My Little Deuce Coupe

Essay: Steve Metcalf | Illustration by David C. Lowe

A few weeks ago, I did something I thought I would never do again.

I bought an American car.

I didn’t plan on doing it, and I certainly didn’t do it to make a statement, or to be patriotic. It happened this way: I was driving around the very full parking lot at my grocery store one afternoon, looking for a spot, and it suddenly struck me that every single vehicle there – including my own Honda Accord – was some kind of import. It didn’t seem quite right, somehow. Since I was shopping for a new car anyway, I resolved to at least see if there might be a domestic car that I could get interested in.

There was, as it turned out.

And at the end of this essay I’ll tell you what it is.

But before we get to that, I want to reflect for a moment on men and cars.

The fact is that for most men, selecting a car is the most complicated and self-revealing decision they are ever called upon to make. More so, even, than selecting a spouse, since most potential mates tend to offer relatively few option packages or trim levels. Men choose their cars with exquisite care. Even the few men who say they’re not that into cars tend to agonize over which car to buy, so as to convincingly demonstrate how not into cars they are.

I realize, by the way, that plenty of women these days are very smart about cars and buy them carefully and wisely.

But it’s my experience that the relationship between cars and men is different. For one thing, it begins within the first few years of life, when boys begin to notice things with wheels on them and evince a desire to make them move. As the father of three now-grown daughters, who I repeatedly begged to accept Christmas or birthday offers of Hot Wheels, or state-of-the-art slot racing layouts, or remote control dragsters that could perform rotating wheelies that you could command!, I can tell you this is a hard-wired distinction between the sexes.

There are at least three things that men think about when they buy a new car.

First, the car must project a reasonable level of professional attainment and social standing, often irrespective of one’s actual circumstances. You want your car, at a minimum, to say, “I am doing OK.” Many men, with an aggressive whiff of Schadenfreude, take this a step further and deliberately seek out a car that says, “I’m doing slightly better than most of my friends.”
It’s tricky, though, and some men do miscalculate. Purchasers of Hummers, for example, or for that matter Cadillac Escalades or Lincoln Navigators (to name three of the most obtuse vehicles ever conceived) are clearly either unaware or unconcerned that many, many people, when they see one of those vehicles coming toward them, tend to associate the driver with a well-known term of disparagement that ends with the suffix “bag.”

On the other hand, there can be a danger in choosing a too-modest car. For instance, if you are considering hiring a lawyer and you see that he drives a seven-year-old Corolla with the economy rims, you’re going to wonder whether this guy is just frugal or whether perhaps it’s been a while since he has actually, in the parlance of the profession, “won” a case. As a helpful rule of thumb, I would say if you need a lawyer for something big like a complex civil proceeding, you want to see that person in a car whose original sticker was at least somewhere in the mid-40s.

Second, every man seeks to avoid selecting a chick car. The chick car idea is a fairly recent concept, having first been brought to the public’s attention a few years ago by those esteemed social critics, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the Car Talk guys. In their view, certain models are indisputably chick cars. These include the Volkswagen New Beetle, as well as the same company’s Jetta. Also the Mazda Miata. Other models seem to be on the bubble, though I would personally add to the list the Chrysler PT Cruiser and the Volvo C-40. And needless to say, every minivan on the road, of whatever make, is now also considered a chick vehicle, or more precisely, a mom vehicle. This is a curious development, since I don’t believe minivans were given this designation when they first came out. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the rise of the SUV – a calamity for the environment, as well as the American car industry – is directly traceable to the rise, ten or fifteen years ago, of the perception of the minivan as a chick vehicle and the corresponding impulse to produce a hulking, inefficient, often brutally unsafe alternative that men would find acceptable. I think there’s a doctoral thesis in there somewhere.

Third and most powerfully, there is in almost any mature male car purchase a poignant – not to say desperate – quest for lost youth. You doubt this? Check out the newly “reintroduced” Dodge Charger or Chevy Camaro, which have been carefully replicated from their glory days of 30 and more years ago. There is simply no reason for these new/old models to exist other than to take middle-aged men back to a fondly remembered time, which also happened to be a time when both Dodge and Chevy commanded a much larger market share. These cars might as well have “Rosebud” stenciled on their driver doors.

I confess I am not immune to these longings. I grew up in what I like to believe was Detroit’s true golden age – the mid and late 1950s and early ‘60s. For boys of my generation, the annual arrival of the new cycle of cars, in the late summer, was an event to be savored and studied. Sometimes – frequently, in fact – the year-to-year redesign of a model was so profound that it felt like a new nameplate altogether. I remember getting my first glimpse of the thrillingly futuristic 1958 Lincoln Continental when a cherry red specimen slowly glided up my street one early autumn afternoon. I dropped to one knee, like a thunderstruck New Guinea tribesman encountering his first Blackberry.

Cars were irresistible objects of desire and fantasy, with pulse-quickening model names like Fury, Eldorado, Invicta, Skyliner, LeBaron, and my favorite, the Gran Turismo Hawk, a stylish two-door offering of the Studebaker Company. (I was among the evidently none-too-plentiful admirers of the Gran Turismo, however, as the Studebaker Company expired a couple of years after the car’s introduction.)

Although for most of my boyhood I could not have named, much less recognized, my Congressman, I could identify virtually every car on the road from half a block away, front or rear. Bizarrely, I still can. Of course, today I can also recognize my Congressman, the Hon. John Larson, although probably only from the front.

Alas, my still-molten car psyche was dealt a crippling blow when I was a junior in high school and just beginning to drive. My mother, divorced and gamely providing for three children on a public school teacher’s salary, decided that our smoking, banged-up ‘55 Chevy wagon simply had to be replaced. I selflessly offered to help guide her toward a suitable successor. After weeks of shopping around (she wisely declined to take me on her visits to the dealerships), she abruptly asked me one day if I had heard of a Pontiac model called a Lemans. This, for context, was a performance-oriented variant on the Pontiac Tempest, and a precursor to the later “muscle” cars.

My mother told me she had seen a Lemans the other day, thought it was “cute’” and wondered whether I thought this would be a good choice for our next family car. I couldn’t believe my ears.

Desperately trying to maintain a straight face, not to mention full sphincter control, I said something like, why yes, Mom, I believe the Lemans has earned an enviable reputation for safety and reliability and would be a very prudent choice, yes.

So as not to overburden her with a lot of unnecessary information, I refrained from adding that the newly-introduced Lemans was one of the fastest production cars on the road, with a screaming 5.3 liter V-8, and that by buying one she would be instantly vaulting her son into superstar status among his high school peers, especially some of those stuck-up, hard to impress cheerleaders.

Indeed, starting the very next day in school, I began to enjoy a rising social standing merely on the strength of the rumor – self-planted, of course – that a Lemans might be in my future.

Ah, life can be good.

You can perhaps sense where this is going.

The cruel particulars: a few days before she was scheduled to formally close on the new wheels (she had settled on a handsome metallic cinnamon color with beige bucket seats (I can still picture it), my mother was approached at church by a fellow parishioner, indeed a deacon, who owned a Plymouth dealership in town. He said he could give her a very attractive deal on a Plymouth Valiant. Good Christian woman and automobile naïf that she was, she accepted.

Plymouth Valiant! One of the most anemic, insipid, and mainly slow vehicles ever inflicted on the public. For my purposes, it might as well have been a Schwinn two-wheeler with saddlebags.

I feel certain that in some fundamental way, I was never the same after that, not in high school, not ever. Did I mention that the Valiant had an automatic transmission that was operated by pathetic little pushbuttons on the dash?

Thus scarred, my adult car-buying journey for years thereafter was marked by ambivalence and uncertainty, made worse by impecuniousness. When in middle age I finally had a few nickels to rub together, I settled into a sensible pattern of Nissans and Hondas – good cars, to be sure – but my car psyche remained restless.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I was pretty well on the way, more or less by default, to buying another Japanese car when, spurred by my experience in the grocery store lot, I dropped in on my Ford dealer. I had owned one or two Fords in the distant past, and had liked them. And in these troubled times, Ford has seemed to be the Big Three company that has been, well, making the most credible effort.

I was shown the new 2010 Ford Fusion, which is a mid-sized sedan, intended to compete with Accords, Camrys, etc.

I was, to put it mildly, impressed. Not only did it clearly hold its own against the Japanese cars in terms of driving characteristics and comfort and all those Consumer Reports kinds of things, but it struck me as having a real personality, as in the old glory days. Plus it has this ingenious feature called Sync (not found in the imports, let it be noted) that, among other things, lets you operate your iPod by talking to it. Plus the price was decidedly right.

So I bought it.

I know it’s dangerous to allow a mere car to count for too much in one’s life, but somehow I feel with this particular car that I have at least partially erased the pain of the Lemans episode, I have redeemed my poor trusting mother, rest her soul, and I have given my country’s heavy industry a small token vote of confidence in its hour of need.

And I truly believe that, at this point in their lives, even those cheerleaders would be delighted to go for a spin in this car, with the open moon-roof gently tossing their hair, and the 390-watt, 12-speaker Sony sound system pumping out, I don’t know, maybe a nice little Beach Boys medley — just for old times’ sake.

Steve Metcalf, music critic of The Hartford Courant from 1981-2002, is now director of instrumental studies at The Hartt School, University of Hartford.