The inextricable link between the automobile and sexual reproduction, is unforgiving. To see how this masculine delusion plays out in my own life, I must do a bit of self-psychoanalysis and explain how I came into this world. A car was involved. My father, in the army at the time, used a car, a white 1959 Morris Minor, to “steal” my future mother from another army suitor, John Shalikashvili, who would later become a United States General and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. My father and Shalikashvili were both stationed in Anchorage and both had met my mother in a tavern. My eighteen-year-old mother and her parents had recently “relocated” to Anchorage from Los Angeles when Senator Joe McCarthy went on the red-scare-inspired witch’s hunt, which included going after my grandfather whose politics were so left as to make Joan Baez look like a member of a William F. Buckley think tank. Deemed a threat to national security, my grandfather was fired from his high-ranking government-position with the USO, and, with the help of friends, got radio work in Anchorage. Laying low in Alaska until McCarthy was discredited as the ruthless political hack that he was, my mother, just out of high school, didn’t have a lot to do but flirt the with the local army personnel. That’s when she met Shalikashvili and my father who both wanted her as their very own. Their battle for her sole romantic affections took a Christmas hiatus when Shalikashvili returned to his home in Peoria, Illinois, and my father returned to see his family in Gainesville, Florida. Wanting to beat Shalikashvili to my mother, my father decided to secretly head back for Anchorage a couple of days early. The problem was that the Lukas fuel filter in the Morris Minor wasn’t working and the auto parts store still didn’t have a replacement. In a moment of ingenuity, my father, who would later become an engineer, used his only prophylactic and a paper clip as a temporary fuel filter replacement. While not a perfect repair job, the condom did serve as a spring to help keep the fuel pump from staying stuck in the “open” or “closed” position. Somehow he made it to Seattle, where he ferried to Alaska and reunited with my mother, beating Shalikashvili by forty-eight hours.
The problem was that my father used his one and only prophylactic and I was, as a result, born nine months later in Gainesville. The condom that would have blocked my conception was instead adapted to make a car drivable.
No doubt this lust-soaked effluvium that accompanied the origins of my birth made an indelible stamp of car lust that shows no signs of weakening.
Comments