(“Four on the floor” to the uninitiated.) Below in the scale came threenatry-three on the tree-meaning a shifter of three speeds on the steering column. This refers to a gear shift of four speeds, located on the transmission hump. Truth is, the Pluke Bucket-my tired Detroit dragon-was not of high consequence. Don’t park under a mercury light because it makes zits turn purple and green. We learned things only known to teenagers. We actually liked our girlfriends because we knew we probably weren’t going to get laid anyway, so we might as well not do it with someone who was good company. We’d park for hours with our girlfriends in empty fields glowing with moonlight. On Saturday nights, we drove interminably through the dark forests, just driving, moving, rapt with the night and freedom, without the sense God gave a crabapple. The county was mostly woods and fields with towns far apart-King George, Colonial Beach, and Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory on the Potomac, where I lived. The closest it came to compression was a sort of ancestral memory, and the tires showed more fabric than rubber. It had six cylinders, but ran on three, perhaps saving the others for emergencies. Now that Chevy was brown like two colors of mud. It’s like, you know, real history and American.)

(You may think you don’t need to know this. You need to know about how in 1962 I was a half-wild country kid of 16 in the wilds of King George Country, Virginia, and drove a derelict ’53 Chevy that shouldn’t even have started but in fact went places that would terrify an armored corps.

Who said get er done