I used to drive a Ford Pinto. I even boasted about its road-handling abilities. And about how its two-liter engine block had a high nickel content, though I wasn’t sure what that meant. And how I was going to bore it out, and put a four-barrel Weber carburetor on it. And torsion bars on the front suspension. And this when I was already past thirty.
But, as some of you may remember, this car had one fatal flaw. For some awful reason, the Pinto had a gasoline tank that blew up, igniting the car, the passengers, the luggage, everything, into a blazing fireball. Of course, such an explosion was always the result of some catastrophic impact, like a crash with another car or a huge semi. As I was always an optimist about these things, I figured that such an event would not occur to me. Since I was such a good driver, I could always avoid any crash that would come my way.
In the summer of 1977, my parents insisted that they wanted me to have a car…their old Pinto…to keep. I was pleased to be the recipient of such largesse, as my parents had never given me anything…except life. “I gave you life,” they always said when we had disagreements. Great. I never had a comeback for that. Or a giveback. “Well, take it back,” I would retort. They would then gargle something in Hungarian: “Ggarrrgggll.” I would go mute, being totally unable to generate anything in Hungarian, causing them great consternation, at my failure to speak Hungarian and their inability to teach it to me. “All we wanted was to make you a nice present, you ungrateful wretch.” This in gargle-speak, which I could actually understand. As always, the argument turned from me into one between them. Now they were both gargling at each other.
Maybe they had read in the paper (when did they ever read the paper?) about Ralph Nader and the Corvair, General Motors’s version of the Death Car. They had actually also owned a Corvair when I was in high school. On that one the wheel fell off while my older sister was driving it. I was afraid to tell her that I had fixed the brakes, but didn’t have a cotter pin for the bolt that held the wheel on. I was still learning, living the California teenagehood. Anyway, even though they lived in the back, they had almost certainly heard about the Pinto and its finicky gas tank. Maybe they got scared, and convinced themselves they were doing something nice for me. Besides, I needed a car back in Philadelphia where I was living with my girlfriend, Manya. Manya was a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn…
“Oh, my god! No, is that why they’re giving me this car?” I know my folks were never crazy about my taking up with Manya, being Jewish and all that. Not that they had a right to complain about anything, being the poor immigrant refugees that they were. Maybe they thought they could create their own little private holocaust with Manya at the wheel. With my mechanical abilities, they didn’t have to worry. I probably would have killed somebody without the gas tank as a weapon.
This thing about Death Cars came up again decades later, when Manya insisted on buying a German car, a deliberately suicidal act, but one that was commensurate with her status in the investment field. We all used to tease her mercilessly about it. You know, how could she be such a traitor to her ethnicity?
Until one day, when she got in the car and she sat in the driver’s seat and it started to move forward toward the steering wheel which was, in turn, moving back toward the seat. Manya was being crushed, barely escaping certain death, when I reached over and turned off the ignition. One of my kids in the back piped in, with exquisite timing, “I told you this car had a Jew detector.” Then all three kids gleefully proceeded to tell us how one day all the windows and doors would lock, with everybody in it, and the car would pipe carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment. I reminded them that I didn’t have to worry.
The odd thing about my parents was that I always thought they themselves were Jewish, impersonating Christians. I know, it sounds crazy and Manya’s parents were doubtful. Who would want to do that? I know that my father said his brother was a Benedictine monk, and that my parents sent me to a Jesuit school in San Francisco and my sisters to nun’s schools, and that they were always making anti-semitic remarks. But I think it was all a cover. They did all that to make us kids believe we were not Jewish. But you can’t fool me. Unless all Central Europeans act, sound and behave like Jews, which is not likely. Why else would I want to grow up to be Woody Allen? All my life, there was this deep connection he and I had. It was only later that I found out that they had turned into Christians impersonating Jews, after the kids had left the house, because they thought that would help them financially. Well, that at least made sense.
So I took the Pinto, knowing of their murderous intent. I could have abandoned it at the next street corner and taken the streetcar downtown, and a bus to the airport. But at the last minute my folks stuck my little sister in the car, and said I had to take her to our aunt Mia’s house in Ohio, where she was to spend the summer. They were always springing stuff like that on you at the last minute. “But that wasn’t part of the plan,” I objected. It was way out of the way; surely they could see what an imposition this was.
“We saved you from communism,” said my father, affirming my ungrateful wretchedness, much as, years later, when their fortunes had only marginally improved, my mother would reproach me with “I gave you Provence!” Trust me, there is no arguing with either of those propositions. This last occurred when she was trying to move into my shared room in the East Village, at a time when it was definitely not cool to live there, and I tried to resist. I lost, again, she moved in, and I moved out. I never saw my room-mates again.
So, after stuffing the back seat full of salamis and green peppers, my father gave me the car keys, smiled, and said, “Good luck.” By the time we got to Nevada, I could tell we were in serious trouble. The food was all gone, and the loudest, scariest knocking came from the engine compartment. Not knowing what to do, I panicked, flooring the gas pedal, and driving across the desert as fast as the thing would go. My little sister squealed with delight all the way to Provo, in Utah. There, I decided we needed a Ford dealer. After all, we had a long way to go and this motor was not going to make it. The service guy comes out to look at it; he sees it, hears it, shakes his head, and says, “Well, it depends on how far down we have to go.” The hilarity of that line didn’t hit me until years later, but at the time it was ominous, the end of the road. Being of a suspicious nature, I ignored the man, and told my sister that we were moving on. We did, and the engine knocked all the way to Ohio, and then to Philadelphia. It still knocks all the time. Sometime after I got it home, I took out all the seats, except the driver’s of course. That was cool; I could then haul a lot of stuff. It is really strange to drive around in a car with no passenger seats. After a while, feeling lucky, I took out catastrophic accident insurance, as Manya was now commuting to work everyday.
Years later, after Manya and I had our first baby, I had to put the seats back. You had to have baby car seats by then, seats that were attached with the seat belts. Never mind that, whenever I strapped my son into his baby seat, he was two feet away from that finicky gas tank. And since my son refused to sleep, or even nap, we drove around a lot. By the way, that thing about how babies sleep all the time is a canard; I was totally misinformed about that. In fact, for years we drove the highways of Connecticut together in our Pinto, the baby packed in with lumber and tools. It was the only way I could get him to sleep. Now he is an excellent navigator and airplane pilot, and a master woodworker too.
The car slowly rusted away. We kept it for another twenty years, and never did do anything about the gas tank. My folks are gone, but every now and then, distantly, “We gave you the Pinto.”
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