In My Own Galaxie
THE OVERLOOK
By Tom Clavin
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[Last week, I was invited to participate in a “story time” event at a nightclub. Those willing to take the stage were encouraged to tell real-life tales from any time in the past. Being part of that evening combined with recently seeing after many years someone involved in the following inspired me to offer this story. A version of it appears in the collection Promise, which can be found on Amazon.]
The first car I drove was a 1961 Chevrolet Impala. It was also the first car I crashed. I wasn’t that upset because I didn’t love it. That was reserved for my next car, the first one I owned.
I earned a driver’s license a few weeks after my 16th birthday. The only restriction was I could not drive outside of Suffolk County or at night without a real adult in the car. My mother owned the Impala, which seemed ancient to me. She got tired of my begging and allowed me to use it one afternoon. Off I zoomed. I recall that it was a brown, two-door vehicle with a lot of power.
I collected some friends from Deer Park High School, feeling very important as one of the first 16-year-olds in town to have a license. I made sure “Mary,” the prettiest of the passengers, sat next to me. Time to head to the beach at Smith Point Park. The post-summer parking lot was mostly empty and I raced through it I feeling like James Dean, conveniently forgetting that he had died in a car crash. Suddenly, it became apparent that we were running out of asphalt and only a thin-slatted wooden fence stood between us and what we assumed would be plunging off a cliff into the ocean. Classmates screamed. Especially hysterical was Mary, who was wringing my neck and snarling, “You’re dying with me!”
We hit the fence and it flew up in the air. Like in a cartoon, it fell back to earth and was collected in a pile of pieces. There was no cliff, just a drop of a couple of feet. We landed with a muffled “whump” in the sand and all the shouting stopped. The only damage was a broken headlight and my pride. A few weeks later, driving alone and again too fast, I rounded a corner and sideswiped a telephone pole. The damage cost $500 and my mother’s permission to use the car. At the time, I thought she was being unfair, but later I realized I had been callous as well as careless.
I managed to buy a 1968 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible from a local gas station mechanic who afterward was known among my crew as “Phil the Shafter.” At $400, what a steal! And great timing. A week earlier, a senior at the high school, Richie, had invited my friend Harry and me to work with him for Vito, who owned a company that cleaned business offices and the twin movie theaters in Babylon and Commack. For the first few days Richie picked us up in the evenings and after midnight he drove us home.
But one evening he picked us up and his van swerved all over the roads. When we asked if he was drunk, Richie cackled and stated, “No, man, I’d never drink on the job. But I did drop some acid.” Somehow, we persuaded Richie to pull over. Harry and I jumped out and ran away. We eventually found a phone booth and called Vito, who had someone pick us up. To this day, I have no idea what happened to Richie.
We still had jobs, and a few days later, we had a car that I loved immediately. It had a shapely and sturdy white body with a black top and a black leather (okay, probably vinyl) interior. The V-8 engine purred like a cougar, and the first time I took the Galaxie on the Long Island Expressway, it was like the way the Enterprise in the TV show “Star Trek” shifted into warp drive. I could fly in my own Galaxie!
Then one night, on the way home from a cleaning job, the car drifted over the side of the road, dead. I knew nothing about cars and Phil the Shafter hadn’t bothered to tell me about the various leaks it had, and, as I later learned, the engine had seized. I was doubly shafted because it was about 2 a.m. and Harry and I were stuck in Nassau County. After we hiked to an all-night gas station and called her, my mother got out of bed and into the Impala and picked us up.
Even with being lucky, it took every penny I had left to get a new engine installed. The luck was my good friend Billy, who worked at a gas station in Wyandanch. That weekend, while the owner was away, Billy ordered a refurbished engine and he and another friend installed it, and I paid only for the engine. Billy almost got away with it . . . but a couple of weeks later, my Aunt Roberta pulled into the station, and as the owner happened to be pumping gas in her car, she thanked him for being so generous to her nephew.
It was like American Graffiti every time my Galaxie rolled down Route 231 with the top down. Girls actually allowed me to drive them home and to away basketball games. Two of the cutest went with me to an Edgar Winter’s White Trash concert. Harry and I worked those nightly cleaning jobs for a year and the only time a cop stopped us, he was more interested in what was under the hood than that I was underage. I hated to part with it, but the time came when someone made me an offer I could not refuse. My next car was a much more sedate Oldsmobile.
The other day I saw a fellow stepping out of a white 1965 Ford Fairlane, and memories of the Galaxie 500 flashed back. I wish I had somehow kept it – and my collection of baseball trading cards.
Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including the just-published The Last Hill, with Bob Drury. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.