locked in concentration, sweat soaking her forehead, clenching the steering wheel like she was driving the final lap of the Daytona 500, but without her foot on the accelerator. Once I managed to get some words out of my mouth she "snapped out of it" more or less and we were both horrified to realize we were driving along a (thankfully empty) soccer field at an elementary school right around the corner from her building.
Apparently, at some point she had decided she wanted to go for a drive and we'd left her apartment. I had no recollection of it whatsoever, but she said I was conscious and talking to her through the whole thing. We had been in that car for at least an hour, smoking Salvia bowls all the while. That sobered me up very quickly as I immediately assumed the worst, but through some type of absolute crack miracle she had managed to pilot that car without killing or injuring anyone, damaging it or anything else and without getting us arrested. We limped the car back home very cautiously and slept for the next 14 hours. Let it never be said that nothing interesting has ever happened in a Toyota Corolla!
I never smoked Salvia again, but I was glad I did that one time. That was enough. Not to have some quasi-religious “we are all one” type experience, but to realize just how suspect, frail and subjective perception and consciousness are. I think therefore I am, but what can be trusted beyond that? That’s an interesting proposition philosophically, but to actually experience the question is something else entirely. Unfortunately it didn’t dissuade me from using other, much worse drugs instead, but that’s a horror story for another time…
Ah, yes… AKA “potpourri”. Wouldn’t touch that stuff on a dare. Ex-cook at a bar & grill I frequent smoked some and bit the ear off his dog…
“potpourri” or “spice” is a synthesised ‘legal high’ .. Nothing to do with salvia divinorum, an unadulterated natural plant, which grows wild in Mexico.
Xx, it might’ve been scary but it makes for an hilarious tale. Thanx.
Paul – another great story, but I’m not too happy with your choice of lead picture. I’m an Olds guy myself, as was my dad, and am of the age that saw me more than a few times (as a young man) driving under the influence of something or other, but never anything that would have required sticking a needle in my arm. IMHO, This is not only over the top, but a completely inappropriate image for this article. Believe me, I’m not a prude; this is merely my observation about content, which I can usually rely on in CC to be uplifting and informative. I’d like you to consider this and formulate a reply.
As I work daily with the results of drugs , I cannot disagree highly enough .
Just like the amputated foot article a while back , this is -VERY- appropriate and needs saying ~ you can delete it of you choose to ignore the facts .
-Nate
Interesting takes, Paul. I’m becoming a fanboi for your musings and this site.
My experience with psychedelics are limited and have no car tales, so nothing to contribute.
However, pot and beer, and communing with one’s auto, that I can relate. My first car was a 1973 VW Type III squareback. I rebuilt the engine (that didn’t work out well during the year) and put a 2 bbl Holley carb on it (oh, how I loved hearing it aspirate on acceleration!). I got that car the year after I finished college and was working at a liquor store before moving on to graduate school. This was 1982-83. I would go back over to my college (I was one of the rare local boys that went to a nationally known private university) to party with friends in the year behind me. In an era before MADD really came down, no telling how many times that VW got me home while I was semi-conscious and I don’t know how or clearly remember. Once I did get pulled over, but I stayed polite, told the truth to the reasonable limit, such as saying I was going home, and my license said I didn’t have far to go, and I was let go. (There could have been other opportunities, but I learned from my step-dad, a former probation officer who was the best driver while enebriated in the world: he said, treat your car like a woman–be slow, easy, attentive, never get hasty, and no sudden stops.) That won’t happen today. A year later I burned out the bearings (after blowing 4 oil coolers) on the drive home from graduate school, and it ended its life in a junk yard in PA. The aftermarket tape deck lived on another 14 years in my second vehicle, a Toyota SR5 truck.
I don’t regret that part of my past, but I don’t miss it either. It seems miraculous I got this far in life without a criminal record. While the criminal penalties for DUI are very harsh (and rightfully so), I’m more terrified of what my professional licensing boards would do if I get busted for drug/alcohol-related matters, because the charge IS the conviction.
Mixed thoughts on the needle-in-the-arm picture. Yes, it is dramatic, and it does scream “addiction!” which is your theme in this engaging post. But in my professional medical field, pharmacologic additions–especially those with hypodermic needles–have no upsides and too many long and short-term negative, life altering (shortening) consequences. (Keith Richards is an egregious exception.) An addiction with cars, which can be troublesome, at least has potential good while remaining life-long (and somewhat moderated by experience and learning), like good mechanics and writings, without inevitably hitting the bottom of the abyss as so many drug addicts have gone. The symbolism is strong, but not a good match to cars, gasoline and grease.
Down at my local Citroën garage in the village near where I live in France – when I was chatting about cars with the very knowledgeable proprietor – he mimed injecting himself in the arm with a hypodermic – ‘Citroëns are in my blood he said’. My DS came from that garage – then run by his father – in 1968.
Ah, driving on acid…
Mostly done at night around the inner city in an understeering pig of an HJ panelvan. Tho, down the coast with a bunch of folks one eve, post gig we drove along the twisting coast road, I was piloting the drummer’s old Mazda 323 and the moon was huge and bright and low over the water.
Next morning a similarly afflicted friend decided it was time he learned to drive and asked me for a lesson. We’d all crashed at a semi-rural shack on a hillside above the beach with a long dirt drive, Jeff got the Mazda in gear, floored it across the embankment.
Instead of rolling and tumbling down the hill, a likely prospect, we landed on four wheels and I still have a vivid memory of the shocked expressions of the other folks as they came rushing out of the shack after hearing the crash.
Jeff and I fell out of the car laughing our guts out.
How did you disable the steering Column Lock?