D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
June 2008
Auto de Fé
As gas prices skyrocket, is it too late to become a "car guy"?
When I was a kid, "gas wars" involved competing gas stations battling for drivers' business by cutting prices and sometimes, when the conflict escalated, giving out free glassware or trading stamps. Our gas wars did not require sending American soldiers to dusty, dangerous foreign countries to protect the interests of oil-company plutocrats. Maybe we were just naive.
No, this is not going to be one of those cranky reminiscences about how "back in my day, I had to walk five miles through a blizzard to get to school." But with everybody talking about gas prices, it's hard not to reflect on the halcyon days of two-digit gasoline — three, if you count those silly "9s" they use to pretend it's a penny cheaper per gallon than it really is. Maybe we should have passed a law way back then restricting the number of digits that can appear on gas-station price signs; that would have headed off this whole $4 a gallon nonsense.
We feel this latest surge in gas prices most acutely here in Silver City, of course. Much like those tacky tourist traps where "gravity runs backwards," in Silver City the laws of economics run backwards. Somehow our gas prices are higher than anywhere else in this corner of New Mexico, because we have too many gas stations. Mysteriously, too, the price here is always the same at all the pumps, all the time.
It's no doubt hard for Las Crucens, wallowing in (at this writing — add 20 or 30 cents by the time you read this) $3.61 gasoline, to imagine, but folks in Silver City actually calculate whether it would be cheaper to burn the gas to drive to Lordsburg and back to fill up on gas that's at least 30 cents cheaper per gallon. It's a near thing. If the Flying J in Lordsburg really has gas 42 cents below Silver City prices, as NewMexicogasprices.com says, the math might make sense.
But it has not always been thus, here or elsewhere in America. Honestly, I'm not exactly as old as the proverbial hills, but I can recall when gas typically cost 24.9 cents a gallon, dropping to 19.9 during "gas wars." I'm pretty sure I saw it as low as 14.9 cents a gallon — and, yes, we actually had cars to put the gas in that long ago, and the dinosaurs had already died and turned into petroleum.
That two-bit price doesn't even count the admittedly minuscule value of the Green Stamps or Gold Bond Stamps the gas stations spat out with each purchase. I remember sitting at a card table in our living room, helping my parents paste trading stamps into booklets — we had a special little sponge bottle just for this purpose — which we would save up to redeem for, well, another card table. (Do they even make card tables any more? Wait, sorry, I'm starting to channel Andy Rooney. . . )
Did I mention that these prices were for what later came to be called "full service"? Back then, of course, there was no other kind of service at a gas station. My dad would have had a heart attack if somebody had told him he had to get out and pump his own gas, much less check his own oil. I don't think I saw an actual dipstick until after I got married and was paying for my own gas.
Despite my fond memories of affordable gasoline, you see, I skipped the whole American teenager love affair with cars, tinkering with hot rods and knowing where your car's dipstick goes. I loved the idea of being able to drive myself around, sure, and imagined that if I ever did date an actual girl we would have a much better time with me and not my dad behind the wheel. But I was not, to put it mildly, "mechanical."
Other kids — rougher, unruly boys with scabs on their knees and names like "Butch" or "Spike" — doodled pictures of hot rods. When they weren't swiping penny candy or pushing "four-eyed" kids into snowbanks, these boys built models. Sometimes the models duplicated real cars; other models were monstrously exaggerated vehicles, souped up in ways that were then physically impossible and now would be politically incorrect.
Me? I doodled superheroes. Actually, "doodled" is too modest: I wrote and drew whole lines of superhero comic books, one-of-a-kind titles whose only audience was my long-suffering mother and my best friend.
Given the recent box-office success of the Iron Man movie and the string of other superhero films in the Hollywood pipeline, coupled with skyrocketing fuel prices that threaten to emasculate the American "hot rod," I like to think I came out on top in the long run.
Even the inexplicable popularity of NASCAR seems to have peaked. I remember one year, when my professor parents dragged me to Lexington, Kentucky, for a sort of summer teaching exchange, I befriended a fellow "faculty brat" who tried to make me share his interest in race cars. This was when Indy racing still ruled, before Americans decided it was more fun to honor the great Dixie tradition of moonshiners racing away from the "revenooers." I would dutifully feign interest in Mario Andretti until I could persuade my temporary friend to get back to wearing towels as capes. Why would anyone want to pretend to be racing cars when you could be part of the Legion of Superheroes instead? I put it down to Kentucky's backward ways and longed to return to South Dakota and civilization.
I did eventually learn to drive, back in those days of two-bit gasoline. True, I managed to flunk driver's ed — a first in the history of Washington High School, I'm pretty sure. But my dad took me out to a nearby dirt road — today, ironically, the busiest intersection in my hometown — and patiently (well, patiently for him) took me through the basics until I could get my license. (My wife's technique, a few years later, for teaching me to drive a stick shift was simpler and less stressful for the teacher: She dropped me and the manual-transmission car off at a nearby parking lot and made me drive home by myself. Hours and much cursing later, I did.)
The first car I ever drove was not exactly a hot rod: my dad's boxy, white, practical Plymouth Valiant. Predictably (as regular readers of this column will remember), I christened the car "White Wind," after the horse of an old comic-book cowboy hero, the Golden Archer. This enabled me to holler, as the Golden Archer had back in the 1940s, "Scratch gravel, White Wind!" I might note, for the benefit of teenage boys of the present generation, that said hollering did not prove to be an effective technique for "picking up chicks."
The first car I ever owned was a slight improvement, hot rod-wise: a blue Chevrolet Monza hatchback. It got what today, 30 years later, would be impressive gas mileage — so much for technological progress. My relationship with my Monza was never the same, though, after I smashed its front end in an accident on my first day at my first full-time job. Ever overprompt, I'd arrived at work way too early and so decided to kill some time driving around a nearby park. After a left turn into an oncoming car, I wound up being quite late for my first day on the job instead.
The car got repaired, but I'd fallen out of love with it. After my wife got a car — the one in which I'd learn to drive a stick — I sold the Monza and used the proceeds to buy my first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80. It's worth noting that if automobiles had progressed the way computers have in the ensuing decades, 5,000 miles per gallon would be routine and cars would change their own oil.
Only in recent years have I begun to gravitate at all toward "hot cars" — just as they become even less practical than in my youth. Oh, there was a Ford EXP that I loved years ago, but it had no back seat and so we sold it when our daughter was born. Exit EXP; enter car seat and (ugh) station wagon. I also loved the black Acura I was driving when we moved to New Mexico, but again practically reigned: Black proved not such a good color in the sunny Southwest, and the Acura wasn't up to the demands of rocky roads or hauling several thousand copies of Desert Exposure every month. I sometimes think I'm the only person in America who actually needs an SUV.
When I turned 50, though, I parlayed that midlife crisis into a sports car. It's subdued, for a sports car, but it is red. And a couple of times, in the Albertson's parking lot or stopped at an intersection, other males of the species have expressed admiration for my car. Once, in fact, the teenaged driver of the car next to me rolled down his window to say, "Cool car, man."
If he thinks that's cool, he should see me with a towel tied around my neck as a cape.