A few minutes ago I ventured out into the backyard, a pint of beer in one hand and nothing in the other, to finish cleaning up for the night. I had some people over for dinner, grilled up some tasty burgers, made some spinach noodles with a nice garlic-laden oil and balsamic vinagarette dressing, along with some delicious, locally-grown corn-on-the-cob. They say the cool and wet weather the summer of '09 has brought spells disaster for the veggies, especially the tomatoes and corn, but if so, the farm selling the corn I bought today must have made a deal with the devil, for their product, even relatively early in the season, is nothing short of outstanding.
I picked up the dirty plates and forks and put the cover back on the kettle grill. A couple of doors down, the neighbors had a wood fire burning in their fire pit. I heard their voices, and listened to them talk as I cleaned up.
"...reminds of that guy, what was his name, Billy Ray...Billy Ray Vaughn, no, that was the singer that died in the plane crash...Billy Ray somethin'...the guy that tried to buy everybody in town a new car back in, what was it, the late '70's..."
It was sometime in the late winter, or early spring - there's little difference between the two here in upstate New York - of 1977. I was one of twenty-five students in Mr. Connors' fifth grade class. He held something of a legendary status in the school, as a tough old former soldier who'd supposedly fought in some of the fiercest battles of World War II. A chain-smoker who constantly smelled of recently burned cigs, even in class; when he needed a fix, in the middle of a school day, he'd give us some "quiet work" to do at our desks, and he'd disappear for a few minutes. We all knew he'd gone off to smoke another filterless Camel or three, we just didn't know exactly where, but we feared him too much to rise from our desks and try to follow him out. He had a massive paddle which he always threatened to use, full-force, on our ten year old asses, though he never did. He gave his students nicknames, year after year, and often these nicknames stuck with his students for the rest of their lives. He called me "Lollipop" at first but then, after spending the first half of the year watching me flirt shamelessly with the girls in class, and especially with the short redhead who later that year became my first "girlfriend", he changed my handle to "Loverboy."
I came into school as usual, on a Thursday morning, and got situated at my desk. A buzz filled the room. Kids were talking. Some of their parents had spent the previous evening at the local watering hole just down the street. This joint had just reopened after closing down for awhile the previous fall, after what we all called "The Shootout." The night before Halloween 1976, a guy had picked up a speeding ticket on the outskirts of town from a brand-new, young police. The guy wasn't too happy about it, and had holed up in his apartment, across the street from this bar, getting drunk. That night, knowing the cop who'd given him the ticket was still on duty, he called the nearby police station and told them that the bar across the street had gotten robbed by a guy with a gun. The young cop came running out of the police station, heading toward the bar. The drunk sat at his bedroom window, waited for the cop, and, upon seeing him, fired several rounds from an M-1 rifle at him, killing him. He then proceeded to shoot up the bar for several hours. He killed another person and wounded several others before finally surrendering.
The kids had some exciting news from the newly reopened bar.
An unknown man had blown into town. Billy Bob Ray, some said. Bob John Ray, insisted others. No one knew for sure.
He sat down at the bar and got to talking. Supposedly showed some fellow drinkers a passbook for an account with his name on it and a whole lot of money in it. He said he wanted to do something nice for the folks in town. He said he wanted to buy some people some new cars.
A crowd gathered round. Someone got a local car dealer, I think, to come down to the bar. He started filling out paperwork. Everyone in town, apparently, except my own parents, was getting a new Ford of some sort. A lot of Mercury Cougars were going to disappear off the local Ford lot the next day.
I didn't believe it at first. Even at ten years old, I thought it seemed too good to be true. I spoke up and said it seemed unreal. I got shouted down. Though I was well-liked by my schoolmates at that stage, they still had a healthy distrust of my sometimes "weird" opinions and tastes in music. Mostly because I had a father with a Ph.D. and we lived in the projects. A question I was frequently asked back then, and for which I had no reasonable answer, was, "if your father is so fucking smart how come you're living in the projects." Intelligence and education were perceived not as qualities worthy of respect on their own merits, but as mere chits that one should properly exchange for a lucrative career path. So something about me, and our whole family operation, smelled fishy. We had to have a catch to us. This was a town, and a school, where true success, where making it, meant belonging to the local golf club, driving a new luxe gas-guzzling American whale of a car, and owning a pair of kick-ass Frye boots. And no matter how goddamn smart I thought my father was, we were oh-for-three in the things that mattered.
By the time my classmates got done with me, by the time Mr. Connors had finish filling his lungs with as many Camels as he could before the opening bell of the school day rang, I believed that an angel named Billy Bob Ray had come to town to dish out free brand new automobiles to true believers, and I believed my parents were, if they failed to get involved, complete and total idiots. Everyone in class said that Billy Bob Ray would come back to the local bar the next night to give away a bunch more cars, and I had to make sure my folks would be there to get ours.
We had a car, mind you, a '72 Dodge Coronet with about 75,000 miles on the clock. No dents, yet, and no rust, but in the late '70's, the Big Three still lived off of their reputations, and their business plans had fully incorporated the "planned obsolescence" model that would ultimately prove to be their undoing, though we didn't see that then. A five year old car with 75,000 miles was considered a dinosaur back then; everyone knew that any respectable family bought a new car every four years. We couldn't afford to do that, but here came Billy Bob Ray, offering a way out of our impoverished predicament.
I came home from school that day and told my mom, and later, my dad, that they had to get down to the tavern that night. "There's a guy giving away cars!" I explained. "It's true! He had the paperwork, everyone in school said their parents saw it, he had the sales slips!"
My father laughed.
I stewed in my juices.
I went to bed that night waiting to hear my mom get on the phone to call Nana over to babysit us so my parents could go down to the bar and get their brand new free automobile. The call never went out. I got up the next morning and asked if they'd gone out the night before, and felt crushed to hear that they hadn't. I couldn't believe my own parents could be so pigheaded as to turn down a new car.
In school the next morning, Billy Bob Ray and his free cars dominated the conversation. Some of my classmates' parents, having missed the boat the first night, had gone down to the bar the next night to get all set up. They weren't going to miss out on a good thing! I mean really, who in their right mind would turn down a free car? Oh, I was almost sick with anger at my parents, at their stupidity, at their pride. We'd have to drive around in that "old" piece of shit Dodge while I'd be taunted by the sight of just about everybody else in town tooling around town in their brand-spankin' new Fords.
The word was that at noon, he'd go down to the dealership and square up, give the dealer a fat check, and then the dealer would give out the keys.
By one o'clock, just after lunch and as we strolled into gym class for some warball, the rumors started flying.
"Something's wrong! He doesn't have enough money! Not everyone's gonna get their cars, only the people from the first night!"
Then the news got worse.
"No one's getting a car! He needs more time...everyone's gonna get their cars he just has to wait a coupla days to pay for them."
Apparently, a ton of people showed up at the dealer's that morning. The dealer had all the paperwork ready. Billy Bob Ray, or whatever name he used, showed up a bit before noon. He confessed to the dealer he'd hoaxed the whole town in an effort to score some free drinks. The cops came. They walked him out of the dealer's, through an angry mob, and walked him to the town line and told him to get lost, for good.
My dad somehow got another 100,000 miles out of that Dodge, even rebuilt the engine with an uncle of mine one summer's day at my grandmother's house. I remember them in my grandmother's garage, staring at what looked, to my young mind, like a thousand pieces of a car engine laid out on the ground. I remember after they put the thing back together, and this was maybe in '79 or '80, my dad bragging to people that his rebuilt engine was purring to the princely tune of sixteen miles a gallon.
Me, lo these many years later, I got a 2006 Honda Odyssey in the driveway. I don't drive it much; after three years it's got about thirty-some thousand miles on it. I change the oil every three or four thousand miles, and it gets about twenty two, twenty three miles a gallon. I'll have that car for a long time. And I'll never forget this: when it comes to cars, or anything else, no matter who's sellin', be it a boss at work or a politician or just some guy I've never seen before sidling up next to me at the next barstool over, if it looks to good to be true, well, it probably is.