King of The Road Read online

  One night on the night of the May Queen dance, Alex and I rolled his car three times and the only damage we did was break the fan belt. We had to drive around with no headlights because the generator wasn’t working. But that wasn’t too bad because we had lots of practice driving with the lights off. Finally, we went to this house where the toughest teacher in school lived. He had a car just like Alex’s, so we snuck into his garage and removed the fan belt from his car and left our broken one in its place. We took a lot of pleasure imagining that teacher pulling out of his garage the next day and seeing that broken fan belt under his car, never realizing that the two students he was always tormenting had made off with it!

  For a young man, a car is a major tool for growing up. When you are fifteen years old, you don’t know your ass from your elbow. Your whole conception of the world is defined by what happens within twenty miles of your house. A year later, you’ve got a driver’s license and you’re like Christopher Columbus. You’re out there exploring places you never dreamed about. They might be pretty boring places for a grownup, but for a teenage farm boy they’re as exotic as a foreign land.

  I was branching out in other ways, too. They had these dances at the Legion Hall with kids who would come from other small towns in the area. It was a way of meeting kids your own age other than the ones you knew from school. All the girls were lined up on one side of the hall and the boys on the other. There would be a live band, usually one from the local area, and I met this girl there named Louise. She was there with her older brother and I asked her to dance. I was a pretty wild dancer and I guess she liked me, because we started going out together.

  Her dad didn’t think too much of me, and when I was sixteen years old he sent her off to Calgary to take a babysitting job for the summer. He thought it would get her away from me and break us up. But I had a 1959 Ford Meteor Sedan that I had bought for seventy-five dollars, so I decided to go find Louise. I filled the tank with gas and headed south from Fairview with fifteen bucks in my pocket. I was still in school, but it was summer holidays and I’d been working hard all day on my car, trying to make it roadworthy. This was a long, long drive, so once I got out on the open road I leaned my head against the doorpost and decided to catch a little nap.

  The road was deserted and I was a wild-ass country boy, so it was no big deal to catch a few winks while you were driving. You just kind of snoozed and opened your eyes every quarter-mile or so to make sure you were still pointed straight on the highway. If you saw headlights coming or if you heard gravel rumbling under the tires, you woke yourself up and drove a little ways with your eyes open. I could drive all night like that.

  At one point, when I opened my eyes to check my progress, I saw flashing lights ahead. Hmm, I was thinking, it’s one of those pedestrian crossings. Some drunken bastard is walking home and he thinks he can just push a button and make me stop. Well, to hell with him. He can just wait until I’m past.

  So I put my head against the post and went back to my nap. Then I started thinking, Wait a minute, those weren’t yellow lights. Those were red lights. That’s a train crossing!

  I opened my eyes again and now I could see this train going over the crossing. Straight ahead of me. Okay, boy, enough napping, it’s time to wake up!

  I jammed my feet on the brakes and laid down a streak of rubber that the cops later measured at 389 feet.

  Blam! The car hit the train and proceeded to bounce sideways. It turned out that I hit the ladder at the front of the boxcar because the ladder sticks out a bit, and that kept the car from going under the train. If I’d hit the middle of the boxcar I would have gone under the train and I wouldn’t be here today. The car was now sitting sideways and the train was going bang, bang, bang, bang as each freight car whacked the front end of my Ford.

  I was a little startled by this development, so I sat there behind the wheel for a moment or two, trying to decide whether it was safer to climb out the left side or the right side of the car. At any moment the train could whack the car a different way and make it spin around, and I was liable to get crushed if I picked the wrong door. Finally I jumped out the left side and tried pushing the car away from the train. I put my shoulder against the car and pushed like crazy, and finally I got it clear. The end of the train went past and now I had some peace and quiet to evaluate the damage.

  Well, okay now, it wasn’t too bad, actually. The bumper was torn away, the fender was torn loose, the grille was all ripped up, and the clutch pedal had been knocked off the pivot so I couldn’t shift gears, but otherwise it was perfectly good. I tried moving the car in gear, and even though it wouldn’t start, it jumped forward on battery power and I managed to get it halfway across the tracks.

  But then, what was this? The train had stopped about half a mile away and now it was backing up! Some guy on the train had seen me run into the side of it and now the engineer was backing up to see if I was still alive.

  Quickly, I put my shoulder into the car and managed to get it off the tracks before the train could have another go at us. The train crew had called the cops and pretty soon the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) arrived. This cop was not exactly sympathetic to my situation because some friend of his got killed at this crossing and he wanted to know why people couldn’t see flashing lights plain as day. What was wrong with the drivers in these parts? Were we all blind or something? He told me that he was going to charge me with “undue care and attention while operating a motor vehicle.”

  Being sixteen, I was still pretty shy when it came to speaking to adults in authority, but I managed to put forth the argument that it was a ridiculous charge. Basically, he was charging me with not noticing a bunch of flashing lights and a freight train. How could anyone not notice a freight train? The ground was shaking! The lights were flashing! If I hadn’t noticed the freight train, then why did I leave 389 feet of rubber on the highway?

  “You must have been going too fast,” he said.

  I told him my brakes failed.

  “Then how did the skid marks get on the road?”

  “They just failed at first, then they worked.”

  This was an older cop, and he’d heard every bullshit story in the book. But he still seemed kindly disposed to my situation. He said, “I’ll tell you what. You go and make that argument to the judge and if he throws it out of court, no hard feelings.”

  So he left me with a ticket and off I went. The car wouldn’t start in forward gear, so I managed to get it going in reverse and backed up a couple hundred yards down the highway to a service station, where I went into a phone booth, planning to phone my buddy Lloyd Paul.

  I was going to tell Lloyd I was screwed. That was the long and short of it. I’d T-boned a train and my car was wrecked and I had a citation in my pocket and the only solution I could think of was Lloyd stealing his father’s car and coming down with a tow chain to pull me home. But when I stepped into the phone booth, there was a wallet sitting there with thirty-five dollars in it with no identification. I didn’t think God had left it there for me. Maybe that bad guy with the pitchfork did. I took the thirty-five dollars and put it in my pocket and now my situation had changed again. Why did I need Lloyd? I was rich! I slept in the car, and the next day I talked the guys at the service station into letting me use their hoist. I put the car up on the hoist, fixed the clutch, straightened out the busted front end, and off I went, as good as new.

  I had this stranger’s money in my pocket. Thirty-five dollars was enough to live on for weeks. It didn’t really bother me right away that I’d stolen somebody’s money. But I began to feel guilty as time went on, and it still bothers me to this day. I wish I could find that guy and apologize, and pay him back with forty years of compound interest, but I never even knew his name.

  After I got the car fixed, I was mighty happy, rolling down that highway with all that money in my pocket heading for Calgary. Hostile parents and train crashes were not going to stop me from finding Louise. I was excited about seei
ng her, and holy smokes, I’d never seen so much open country in my life. Towns going by I’d never heard of. Big trucks, fancy new cars, this spanking-new wide highway with a neat dotted line going down the middle, and not a single pothole or stretch of washboard gravel.

  Somewhere by High Prairie, I picked up these tall, skinny kids hitchhiking. They were farmers like me, but they were about twenty-two years old, and for a sixteen-year-old kid like me they were pretty mature and sophisticated. The fact was, they were just as dumb as me or maybe even dumber. We were just this trio of morons heading to the big city.

  We eventually got to Calgary and of course I was driving too fast. The speed limit was 30 mph and I was going about 40 mph. I grew up in a place where you just figured out what the road conditions would allow and then you drove about 10 miles an hour faster. Everybody drove that way. If you were driving the speed limit the cops would get suspicious because they’d figure you were acting guilty. But I couldn’t help noticing that these city drivers were driving even more aggressively than I was. I mean, I was speeding down this road and all these other cars were veering onto the boulevard, driving right up on the grass, and going around mailboxes and lampposts. Some of them were even playing chicken with me, driving straight at me and then veering off at the last second with their horns blaring. Holy mackerel, what’s wrong with these Calgary people? Are they all blind drunk at ten o’clock in the morning?

  One of these farm kids was watching all these cars with a puzzled look on his face. He says, “That guy on the sidewalk back there just yelled something at us.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s his problem?”

  “He says this is a one-way street.”

  “I’m only going one way.”

  We finally figured it out. This city was so big and complicated that they had streets where the cars just went one way. If they did that up north the town would empty out in no time. I guess you could blame it all on television, because we didn’t own a TV and I had never seen cars driving in a big city. All these people veering over the boulevards and crashing into mailboxes watched television all the time, and when they saw this car with a crooked front bumper and smashed-in fenders speeding toward them they probably thought I was a lunatic escaped from prison.

  When I finally tracked down Louise I found out that I had come to Calgary for nothing, because she wanted to break up with me. My rebellious ways had caused her parents, brothers, neighbors, and dog to pressure her into having nothing more to do with me. It was my seventeenth birthday, August 4, and that was my birthday present.

  So I was feeling pretty low as I turned the car around and headed back home. By now I had squandered all that money and I was broke again. I visited this girl I knew in Red Deer and asked her which one of her neighbors was most likely to have a car with a lot of gas in it. She showed me a car, I siphoned the gas out of it, and back I went to Berwyn.

  My Comeuppance

  It’s hard to tell a lot of these stories. A guy shouldn’t be glorifying drunk driving, sleeping at the wheel, and stealing money. Especially if young people are listening. But I’m not telling these stories to make myself look good. I’m just telling it the way it happened.

  Anyway, you never really get away with anything in this world. God has a way of straightening accounts.

  When I got back home I was none too happy about getting rejected by Louise. I busied myself by fixing up my car. I took off the wrecked front fenders and replaced them with new used ones and a new hood. I didn’t bother putting the grille or the bumper back on, but just painted the radiator and the front red and white. It looked like it had a big wide angry grin—kind of retarded-looking, you would probably say, but I thought it looked not only cool but pretty much expressed the way I was feeling.

  Ronnie Markley was an acquaintance of mine. He was this haywire older guy from Grimshaw. He had a nice ‘57 Ford hardtop and his transmission blew up when I was racing against him. He didn’t want to spend the money on another automatic and asked me if I would put a standard in her. I said sure, so he got all the parts and I went to work switching his car over from an automatic to a standard. I learned how to do all this stuff while growing up on the farm, where you can’t just call a mechanic when there’s repair work to be done—you have to fix the trucks and stuff yourself.

  Afterward, we went to Fairview to celebrate the new transmission, and my buddies Tom and Fred Doll were along for the ride. It was nighttime, the end of summer. Tom started teasing me about Louise breaking up with me. I told him, “Hey, don’t tease me.”

  “Louise kicked you in the ass, ha-ha.”

  “I’m warning you, don’t tease me about Louise.”

  He just laughed. So I floored it, took that Ford up to her top end with that suicide knob in my hand. Do you remember those things you used to put on your steering wheel? That thing called a suicide knob? It was like a doorknob that you clamped on the steering wheel, and it allowed you to really crank the wheel hard.

  When she hit top speed I took that friggin’ suicide knob and spun the wheel. I really knew that car and I was accustomed to putting her in a sideways skid at a hundred miles an hour. When you’re an extreme driver you learn that cars will do all kinds of weird and interesting things that normal people never learn about. For example, you can shift a rear-wheel-drive car into reverse at high speed and if you do it just right the wheels will start spinning in reverse and the back end of the car will do some interesting things. One time I had this old car with no brakes and I drove it for a week that way, just shifting into reverse and gunning the gas when I came to a red light. It gets some pretty funny looks from the other motorists, but it got the job done.

  So anyway, I was speeding down the highway at a hundred miles per hour and I decided to pull one of these tricks. I knew just how to crank that wheel hard to the left so that all of a sudden you were going down the highway sideways. You were still on the road, but the car was sideways instead of forward. That usually got the attention of your passengers. Then you stomped on the gas and cranked the wheel over to the right, and a second later she was sliding down the highway sideways the other way. My intention was to scare the hell out of Tom and Fred. So I cranked the wheel hard and threw that car into a skid.

  The trouble was, I had new tires on the car and I was accustomed to doing this little maneuver with bald tires. As soon as the car got sideways those new tires bit in and the car crossed the highway in a fraction of a second and hit the ditch backward and went airborne. The only other time I had that sensation was the first time I flew in a light airplane. I looked out and I could see the ground just flying under the car at a hundred miles an hour.

  This terrifying sight made the adrenaline kick in and suddenly, Boom! My brain caught fire with the biggest friggin’ flash you’ve ever seen, and I could taste ashes in the pit of my stomach. I’ve been in lots of accidents, and it’s always the same. You see this gigantic flash, and you get this taste of ashes, probably from your heart stopping for a split second, and you summon up your old reflexes—Turn into the skid! Keep your foot off the brakes! Put your foot to the floor!

  I jammed my foot to the floor and turned into the skid. But we were flying through the air, so of course that did no good whatsoever. We hit the bottom of the ditch and then we hit the approach with the culvert. Hit it sideways. That car decelerated from ninety miles an hour to zero miles per hour in four inches, because that’s how much we bent that culvert. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and when my shoulder hit the door, the roof support post bent. The door ripped open and I went flying. This all happened in a heartbeat. First I put the car sideways. Then I hit the ditch. There was a big flash of light and a taste of ashes and we slammed into the culvert. The door broke open and I went flying about 150 feet, hit the ground, and started crawling like a son of a bitch.

  When you get in an accident you’re in shock and you don’t know what’s happening. I flew out of the car and the next thing I was crawling just as fast as I could. I was practically
galloping, I was crawling so fast. Then I stopped and asked myself, What the hell am I doing? Why am I crawling?

  And I stood up.

  It was August 23, 1970, and there was just a light summer drizzle. After the flash and the roar of the adrenaline and all this stuff, it was just so quiet and peaceful, with this nice little drizzle. And I looked up in the air and I could see the stars through the rain, and the grass was up to my armpits and I was standing there thinking, Is this ever nice.

  Then I started thinking, Where the hell’s my car? Where are Fred and Tom? And it dawned on me. I just had a wreck.

  So I was looking all over, and then I could hear this slow regular thump, and it was the motor of the car. It was still running, but it couldn’t have been running more than 250 rpm. It was just barely turning over, and every time it went thump you could hear the fan belt squeal. The fan was stuck right through the radiator, and the tie rod was wrapped halfway around the frame. It was just curled right around.

  So I figured, Holy shit, and I run over there. Well, the Rambler seat had come out of the car and it was just sitting on the ground. And Tom was lying over the seat and he was just bawling like a calf underwater—baaww—and his head was split wide open. Your face will rip just like a pair of blue jeans, and his skull was showing.

  Fred just had a little rip on his forehead.

  All that summer I was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and leather moccasins. For whatever reason, that’s what I wore that summer. So I took my t-shirt off and covered Tom with it. I didn’t have anything else and I was still in shock, so I was having trouble seeing. Fred was stumbling around, half knocked out because his head hit the dashboard, and maybe we all hit the steering wheel because it’s pointing out the door.