Birth and Death of the Travelermobile
Before getting very far into this story, it should be noted that a total of six of my friends, classmates, teammates, and lovers never made it out of high school, owing to vehicular misadventure. That’s quite a lot for a small school.
Farmer Jim Neal used to play a song on the radio that he said was an old Russian folk song. He also said that he had a dog that talked, so you have to be careful with taking Jim at his word. It did sound Russian, though, maybe that’s enough. It went like this:
Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way
La-la-la-da-da-da
La-la-la-da-da-da
It’s sixteen now, but when it was my turn, the legal driving age in Mississippi was fifteen. You could apply for a learner’s permit when you were fourteen, which allowed you to drive if there was a licensed driver in the car, unless you could demonstrate that you were enrolled in a licensed Driver’s Education course. Under those circumstances, you were allowed to drive alone, but according to my parents, that only applied if there was still sunlight.
You don’t have to tell me twice. I know a good deal when I see one. My school hired a man to teach Driver’s Ed in the Summer months, and everybody who was old enough signed up. In 2004, the Mississippi legislature passed a law raising the legal driving age to sixteen. Had I been fifteen in 2004, I would have been very angry with Hailey Barbour. Other than that, I liked him okay.
Being able to drive alone at fourteen meant I could drive to the YMCA, lift weights, go to Drivers Ed class, and look at all the girls in their shorts and summer tops, make it to Mississippi School Supply in time for a free lunch, and spend the rest of the day moving forty-five pound boxes of textbooks from one spot to another until we slapped a label on the box and shipped them out the door. If it sounds like the labors of Sisyphus, it was. I got to spend time with my father and grandfather, though, and it allowed me to have cash money without having to ask anybody. He might be my father, but I’m not moving forty-five-pound boxes of textbooks around in the summer heat all day for free.
If you read my story “Katie Died,” then you know that, beyond being able to drive, fourteen was a pretty rough year for me. I mostly kept to myself. There were some older guys at the gym I talked to. My dad warned me about the queers that hung around those gyms, and there was one, but I guess nothing about me appealed to him and he never bothered me, even though he did get with some boys I knew once they were in college. One of the reasons I can so effortlessly be a gay advocate is the simple fact that they never found me attractive. Without skin in the game, I can focus on the right and wrong issues, and what’s been happening lately is pretty wrong.
Turning fifteen meant that I could drive alone, even without the paper that said I was in Driver’s Ed. It also meant that I could use the money I made to buy a piece of shit car. My dad’s donation would include me on the family automobile insurance policy, which went down because I took Driver’s Ed. That guy was always working an angle.
For sale was a 1975 Ford LTD. It said it was a Brougham edition, but it lacked the luxurious vinyl roof and power windows. For those of you born after the turn of the century, some cars had a crank you had to operate to make the windows go up and down. You bastards are so spoiled. You have no idea.
This black monster had served a year in the Copiah County Sheriff’s Department and almost three years as the company car for the General Equipment Manufacturer’s installation manager, who drove around the Southeast supervising the installation of laboratory tables with it. With a little over a hundred thousand miles on it, and considerable hail damage, it was for sale to me at the princely sum of five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars I earned in the summer heat, schlepping forty-five-pound boxes from here to there so the school children of Mississippi could learn to read. Seemed like a fair trade.
One of my teammates had a father in the Wildcat Oil Business. Wildcat oilmen pretty much earned their name. They were hard-living, hard-drinking, heavy gamblers, with a taste for women with big hair and cigars. The cigars were for them, not the women with big hair, at least not always.
Tommy’s Daddy bought him a brand new Ivory White Corvette Stingray. This vehicle existed for about thirty days before Tommy realized he could do his hair in the rearview mirror. Turns out, doing your hair in the rearview mirror while driving is actually a really terrible idea. The Corvette found some trees it liked more than Tommy. He wasn’t hurt, though. I’m not sure how.
A man downtown dealt in vintage sports cars. He had a sign with an old Corvette on top. He bought what was left of Tommy’s Corvette. With a fiberglass body, once you wreck a Stingray Corvette, there’s no going back. Mr. Slay exhibited Tommy’s wrecked Vette with a monster truck on top of it to get attention. More attention than having a luxury sports car on top of your sign.
There are so many great stories about Wildcat Oilmen. They’re extinct now, but for a while, they were some of my favorite Mississippians. Tommy’s dad pledged a million dollars to our school to build a new baseball field based on what he expected to make from a gas well he was drilling. Never bet on money you don’t have yet. Pert near bankrupt, he had to delay on that Million Dollar donation for several years until he found a hole with some gas in it.
Once boys had cars, dating was an option. I had misgivings since the last girl I talked to didn’t work out very well. Girls are more adventurous than boys, though, and once the news got out that I had a car, there started to be people suggesting I take them places—lady-type people. Girls.
It’d be a few years before Jackson had its first multiplex theater. There were two two-screen theaters, one in Jackson Square and one in Ellis Aisle, but the rest were single-screen operations, except drive-ins. Drive-ins had as many as three screens. Having a car meant I could take dates to drive-ins. Some girls weren’t allowed to go to drive-ins because that’s how you got pregnant. Some girls were very anxious to go and see if they could manage without getting pregnant, or worse, a reputation.
My experience with drive-ins was complicated. While most of the movies they showed were second and third runs of popular films, they also showed science fiction movies I couldn’t see anywhere else. In particular, they showed all the Japanese Science Fiction, including the last four Godzilla films and Doc Savage, Inframan, and the last Planet of the Apes film.
Going into the summer of my sixteenth year, there came a time when I had to quit work and begin three-a-day football practices. It was there that I befriended Mike Sheppard. Mike had the idea that we should go out after three-a-day practices, so, one Friday night, he solicited Tommy (the boy who wrecked the Corvette), Duncan, Alan, and me to meet him at Scrooges, because he knew somebody who would serve us beer if we had fake IDs.
In those days, there were no photo IDs. Fake IDs were stupidly easy to make, and everybody had one. Mike’s claim to having an inside track on getting us some illegal beer was actually kind of bogus. With a fake ID, you could get beer anywhere. The legal age for beer was 18, two years older than we were.
One night out led to two, three, four, and eventually it was several times a week. Getting throwing up drunk at night when you were throwing up from the summer heat at football practice might not have been the best idea. We weren’t really looking for good ideas, just fun ones.
One night, we had an open night in our football schedule, and Mike suggested that the five of us drive to see our next opponent play. Since I was the only one with a car big enough to hold that many high school football players, I was elected, or rather, my 1975 Ford LTD was elected.
Mike insisted that we need a name. He had a thing about names. The football team's linemen were known as “the mules” and were written up in the Clarion Ledger as such. Since Tommy and Alan weren’t mules (but mule was a mule. That’s confusing, I know.) Tommy suggested that we call ourselves “The Travelers.”
There was some discussion as to whether or not “Traveler” was the name of Robert E Lee’s horse (it was). There was no Confederate connection to what we were doing, though. Tommy insisted that “Traveler” was the name of a song he almost remembered. He even almost remembered how to hum it.
For people of a certain age, from a certain part of Jackson, Mississippi, at a certain time in the late twentieth century, stories of The Travelers rival those of Odysseus. Some of them are even true. The Travelers never made it into the Clarion Ledger, but we were written up in the School Paper, almost the entire article was in code and tongue-in-cheek.
Christened “The Travelermobile,” I can’t tell you how many miles we put on that LTD. It saw most of Mississippi. In high school, we had a reputation for drinking. Just because I kept an ice-chest with beer in it in the trunk of the Traveler isn’t proof we had any sort of problem. In two more years, it woulda been legal! Compared to what’s going on in America these days, that’s hardly an infraction at all.
The actual adventure of the Travlers and the Travelermobile is the stuff of other stories—probably several. With a heck of a lot of miles and some pretty jury-rigged bodywork, the Travelermobile died when I found out a new engine would cost more than what I paid for it. I traded it in for a two-year-old Mercury Capri, a car with intentionally only two seats in it.
The Travelers are scattered around the globe. The Travelermobile is in a landfill somewhere, or recycled for the massive amounts of steel it took to build it. We’re all older now.
Through the door, there came familiar laughter
I saw your face and heard you call my name
Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts, the dreams are still the same
Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days
La-la-la-da-da-da
La-la-la-da-da-da
