The B-52 Bomber

            My younger sister, Tricia, and I have a standing appointment every Sunday afternoon having FaceTime for happy hour. Like everything else these days, I am sure this started during Covid. My sister lives in Michigan, not far from where we grew up. She was raised by our mother whereas, I was raised by our dad. Another family whose dynamics are created through divorce. The fact that Tricia was raised in a different household also meant she had a much different childhood than I did.

            When I had asked my dad for cash, he freely gave out a stern, “Go get a job.” My sister on the other hand, did not have a job, she had an allowance. She wore all the latest in high octane eighties fashion while I dressed like an angry scene from VH1. Her hair had spirals of high-lighted tresses which looked like cascades of chocolate waterfalls. My hair hung around my face like an overly used mop. She was popular while I had been a misfit, never quite fitting into one group and hardly accepted by any of them. However, being the older sister, I had one thing she did not. I had a driver license.  

            Actually, I had two things she did not have. The second being my car. After borrowing my mom’s Buick repeatedly for work and weekend troubles, my parents broke down and bought me a car. There was a small window in time, like four days, where the Chevy Chevette was a cool automobile.

“I prefer it in brown. Don’t get the powder-puff blue. It looks like a grandma car.”

“You’ll get what you get.” My parents snapped back in unison. I hated it when they talked in unison.

I heard the sound of automobiles slowly crunching over the gravel in the driveway after the longest four hours of my life.  I bolted to the front door with great angst as to what laid ahead for me in all thing’s teenage transportation. My parents met me at the front door with a set of large keys dangling from my dad’s index finger. I shoved past them trying to get a glimpse of my cool Chevy Chevette. My feet came to a screeching halt like a grandma slamming on her brakes at the sight of a garage sale on a Saturday morning.

“What’s that?”

Parked right next to my mom’s Buick was the ugliest car I had ever seen in my life. It was twice as long as my mom’s car and so wide it was partially parked on the lawn because there was not enough room for two cars abreast in the driveway. The hood was larger than a California King and the trunk looked as if it ate my beloved Chevette.

“It’s your car.” My mom said.

“It’s so.” I was at a loss for words. A very rare phenomenon for a teenager.

“You asked for brown.” My dad mocked.

“Um, yeah, like, oh my God, that is so not brown. Fer sure.” I had recently been trying out my Valley Girl talk.

The color was the same color, I would find out some eighteen years later, as being that of a baby who is breastfed and has its first real poop. A strange tinge of Dijon yellow.

My mom went on to explain they wanted to get me a large enough car so if I were in a wreck, I would have a better chance of survival. Seatbelts were optional in the mid-eighties. She felt a Chevy Chevette could not possibly keep me safe. I was sixteen, safety ranked last. I was all about the cool factor. Nothing, and I mean nothing about a 1973 Ford Galaxy 500 screamed cool. Then I remembered, pouting, I turned towards my dad.

“Like, oh my god. It’s the same car Marcus Welby MD drives.”

“You are not that cool; Marcus Welby drives a Chrysler.”

After getting a lecture on the dos and don’ts, and it was my responsibility for gas, a promise made not to drink and drive, and after another long list of items car related which, I selected to hear or not, I asked to take it for a spin.

Do you know what happens when a ninety-five pound sixteen-year-old and a nearly 3500-pound car collide? This car could go from zero to sixty in 13.7 seconds and it could reach 100mph in just 14.6 with a top speed of 173mph. I pretended like I would just drive the one mile to town and back but I decided to make a left hand turn on Sherwood Road and push the pedal to the metal. This was a ribbon road. There were small hills and valleys like the ribbon candy your grandma placed in her fancy candy dish every year at Christmas. I felt butterflies doing cartwheels in my stomach as I rose up the hill. Heading into the small valley the butterflies became scared and flew up into my ribcage, only to flutter back down into my stomach again as we glided back up. A powerful dance with grace. A seamless ride. It felt as if the tires never really connected to the two-mile stretch of the ribbon road. There were times, later, that they probably did not.

As I turned back into the driveway, I saw my parents were still outside on the sidewalk waiting for me. I made a big deal of driving slow with concern and caution as I parked my car. I climbed out of this behemoth automobile and casually walked over to my parents.

“Thanks mom and dad.”

“Well, what did you think?” They said in unison.

“Um, ok, it will do.” Teenagers are so ungrateful at first glance. They are not to be trusted when behaving this way. This was code for, holy shit, I am about to get away with something really big.

I left them outside in their proud parent moment. I raced through the house and down the basement stairs to the phone in my mom’s office. Or as I liked to call it back then, my other bedroom.

“Jan, call Kris and Missy. I’m driving us to the party on Bravender Road Saturday.”

My social life would blossom from there on. I had what every sixteen-year-old with a driver’s license wanted, a car. If I had a car to drive on the weekends, I was cool enough for the in crowd. Not every kid had a car. Some of the rich popular kids drove Cutlasses or Monte Carlo’s. The richest girl in my class was given a 1968 Ford pick-up, painted cherry apple red, on her sixteenth birthday. It had fancy detailing in brown and under her front bumper hung a cow bell. Her family owned a large farm; they raised black agnus beef cows. It was our towns version of Dallas, only her family did not have the drama like the Ewing’s.

I am not exactly sure when, but somewhere the name B-52 Bomber came up for my car. Afterall, we could hold about the same amount of people as a plane. The eighties did not have too many regulations about how many teens could be in a car at once. On average I had five; I could hold seven comfortably. Ten was too much. The name could have also come from my love of the band The B-52’s. They were on the playlist of my life back then.

It is funny how memories can vary from family member to another. I have been witnessed to many heated arguments about the past when my aunts and uncles get to talking. This would be the competitive side of my family gene pool. Eight siblings with five different versions. But my sister Tricia and I are not like that. We listen with interest when the other tells a tale from our past. I did just that when she told me something that even now, I have no memory of.

The Sunday before my trek back to Michigan for this year’s family Thanksgiving celebration, Tricia and I were having FaceTime. She had recently started a new job at a dentist office closer to home in the town we grew up in. A woman came in to the office and my sister recognized her. After seeing her name, she remembered that this woman had gone to school with me.

Tricia then goes on to tell me, she remembered this woman from one of her weekend visits to our dad’s when she was a teen. I took her along with me and a few friends out on a weekend night for driving around in the B-52. She told me she was in the backseat while the three of us sat up front.

“That car was such an ugly color. And it was so huge.” She said. “I hated the interior because it smelled funny.”

It did smell weird in that car. A distinctive musty smell, like the scent of a vintage suitcase. The kind with a silk lining and brass locks. Old.

We were driving down the back country roads up to shenanigans. It was a classic fall night in the mid-west. The crisp night air zapped at our exposed skin through the small crack in the window. Music impacted the mood. If Cindy Lauper had been singing, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, we were. Led Zepplin’s, Stairway to Heaven, brought the mood back down to the ground floor. As we listened in silence, our shoulders swayed side to side, touching lightly with the girl sitting next to us. We were all in a melancholy trance. One puff, another. Our cigarettes brighten then faded. We would cock our heads and pierce into the slight opening in the window and expel our used smoke.

We would drive by the homes of boys we liked from class and honked the horn as we drove past. We probably drove by the homes of girls who had stolen our boyfriends and yelled obscenities out to the night with such teenage rage. Rebels as we drove through town smoking in plain view. Honking the horn at the senior boys parked in the Felpausch parking lot. It was the local grocery store; all the cool kids hung out there. You never dared to park there, unless you were invited or knew someone well enough.

A one traffic light community, our town was so small there was no need for a cop. We had one but he only came out on weekends if he was called out. Every now and again it got rowdy. Tires would squeal, fist would collide, and someone was making too much noise next door with their rock-and-roll music.

“I think they are having a party. The parents are out of town.”  All illegal parties were broken up by rock-and-roll music which played too loud and Mrs. Busy Body who lived next-door.

“But the one thing that sticks out in my memory was sitting in the backseat thinking we were not going to make it home alive. I remember watching you and two of your girlfriends smoking cigarettes. I thought, ‘wow, you guys were doing some pretty adult things.’ She paused. “I couldn’t believe you were so adult like.”

When Tricia said that, I could feel my heart sink. I remember feeling like a badass, an angry teen (who wasn’t back then), and most importantly, I remember feeling lost. We did a lot of adult things, in the B-52 Bomber my girlfriends and I. Feeling like an adult was not one of them.

 I did not want to grow up. I wanted to be sixteen forever. It took hearing this from my sister to realize that as teenagers we want to do grownup things like drive, smoke cigarettes and sip stale, warm beer we confiscated from older siblings. It was my sister’s perspective after all these years that had shown me, I needed the midnight curfew, chores to do after school, and a job for walking around money. I needed a car so large it would protect me, but I needed something else that took me nearly forty years to finally figure out. What kept me safe were my mom and dad. They were my B-52 Bomber.