He was the whitest, purest, most naive, kindest hearted person I had ever met. We discovered friendship on a shared ride to Wisconsin thrown together by fate. He would later become a police officer driving a one horse-power, four legged coupe through the streets of chicagoland.
Tonight we would embark on our ultimate trip across the eastern United States in the first Beetle I ever owned (a 1971 two-toned beast that would soon leave us drifting into the mountains of Kentucky). We left at midnight (mistake number 1) bound for Atlanta with a full tank of gas, two weeks of freedom, matching "Mr. Bubble" t-shirts (mistake number 2), and of course the requisite new wave bleached, razor-slot-cut sided, spikey topped sting wannabe hairstyles (mistake number 3). We were college room mates who had spent the last year getting to know each other by driving (through snowstorms, tollbooths, heatwaves, and beer swilling toga cloaked fratboys to visit our girlfriends 3 hours away in madcity). I had devised a simple plan and Paul was all for it. A. Drive down to Atlanta and pick up my childhood chum; B. continue on to Hilton Head Island for a week of lazy sunburned days on the beaches; C. collect the run off girls (mistake number 4... ok, really more like hopeless fantasy number 1) that dripped from Paul's charisma; D. drive back to chicagoland and resume our meek and humble college lives.
Around 4 am (remember mistake number 1?), Paul at the wheel (this became a pattern), Indiana ablating the paint from our ride, "Tainte Love" spilling from our tape deck, things started to go slightly awry. For background it's useful to have memorized and have at your fingertips a copy of John Muir's classic "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive" and in particular the section of the book that describes the large hole at the bottom of a beetle engine where a drain plug is supposed to reside in the hopes that oil will resist spilling out onto the highway, killing your engine, and slowing your southerly directionality. We didn't hear the engine die. Paul (budding detective) noted the glowing red light and rapidly descending speedometer though and we pulled off the road for a looksee. After retracing our journey (on foot, eyes scanning the road, crickets serenading us) in search of the mythic oil drain plug we decided to push the car to Atlanta (noting a glow on the horizon that looked promising). We were soon gliding downhill towards an oasis of gas and truckstop love. We found no drain plugs at the rest stop, no german engineered parts at all for that matter. They laughed at us when we asked (remember mistake number 2?) for help. However we would not be diverted so easily. Paul began to buy up bottles of 10w-40 while I slipped under the car to drop the entire oil pan. We fashioned gaskets using a swiss army knife and spare oil containers. We sandwiched the makeshift parts in place over the gaping oil plug hole with degenerate american nuts and bolts. We were soon pinging down the roadways in search of our american dream again, refilling the engine with gas and oil every hour on the hour as it dribbled across the border between north and south, laughing in the face of Mr Murphy and his law.
Paul was driving again when we entered Kentucky's mountain range and he noticed that we were slowing down even though we heard the engine winding up, even though we were in fourth gear, even though we had the gas pedal embedded in the floor even though Joe Strummer and his crew were calling us towards London. "Bonnieville 1 mile" is where the Volkswagen finally came to rest. Once again Mr. Muir's book is useful for reference, and in particular the section that illustrates the one large nut holding the wheel to the axle, the one large blurred, spinning when it clearly shouldn't have been spinning since we were sitting by the side of the road wondering why revving through the gears was doing nothing but spinning the, axle with that one large nut doing nothing useful. We would not Rube Goldberg our way out of this (years before macgyvering was all the rage Rube would guide our journeys). We had met our roadtrip match. Who designed this car? Who thought one screw should hold in the life blood, one nut should hold on the wheels, four bolts the entire engine? More importantly who would fix it in Bonnieville Kentucky, a town with no stop lights, slow moving gapers looking at mistakes number 2 & 3, a town with a single gas station with dirt floors and a shotgun leaning up against the door, strains of Deliverance lilting in the breeze, who?
Toad (or was it Newt?) of course but he'd have to tow it to his shop, he assured us he could fix it in a week for 200 bucks no ups and no extras, Newt (Toad?) would save us. As we rode in the back of his pickup truck to the next town down the greyhound line (Lizbethtown?) we were looking on the bright side, we'd never been on a bus ride of such epic proportion before, we'd never had to hail a bus who's driver didn't usually stop in that particular hamlet so may not even slow down for those two sorry oil stained Mr. Bubble apparitions, we'd never felt so out of place (well maybe the time that our accelerator cable broke and we slowly drifted to a stop in the heart of the Cabrini Green housing project, bullets zinging off the roof, cops laughing at us as they carted us away for our own protection). Our first real taste of southern hospitality came 4 hours later when the bus pulled into a local town and stopped so we could all buy dinner from the local po' folks (the actual unfortunate name of a chain of restaurants in the south).
Two weeks later, our skin glowing blindingly red from the sun and our minds still reeling from the effects (or lack thereof) of fantasy number 1, we tooled along the highways and byways of Kentucky in a metallic blue 240z saying our goodbyes to my atlanta friend, in debt to him for more than we could say. Newt handed us the keys milked us for the dough (now it was 250 bucks and he retarded the engine timing so that we'd spend the rest of the drive overheating and stalling) and we headed home.
Paul and I grew up together that summer, stumbled towards manhood, fumbled through relationships, opened our souls, tested most limits (the first and last time I ever almost threw up from too much beer, he in fact did throw up... after both too much beer and 10 white castle hamburgers... across my parent's bathroom).
I learned that he was a fat little crippled boy scout raised by the commander of police of a small suburb, suddenly rejuvinated, maraculously cured and suddenly growing into his looks, winning gymnastic competitions, just learning to live his own life (getting an earring in his family was cause for permanent expulsion from his parent's home for, apparently, ever). He found me to be, oddly enough, the bad influence, the dangerous friend, the city kid raised to know that we'd all be blown off the face of the earth by 22 (this was just a few years after Three Mile Island and the cold war was mutually assuring plenty of destruction), hoping to invent his way out of it.
I was going to be a scientist (mad of course) and he an airforce pilot.
Paul was driving later that summer when he talked me into taking a detour into my first art class in college. The wheels fell off my theoretical scientific future at that moment but all we thought at the time was that it would be a nice way to make some easy credits, the wind whistling past our faces as we began to slide uncontrollably out of man-childhood. That decision changed our direction and prepared us for life in startling new ways. In fact that one push, that single conversation, his singular idea to take a blow-off art class when neither of us was particularly interested in art (I had last engaged in drawing on an Atari 400 in high school, replacing pencil for pixels but ultimately assumed it was no way to make a living and wandered slowly away) set us on very different roads from that moment on.
A year later he was a bouncer at a punk bar (he fell in with our art teacher and her alternative crowd... did I mention that no woman could resist his baby face and boyscout glow?), we had both broke up with our girls and become engaged in new lives. Somehow we had also lost the map to our friendship.
The next (and last) time I saw him I would have a child, a career in something called design, and a soulmate. He would gallop off into the sunset, girls spilling from his fitted uniform, back on the straight and narrow, following in his father's tracks, fighting crime, his ride no longer in need of a book about misfit automotive engineering and the 101 uses for a pencap, super glue, chewing gum and toothpicks.
