One summer night, my brother wrecked my car. It was a long time ago, yet something in the spring air we’re having this week got me thinking about it. It was a 1970 Dodge Dart, and some of my best memories of late-teenage life in East Hampton were made in that car.
By the time my brother and a friend went through a privet hedge and smack into a tree, the Dart I had bought for $100 was already a mess. It was a canvas onto which my friends and I could project our post-adolescent selves. We had taken out the back seats to give my pet goat, Ginger, a way to stand safely as we drove around town.
The front seats we had pulled from an Austin-Healey that one friend’s father intended to restore. The seats did not exactly line up with the bolts on the Dart floor, so when we went around a corner, one side of the seats would rise, then slam back down when the car was going straight again. There was a Sex Wax sticker on the hood bigger than a basketball.
Cars expressed our individuality then — the guys with shotguns in the racks in their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot, muscle cars that looked like crap on the outside but went like hell. You could tell a lot about a person by looking at their car in those days. Leases make everything on the road now look the same — $80,000 of shiny, boring, and going back to the dealer in a few years for another just like it.
I probably don’t need to explain that my Dart was brown. There were a lot of brown cars. Brown paint was probably cheap. But the Dart’s most-distinguishing feature was its bumper, a heavy piece of 4-by-12 lumber.
Around about the time my friend and I stole his father’s Austin-Healey seats, we removed the Dart’s rusted chrome bumper and replaced it with the wooden plank. To this day, people I grew up with sometimes ask, “You used to drive a car with a railroad tie for a bumper, right?” It wasn’t a railroad tie, but it was tough.
For kicks, we would drive into the woods and knock down dead trees. Branches would land on the hood. I attached fog lights, pointed straight up. “Squirrel finders,” we called them.
We nailed a plastic infant figurine — of course, right? — above where we had fastened the license plate. The guts of an old odometer were next to it; that was the “baby counter.” We thought we were funny.
Toward the end of the Dart’s life, when we were stuck in a pothole along the dirt trail under the power lines, we unbolted the bumper, jacked the car up, and laid the bumper across the hole. Then we lowered the car onto the bumper, rolled clear, threw the bumper in the back where the seats used to be, and went on our way.
Soon life changed, as it does, and I left for a college semester abroad. There were no smartphones, not even email, and in the few letters I got from home, there was nothing about what had happened to the Dart.
Had the bumper been there when my brother and friend sailed through the hedge and into the tree, the Dart might have survived. But it didn’t, and my brother and his friend fled the scene. They walked back to East Hampton along the ocean beach that night to avoid the cops. My alibi was solid, of course, and I think our mother had to pay to have the thing hauled away, my buddy’s father’s Austin-Healey seats and all.