I grew up in New York City, and I fished in the winter for cod, pollock, mackerel, and shark out of small boats, mainly, on Long Island Sound. I camped in pup tents and lean-to’s in the snow, and I almost died delivering the Long Island Star when I hit a pocket in a snow dune on 21st Avenue that happened to be an abandoned car. Fortunately, someone in the Iverson house saw me disppear into the drift and dug me out. I still have a certificate honoring me as a Blizzard Buster for that silly escapade.
In 1964, I left New York and moved to Clemson, South Carolina, for undergraduate school. I didn’t stay long, a couple of years, before I dropped out and moved back to New York, where I bought an MG Midget, brand new, 1967, with money I earned driving a cab for a local company connected with a social athletic club whose clients were good tippers. I paid cash for my first car, and I didn’t have to kill anyone to get the cash, although some of my tippers probably did rough some people up for their cash.
I lost that car in the snow in the 1968. I was working as a logistic technician for a company that performed bureaucratic magic. One of the jobs I was on involved correcting log files so that a destroyer that had inadvertently been reported missing because of a faulty transfer transaction could again be found without involving any embarrassing admission that the inventory control system for major naval weapons systems was horribly inefficient. I was still a teenager and thought the whole thing was a hoot. Looking back on it, I still think it was a hoot.
I actually lost that car in the snow three times, but that’s beyond the scope of this imaginary post.
I was dating a girl whose mother was named Alice Cooper. No shit. I can’t remember the daughter’s name. I bought her a diamond ring with tips I got driving the cab and we got engaged, but I can’t remember her name.
I had driven Sarge and Alice Cooper’s daughter and me to Binghampton in the MG, which had a faulty thermostat, so the heater didn’t work, and because it was 5-10 degrees outside, I had to pull over every 60 miles or so and let the car idle so we could avoid frostbite.
Up in Binghampton, I found a replacement thermostat so the girlfriend whose name I can’t remember and I didn’t have to engage in constant coitus to survive the ride way back. Sarge was staying over in Binghampton, and on the second or third day (this was supposed to be a weeklong vacation), a major storm began moving down from Canada, and the temperature was hovering just below zero, and the wind was blowing, and more snow was coming, so I decided to make a run back to NYC before getting caught in Binghampton, which is just not my kind of town.
The Midget was 39 inches tall at the top of the windshield. It was the most impractical vehicle I ever owned, but it was fast and nimble. The speedometer only went to 105 mph and I often kept it at that point. It had a removable hardtop, a soft top, and a toneau cover. On the trip to Binghampton and back, I had the removable hardtop.
When I left Binghampton, it was 6° below zero with winds of 10-15 mph from the west-northwest, and there was some powder in the wind. I headed south toward NYC on the highway at got it up to 90 or so, and it started snowing.
The wipers on the Midget had two speeds: worthless and unacceptable, but at 90-100 mph, the snow wasn’t going to stick anyway, and there was little traffic and for the first 100 miles or snow the road was in pretty good shape and I had no trouble keeping up speed and listening to the approach of the storm on the shitty radio.
Nearing Monticello, I noticed a car in the rear view mirror was closing on me.
Where will it end? Officer John Friendly holds us without charges in Monticello until the storm arrives.
