Cool Kids and Cars

By Bob Liddil

   The cool kids all had cars. Or more to the point, if you had a car you were automatically one of the cool kids. They all dressed alike as well, Madras or Gant with button-down collars and those loops in the back that always semed to get pulled if you were not a cool kid but wore one of those shirts. Weejun loafers and attitude completed the picture, but always, it came back to cars.

   Billy Shaley drove a bright blue, brand new '59 Impala with fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror and the radio always blasting. Billy wore his hair combed back and pasted down with Brylcreem. No mere dab for Billy, he used that stuff by the quart. And the girls dug it. Three, sometimes four at a time, they would pile out of that Impala, giggling, jiggling to whatever extent possible and all clustered around Billy, the Motor God.

   Preston Sturgis drove a fire engine red Austin Healey convertible. It was a two-seater, it was fast as greased lightning and it was English, which in and of itself was a kind of statement for Preston, because he never wore Madras, only Gant in pastel shades of blue or green or tan or, if he was feeling frisky on a particular day, like a football or basketball game day, vertical pinstripes the seemed to pulsate if you stared at them for too long.

   And I rode a moped, a shiny red, chrome trimmed, 50cc, two speed, 25mph top speed, two-wheeled imitation motorcycle, partially because I was only 13 and had not yet completed the car part of my drivers' license, and partly because $189.95 was all I or my family could afford, transportation wise. No one in my family drove, and me, I rode.

   I was nobody. Not one of the cool kids, not one of the tough kids, not one of the brainy kids (separated discreetly from cool by achievement). If anything, I was an outsider, except for a brief period as a gangster, selling bootleg doughnuts to any teacher or student hungry enough to pay the price.

   On a particular day in the spring of 1960, though, I moved up in the world. Billy Shaley invited me to ride shotgun (right seat window) as a witness to The Race.

   Tension had been building that whole school year between Billy's friends and Preston's friends. It was a cool kids' war and it came to a head on the Friday I was given a chance of a lifetime. There was to be a race, part drag race, part street race, to settle the question of which was faster, the Chevy or the Healey. Each driver was to pick a freshman as shotgun, to act as witness that the drivers didn't cheat. Those two freshmen would become immortal, would become cool kids. And I'd been named one of the chosen. I became somebody whose name everybody knew. I was Billy's shotgun. I was the cool kid on the right side of the car that was odds on favorite to win.

   But something eerie tingled at the back of my neck. These two drove like the devil's hearse was chasing them. As I moved through the open door of the school and out in the parking lot, I knew I had a decision to make. I was undecided until I had my hand on the door of the Chevy. But at that instant, I knew.

   "B- Billy, man. I'm sorry, you gotta get somebody else." It was my voice, but I had no idea who was talking. Someone hijacked my body for fifteen seconds and made me the laughingstock of the school. He didn't write "chicken' on my jacket, but he might as well have.

   Boos and jeers and catcalls erupted like startled geese from cool kids near enough to hear my stuttering beg-off. I was near tears with humiliation as I climbed aboard the moped and kicked the pedal to start it's little motor.

   From a dozen volunteer freshman guys, Billy picked a replacement, who eagerly climbed into the cool seat for the ride of the century.

   I twisted the handlebar-gearshift into low, let out the clutch and headed toward the parking lot gate, too humiliated to stay and watch.

   Both cars gunned their motors behind me. The race was on. The two cars dragged the length of the school parking lot, each one wanting to be the first out of the gate and onto the street. If I hadn't moved when I did, I would have been bumper food to Billy's V8 Chevy, faster in a straight line by far than the Healey.

   The cool kids stood watching the two racers as they sped away down the street, and laughed at the dust-covered coward righting his upturned moped for the ride home.

   The cool kids knew about the race and the wreck before most of the rest of us. They had telephones and TVs. Preston had taken a commanding lead. The Healey performed better in traffic than the Chevy. Raw horsepower bowed to maneuverability. But then traffic cleared and they were back neck in neck at more than a eighty miles an hour when a light changed.

   Billy hit the brakes and Preston went for the win.

   Three of the cool kids died that afternoon. The sole survivor was the freshman in Billy's car. According to his eyewitness account, Preston cleared the intersection that Billy slid into, but t-boned a Plymouth coming out of an alley halfway down the block. The Chevy slid through the intersection and plowed into a Checker taxicab, hitting it dead center between the doors. That the freshman lived was deemed a miracle by WIS -TV news.

   Nobody ever called me a coward to my face, but I could read it in the eyes of each and every one of them, all the rest of my school days.

I was branded for life.