The other day I got an email from an old friend.
Besides the supreme surprise of the email being so eloquent and moving, I was struck dumb by how much one seemingly silly thing really meant to me. He sold his car.
Not just any car...the most beautiful behemouth machine that man has ever made...the '63 Chevy Impala. As the email went on, its writer getting increasingly more drunk, as he explained that the Impala was destined for some dillhole who wanted to put hydraulics and a continental kit on her smokin body. Blasphemy! My friend says he thinks he is doing something smart, something responsible for the first time in his life.
My relationship with Bruce consisted partly of late night phone calls and me yelling at him for being such a grease monkey polluter and getting scared for my safety when he and Chad did burnouts or went snow bank hunting in winter. Of course there was other stuff... There was the fact that he was the only person who would listen to me in high school. When it came to nasty rumours and me losing old friends that I had known since elementary school because of heresay, he was the only one who told me they were jerks, the only one who made me forget the Heathers for a while. I owe him any residual sanity I had left after high school. I'm not sure if he even knows that.
I hated most of his girlfriends, one strawberry blond hair flipping bimbo in particular from a local private school made my blood boil. I also never really got over the fact that I was never invited out to his cottage with him and the boyzzz (and I know it wasn't always boys). And even though Chad lent me probably every HotRod magazine published since 1982 I was still a million miles away from being mechanically helpful to that car. I never drove her, I never fulfilled any weird fantasies of his by washing his car in Daisy Dukes...But I love that car and I loved that boy.
I think we even sort of tried to "date" once which lasted about an hour because we fought like cats and dogs. We ended up laughing it off, saying we should leave well enough alone. The granola and the grease-monkey weren't meant for each other after all.
I wish I could say something to comfort him about his baby being gone. Apparently the dillhole is picking it up today and I am reticent to call him in case I say the wrong thing. I can't muster the words to explain how much that car, how much he meant to me. I'm not sure there are any words.
My mother's high school boyfriend had a '63 Chevy Impala. And if the slighlty creepy crush my mother had on Bruce could get any more nostalgic, it did when he'd pull up in that machine.
Alas, it is a time gone by and me and life are much changed entities now. But, in some sort of ghostly fashion, I will always remember that car.
And I will never forget that boy.
