Grease

In my junior year of high school, I found myself deeply enmeshed in a torrid menage a trois. I had a boyfriend named Jimmy.  I really liked Jimmy.  And Jimmy really liked me.

But Jimmy loved his car.  It was a 1966 Dodge Coronet 426 Street Hemi, a major muscle car that he had bought from Mr. Norm’s Grand Spaulding Dodge in Chicago.  It stuck out from every other car in the New Trier parking lot. (Not that it spent much time in the New Trier student parking lot.  Jimmy put his pampered darling up in style in a pricey rental space at a nearby gas station on Green Bay Road.)

It was fast, see.  Real fast.  Like zero to sixty in six seconds fast.  It was the fastest thing around.

Jimmy spent all of his time and most of his pocket money on that car.  It had custom everything.  Isky cams, a Sun tach, a Hurst ball shifter knob, and M&H Racemaster slicks- special racing tires that Jimmy hid in our basement.  (He wasn’t too keen on his parents knowing exactly what he did on weekends.)  He also replaced the lake pipes with “Headers by Doug,” and the factory-issue headlights with airplane landing lights.

The end product of all this customization was magnificent- and loud.  Whenever Jimmy came to pick me up, the whole neighborhood heard him and saw the megawatt headlights from miles away.  That is whenever he could actually make it to our house.  There was always something broken, haywire, or about to blow on the Dodge.

(Sidebar:  Once, when Jimmy was issued an expensive “noise” citation for having those headers roaring full-blast, I turned to my politically-connected Uncle Jack. He was wired into the Daley democratic machine and could make petty annoyances like that “go away.” After a happy resolution of Jimmy’s problem, I did what any well-brought up great-niece would do. I wrote Uncle Jack a note thanking him for fixing the ticket.  The next time I saw my uncle, he took me aside, ruefully shook his head and said, “Never in writing, darling.”  My first valuable lesson in Chicago Realpolitik.)

The Dodge was a diva- jealous, high-spirited, unpredictable and temperamental.  She was always acting out- blowing a gasket or cracking her pressure plate.  On the night of our junior prom, Jimmy arrived at my house an hour late in a tux covered in grease.  The Dodge had blown yet another pressure plate and left him with only two gears.  First and reverse.  We did a lot of backing up to the gym that night.

But when the Dodge was in working condition, Jimmy raced her.  I was a good sport girlfriend and allowed to come along for the ride.

That’s how I now found myself plunged headlong into the arcane world of drag-racing.

WLS radio screamed all about it: “SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY At US 30 Drag Strip” or “GREAT LAKES DRAGAWAY In Union Grove Wisconsin!”  These places became my new and very un-New Trier weekend stomping grounds.

I learned a whole new vocabulary- on top of the four level Italian homework that I always took along to study.  Words like”Christmas Tree” (the green and red lights that signalled the start of each race) and “funny car” (any standard stock car with an altered wheel base.)  I learned that a car always has an engine, never a motor.  (A “motor” is thing that runs the blender.)

I got acquainted with new people like “Big Daddy” Don Garlits,  Art Arfons and Tommy Ivo.

And I was exposed to a whole new kind of teenaged girl.  Other guys brought their girlfriends to the racetrack but they sure didn’t look like my classmates at NTHS.

We only wore Villager skirts, Lanz dresses, culottes, and round collar or “nothing” blouses that we had bought at Betty’s of Winnetka or Young at Heart in Hubbard Woods. We sported circle pins, charm bracelets and madras bermudas.  We wore penny loafers or Capezio flats and carried John Romain purses.  The look was no makeup, straight hair, preppie.

The girls at the dragstrips had tall, lavishly-teased and lacquered beehive hairdos, white lipstick, mohair sweaters, black tight skirts, leather jackets and chewed gum- when they weren’t smoking.  Some did both simultaneously.

This was not a high school casting call for the Pink Ladies.  They were the real deal.  And I must have looked just as alien and odd to them, too.

With Jimmy always racing, tinkering or ransoming the car back from Green Bay Auto Body, he was spending every last cent of his allowance on the damn thing. His constant state of auto-related poverty inevitably led him to to an after-school part-time job, at, where else, a gas station in Glencoe.

All his waking moments were taken up with his true love.  They made such a beautiful couple.  But finally, even Jimmy got sick of her prima donna ways and reluctantly traded the Dodge in for a Sunbeam Tiger.  (Do you remember that car?  The ‘roided-up version of the British Sunbeam Alpine?  Do they even make those any more?)

Sigh.  That was an adorable car.  And the three of us were so happy together.  Jimmy, both cars and I went steady for about thirteen months.  Forever in high school romance years.

And even though US 30 Dragstrip is no more and I haven’t set a penny-loafered foot in Union Grove for forty-six years, the roar of a lake pipe can still get me going.  I never lost my taste for fast guys in faster cars.

Vroom vroom.  Anybody wanna drag?