04/02/2017
Johnny's Old Lincoln
The highway at night. Headlights. The white line swallowed under the car. Late. Dark The road is empty. You feel the urge and you press your foot to the floor. You can feel the engine seizing the drive train, it dips before lunging forward.
To me, the late night ride feels like freedom. It’s escape. It’s running away and running to at the same time. All the old, all the pain, all the baggage is left behind. And the future is out there, to be seized.
I left home for the final time at age thirteen. Alice (my mother) had tried to set fire to my bedroom door when I wouldn’t come out. We lived in a third-floor wooden walk up with one set of wooden stairs as the only way out. I’d put out the fire. Alice had wandered into the bedroom and was laying on the bed, half passed out. She had my record player in her room and was playing the same song over and over. “Make the world go away.”
I left that night and never came back. As I walked out on the street into the darkness, I stood in the streetlight and I left the smell of sadness behind. The future was frightening, but it was mine.
I wasn’t born to run. I learned to run. As the song says, “I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I had to get there fast."
I ran away for the last time after the school trip in the song. Sweet Georgina was my girlfriend. We were on a school trip to Sudbury. That late night bus ride was magic. We sat in the darkness, as Bob Seeger would say later, "workin' on the night moves."
And the bus rushed forward, through the night, into the future. That short school trip took me out of Thunder Bay. And I knew what I had to do.
When we returned to Thunder Bay, I traded a prized pair of bell bottoms for a fake id. I died my hair, snuck out the door in the dark of night, walked out of town to the highway and pointed my thumb in the direction of the future.
Another car ride through the pitch black of northern Ontario, watching the road disappear under the car.
_________
Years later. I was working as an actor in Toronto. I hung out at a garage on Jarvis Street where two other guys from theatre school worked. John DeSantis an actor and part time mechanic. Gordon Bradley, an old folk singer turned actor, pumping gas. The three of us, all so different, hung out together.
We dreamed. We laughed. We wrote movies that never would get made.
We had a lot of late nights there, in the neon shadow of the Warwick hotel, a notorious strip bar on Jarvis Street. Gordon pumped gas while Johnny worked on restoring his pride and joy - a Mark IV Lincoln. We'd stay out late, sometimes all night, ending with breakfast at the Warwick with the hookers, the dealers, the addicts and the rounders.
It happened one summer night. The night was Toronto hot, the humidity that pushed you down, that melted you as it soaked your clothes. Where every cell in your body was on alert, hoping for whiff of a breeze, of a relief that never came. Where the sweat rolled down inside your clothes, but it wouldn't cool you.
Gordon was a big man. He felt the heat. He was movin in slow motion, clicking the lights, writing down the numbers, closing down the pumps.
As I did, so many times, I sat in the station in the glow of the fluorescent lights. Silent. Looking. Watching.
I heard the wheels scraping the floor, the clink of a wrench on concrete and saw Johnny roll out from under the car. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He didn’t say anything. He just looked over. It's ready. It’s time for a ride.
And on a night like that, who would refuse? A Lincoln Mark IV, the windows open. Heaven.
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Another picture. Three of us in the car. Me, sitting in the back, silently sitting alone on the huge back seat. Gordon is sitting up front, belted in, his hand clutching the dash - trying unsuccessfuly to not show his total panic as Johnny whipped the Lincoln through the city, onto the expressway and out of town.
Inside, we were lit by that eerie glow that can only come from dashboard lights. Outside, all we could see was Lincoln moving forward in the blackness, like a giant boat, the headlights and white-line swallowed up under the Lincoln.
We left the lights of the city behind. We were on an empty stretch of highway.
Johnny said, “Let’s see what she can do.” And he pushed his foot to the floor.
I saw Johnny's face in the dashboard glow. I saw Gordon’s body go rigid as he pushed on the dash, his whole body quivering with the effort.
I felt the back end of the Lincoln dip, I heard the roar of the engine and for a brief second, time stood still.
The needle moved up and up. 60, 70, 80, 90 and finally it broke 100 miles per hour.
I can still see that moment, a black and white picture with us all frozen in my mind, frozen in time. I can still feel us rushing forward in the darkness. Something was playing on the radio but I can't hear it. I’m lost in my thoughts, in that moment, hurtling away from my past -- and forward into my future.
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I'd play that scene over and over in my life. The late night drive with the windows open and the radio playing. I’m alone. I’m with others. Touring. Travelling. Or just driving home.
The glow of the dashboard lights, whipping forward, the white line disappearing under the car. Blackness outside. The shadows of trees whipping by. The mixture of loss and of hope, the momentum of leaving and moving toward. Caught between my past and my future.
One night, I’m driving up 35. It's late. I'm rushing through the darkness. The windows are open. The eerie light of the dash is there. The radio is playing. I’m singing along to an old rock and roll song. And it all comes flooding back. Johnny’s Lincoln. The bus ride. Leaving home. So many trips down the highway.
And I realize that it’s not trees rushing by. It’s my life. My life is going by at a hundred miles an hour.
As the first lines of the song drift into my head, I do the only thing possible. I put my foot to the floor.
http://music.jimlove.com/track/johnnys-old-lincoln
