Muscle cars were the big ticket then. I coveted a maroon, 350 square-block Nova that I’d had my eye on all through high school. A graduating senior was selling it before he went into the Coast Guard, but with nothing in my pocket I couldn’t make it work. There was a Vega GT going cheap at a used lot over the city line, and the dealer was offering a loan, but a Vega GT was a girl’s idea of a muscle car, and there was the matter of the color: canary yellow, for Christ’s sake, with white interior. The sight of it would have drawn laughs from my gearhead crowd. So I settled for a ’68 pea-green-over-pea-green Dart with the legendary Slant 6 engine. My father, a diehard Mopar man, approved. An old lady on our street who was blind as Stevie Wonder sold it to me for much less than it was worth and let me pay on it monthly. It was a good, dependable vehicle, but dependable was not what I wanted. A guy’s dick should get hard when he gets under the wheel of his first car. Driving that Dart was like taking your sister to the prom.
To pour salt on my wound, my brother was soon to own one of the coolest rides on the street. How that came about shouldn’t be much of a surprise, as cars were always passing through my father’s garage. When he saw one that was cherry, and he knew, he’d sometimes make an offer to the owner, mostly for grins. That’s what happened when the ’70 Barracuda pulled in for an oil change. Ted was about to come home from his thirteen-month tour, and Pop wanted to do something special for him upon his return. My father used some of Mom’s life-insurance money and his own savings to buy the car.
With the 1970 E-body Barracuda, Plymouth had introduced a new-platform vehicle meant to compete with the Mustang and Camaro. Through ’69, the Barracuda had basically been a glorified version of the Valiant, but in ’70 its look was completely redesigned and made available in all varieties of muscle. The car my father bought for Ted was a customized 383 with a four-barrel Edelbrock carb, dual-exhaust, a Slick Shift, console-mount automatic transmission, and after-market Cragar mags. It wasn’t the 440 Six Pack, the holy grail for enthusiasts, but it was plenty fast. And though it was offered in period-popular neon-bright hues like Lime Light, Curious Yellow, and In-Violet, this one’s color scheme was strong and classic: black body, black interior, black vinyl roof. Triple black.
I was a senior in high school and working as a full-service pump jockey at my father’s gas station when Ted returned from Nam. His wasn’t a hero’s welcome, exactly, but where we lived there was none of the spitting-on-veterans thing you’ve heard about. Toward the end of the war most Americans had begun to understand that the young men who’d served in Vietnam were not at fault for the darker aspects of the conflict but, rather, were victims of it. It’s not like Ted had committed any atrocities. To my knowledge, he hadn’t even fired his M16 after basic training. But he’d served his country, and he was a Marine, and in my neighborhood that meant something.
My father owned a slate-blue Belvedere with a 318 engine and a posi-rear. The day Ted came back we took Pop’s car to the airport, picked up my brother, had lunch at our town’s Greek diner, and drove back over to our street. Ted almost cried when he saw the ’Cuda parked in the driveway. “It’s for you, son,” my father said. Ted was still in uniform and it’s hard to forget the way he looked, tall and handsome, and how he hugged our father, the way they held each other, on the sidewalk that day outside our house. I wasn’t jealous. I only wanted my father to look at me with admiration, the way he looked at Ted. I just didn’t know what to do to make that happen.
Ted moved into his old room and settled in. He registered for the upcoming semester at our community college, a couple of classes to ease into it, and got a job as a salesman at a store that sold high-end audio equipment, which was something of a craze at the time. He had always had an interest in electronics, loved rock music, and had bought a tube-amp stereo when he was overseas, so the gig was in his wheelhouse. Despite the fact that he was somewhat introverted and not a guy you’d think could talk someone into it, Ted seemed to like the job.
When Ted wasn’t working or in his room listening to records, he was washing, polishing, checking the fluids, or driving his ’Cuda. He was rarely alone. He’d had a girlfriend, Francesca, since tenth grade, and they’d survived the usual infidelities (him with Southeast Asian whores, her with a couple of local guys) during his deployment. Francesca took care of her invalid father and worked in the box office of a single-screen movie theater up at the shopping plaza, so she was frequently occupied. When she wasn’t riding next to Ted, I was in the shotgun bucket beside him. Since he’d returned, we’d gotten pretty tight.