The LOOVE Gift

This land yacht was the inspiration
for the Griswold Family Truckster       

In 1974 my dad came home with a new Town & Country station wagon. It had electric windows and locks, a lighted vanity mirror, and a little joy stick to control the 8-track tape player. As soon as it quit rolling, my step mother called a family meeting by one of the fenders. She announced that my father had bought it for HER as a LOOVE gift. It belonged to HER and no one else. We were not to touch it, it would be kept locked, etc… The harangue lasted about five minutes and was composed of the constant reiteration of the key points: it was hers and it was a LOOVE gift. This seemed like alot of effort when only one of the kids even had a driver’s license. Besides, we all knew the old station wagon was decrepit and about to die anyway, so a new vehicle was inevitable. It had all the romantic significance as being gifted a mop bucket on Christmas.

One of the most popular
mixed drinks of the early 70's
was a Harvey Wallbanger,
which is a  Screwdriver
with a shot of Galliano
(banana liqueur).

A number of weeks later my parents were having a party. My step mother told us the older kids could stay up for it as long as we didn’t talk to anyone, eavesdrop, or until she changed her mind. This meant that on Monday morning I’d be telling all my friends on the school bus that I had attended a drunken bacchanal and managed to sneak a beer into the bathroom and drink it. Around 11:00 on the night of the party there was a cocktail crisis when the orange juice ran out. My step mother instructed us to go get more.

My oldest sister had a nickname that was unusual even by southern standards. Made from the contraction of her given names of Karel and Louise, she was known dyspeptically as Kweese (pronounced Queasy). She was an astute judge of the human condition, which meant she knew when my step mother was liquored up enough to take advantage of. So she casually asked, in a disinterested sort of way, “May we take the new car?” The garbled answer was apparently in the affirmative because we got the keys.

The we in this case included me, Kweese, and my buddy Charlie Vaughan. Since our parents were friends, Charlie and I spent alot of time together. I liked him because he always laughed at my jokes and encouraged my antics. We devoted much of each day to responding to inside jokes and vague sexual innuendo with peals of goony giggling, but if we could ever be compared to Beavis and Butthead it was only because I played both parts. Fifteen years later, when I was still answering phones in a customer service department, he had become a waterfront cardiologist with a matching wife. This turn of events surprised absolutely no one who ever knew us in high school.

Instructions:
Do not hold in hand.
Light and run away.

We piled in the car, turned the music up, rolled the windows down, and yee-hawed our way into the micro-town of South Hill, Virginia. I had in my possession an M-80 that I had stolen from the drawer underneath my dad’s gun rack. I thought it would be great to throw it out the window to see if I could scare scare up some chickens or something. I punched in the lighter and when the coils glowed orange I touched it to the thick green fuse. When the sparks started to spray I tried to throw it out of the window, which was not down after all.

NO WAIT! I THOUGHT IT WAS DOWN!!

Actually it was down, but a safety feature of this car only allowed the rear windows to go down about four inches. I was unaware of this, so when I went to throw the cherry bomb my hand hit glass. When that happened I panicked and began frantically searching for the switch. Then I had a moment of great clarity in my thinking. My epiphany was this: when you are holding a lit explosive in your hand, it is really too late to come up a Plan B.

It exploded inside the car.

To Kweese’s great credit she did not wreck. We went on to complete the mixer run, because it would be far worse to come home with a smoldering car if it was also bereft of orange juice. Charlie lost most of his hearing for about a week. I lost my fingernails and my palm was burned black, but the car fared the worst. The dome light was gone. A piece of door molding was twisted off and could not be re-bent into its original shape. And there blast mark on the window, about the size of a Kraft Single, that was forever burned into the pane.

The next day dad explained to me that he wasn’t angry so much as he was disappointed, the extent to which he articulated by belt leather to bare ass. That kind of made it hard for me to feel sorry for him.

From this point on, whenever we went anywhere in the car, my step mother would give me “the look”. The look was not actually a single thing, but a carefully created choreography of body language. It started with a short stare and eye roll, followed by a dramatic exhalation of Salem smoke. Then she would sashay her way to shotgun while wearing that week’s trophy-wife sweat shirt.

This was her way of saying: “you disgust me.”

My reply was the time honored smirk. Which was my way of saying: “Who cares? I popped the cherry on your little LOOVE gift.”