Pigs survive but seldom ride in topless roadsters with pretty girls.

 

All generalizations are false.

All men are pigs.

Pigs survive but seldom ride in topless roadsters with pretty girls.

When I was twenty, I certainly wasn’t a man yet, so my piggishness, while innate, was underdeveloped. Not to say I wasn’t trying. My pursuit of the opposite sex was driven by hormones, yes but I drove feeble cars. I began with a 1961 Renault Dauphine. I painted it up and tried to spiffy it up. It was a stick on the floor, which was good but it was a push pull stick. You had to push it out of first to neutral, then push it down to get 2^nd. Lame. Four doors. Lame. The radiator fill neck dripped onto the 2^nd cylinder spark plug and caused it to miss. Lame.

 The girls I dated at that point in my life centered around their looks and their cars. KayLynn, Sunbean Alpine roadster. Gwen, MGB roadster. Kay, Karmann Ghia. Roxy, wins a Camaro in a raffle. Piggish? Pretty much. Standard stuff, right? Going forward, things will take a turn for the weird.

I dated Kay for a few weeks. She was tall, thin, blond and attractive. Nice car. No roadster but hey. My best friend’s GF thought she should have been a model. Her one flaw was a small space between her two front teeth. So what’s weird? She liked me. She suggested we find someplace quiet to explore each other. She was quiet and unassuming. She had a nice car. My son explains why he stops going out with young women by saying, “no chemistry.” And there it was. It was gradual but I slowly quit calling her. Had she been harder to get or drove a Ferrari? Who knows what smelly, fetid darkness lurks in the male mind? She was beautiful and easy? Not for me.

Then

I see her at the same places we frequented as a group (LaCasa’s, Friar Tuck’s) and she’s getting out of a spectacular maroon Mercury Cougar sports coupe, showing a lot of really long leg. It was the 60s. Word on the street is she’s dating Tommy Dutton. Tommy’s father is part owner of Clay-Dutton Mercury, a New Orleans automobile dealership. The details are lurid. The Cougar, while sexy and fast wasn’t fast enough. He got the engine “blue printed.” This is serious. He is using science to squeeze every horsepower he can from this already powerful V-8 engine. He also apparently doesn’t hold being beautiful and free against Kay.

It gets worse.

He convinces his Dad that the Cougar, while keeping it in the family business, is too slow. He gets a Corvette. Now he’s driving a car I lust after and still dating the girl I should have lusted after, given a sane mind.

It finally takes a turn for the macabre.

He tops 110MPH on the Ponchartrain Expressway, inbound to the city, in Metairie, fails to negotiate a turn, hits a concrete support and is decapitated. When I heard the news, which spread quickly through my group of friends, I had to ask the telling question. Was he alone?

Within a few months I had joined the Air Force. I came back to town on leave after tech school. Kay was working at a place near the French quarter and I tried to talk to her about what was going on but she didn’t want to talk to me. Neither did Roxy who won the Camaro. KayLynn had gotten married. My best friend’s GF fixed me up with a gal from Newcomb. She was pretty nice but her Dad didn’t get her the Olds 442 convertible until after her graduation.

 Life is hard in the barnyard. Pigs survive but seldom ride in topless roadsters with pretty girls.