HOW NOT TO RUN FROM THE MISSISSIPPI HIGHWAY PATROL

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There is a ancient proverb that says "In order to be old and wise, you must first be young and stupid". Well, I was young but I never thought of myself as stupid at any age and I guess that is everybody’s story while hindsight is always 20/20.

It was July 1986, my Junior Summer heading into my Senior year of high school. Six months ago I had gone through a rough time with a girl two years older than I was (me being 16, her 18) and that was playing heavily on my mind. Now I could have been the character model for the police officer on the first season of the USA channel’s crime drama "Silk Stalkings". He and I were both named "Chris", we often had ‘girl trouble’, and when things didn’t work out right in a relationship, he and I both went out and sold our current hot rods and bought new ones to dampen out the melancholy. I was six months outside of the wrong end of a relationship, licking my wounds. One week before tonight, I had sold my ’78 Camaro Rally Sport and took possession of one very smurfy ’79 black and gold "Bandit" special edition Pontiac Trans-Am.

I had barely owned the car a week and already I had put over a thousand miles on it just cruising, getting the feeling for the car, etc. The more I drove it, the more I was amazed at the capabilities of the motor and suspension of this car. It was loads better than my ’78 Rally Sport and it had fifty-three more cubes under the hood with enough torque to jerk an elephant through a keyhole. I was in love with a bad ass car driving like a bat out of hell on the other side of a love gone bad. Classic teenage angst in all its wonderful fulfillment.

I was cruising in the black and gold ’79 Pontiac Trans-Am, coming up Highway 49 North, heading to Hattiesburg. I was returning from a long day on the Gulf Coast. The T-tops were off, the 403cid V8 was rumbling nicely under the hood, and I had some Sammy Hagar "Your Love Is Driving Me Crazy" cranked loud on the Kenwood stereo cassette deck. The sheer overload of big throaty rumbling V8, wind through the T-tops and Sammy Hagar screaming out some sort of love tune was drowning my sorrows nicely. I was tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, cruise control set at 70mph and not a care in the world but to get back home before dark, which was rapidly approaching. I reached down and grabbed my glass bottle of Pepsi, unscrewed the metal cap, and took a long swig of the still somewhat cool cola. I looked down at the clock on the radio face. It was 7:55pm by the green numbered digital clock on the stereo face, the sun was setting through the trees to my left, and I stared into the sunset. Something on the other side of the median, going fast in the opposite direction, stared back at me.

A dark gray Ford Crown Vic, with Mississippi Highway Patrol markings.

Damn!

The speed limit was 55mph on the highway at that time. I looked out the window at the other side of the highway just in time to see the dark gray Ford Crown Vic with MHP markings on it pass the other way. The trooper behind the wheel was staring straight back at me.

"Ho-oh shit!" I said laughing flatly. "That’s not good."

I looked down, saw the speedometer buried more than three quarters of the way to the right, and knew I had been caught, dead bang to rights. Fifteen over and me being a teenager in a black Trans-Am. Yeah, I saw what was going to happen in the next few minutes. I was going to get a ticket from hell…

Or was I?

A really calm feeling came over me then, a feeling that I was totally in control and totally indestructible. Maybe it was the Force. I don’t know, but one thing was for sure, after my little head gave me the idea of how to get out of the speeding ticket, my big head took over from there. A speeding ticket would probably cost me all of my paycheck plus make my insurance go up plus get my dad on my ass for driving fast and throwing money down the toilet by giving it to the MHP. I worked part time at a grocery store in Hattiesburg, I made about $35 a week, so a $70 ticket would cost me two weeks pay. Uh-uh. I had other plans for that hard earned money. That just wasn’t happening.

"Well, you’re going to work for this one, bronze!" I shouted to my law enforcement adversary as I settled back in my seat.

I slammed the glass Pepsi bottle down between the passenger seat and the center console, the black vinyl seat material held it tight. I didn’t have time to bother with the cap, thank God I didn’t buy a TA with a cloth interior. I scanned the rear view mirror, side view mirror and then turned around in my seat like a jet fighter pilot caught in a dog fight would. I was straining against the seat belt to throw my head back over my left shoulder as far as I could turn it, looking back past the long door of the Pontiac, past the side sail panel of the car, looking for the MHP unit to see what he was doing. The MHP unit was definitely in pursuit, the blue lights were going and the trooper was racing away from me, looking for a place to cross over the highway to my side. I thought back, really calmly, to where he could flip flop across the median and cross over to my side to give pursuit. It would be about a mile and a half back at the earliest, if I judged right. He couldn’t cross the median before then. Mile and a half behind me, mile and a half plus what distance I could cover ahead of him. That gave me a few minutes head start. Good enough, I decided.

I had about two miles to go before I got to the intersection of Elks Lake Road and Highway 49. There was an old drive in theater there, a package store, a Chevron gas station, and a little vacant strip mall with about four abandoned micro stores. If I could time it right, I could whip around the back of the abandoned strip mall and hide there from the MHP unit when it passed by and he wouldn’t even see me pull the trick off.

My black finger-less gloved hand slipped from the steering wheel to the gear shifter as my right foot went straight to the floor. The big 403 cubic inch V8 under the hood screamed as the four barrels of the Rochester Quadrajet opened wide. The last bit of sunlight glinted off the large three-toned gold Firebird decal that blazed across the top of the hood. The shaker scoop slammed hard to the right in its hood opening as the accelerator met the carpet on the floor. I slid back in my seat as the power from the big cube motor came on strong and even, effortlessly accelerating the old Pontiac up to speed. The THM350 transmission kicked down from third gear to Super and then back up to third as the speedometer needle crossed the north side of the eight zero range and moved into the nine zero speed range. The 403 under the hood produced a primal, feral note that mixed beautifully with the wind that came screaming over the windshield and in through the open roof slots. The speedometer needle slipped past the one zero zero mark and like that Neal Young song "Hey hey, my my", it headed towards the black. The highway vanished beneath the front end and hood of the Trans-Am, the centerline like the blade of a band saw in action. Air building up under the hood was streaming out the side extraction vents, preventing high speed compression and underhood lift. The car felt rock steady, like it was on rails, God, I loved this car! So smooth at speed, so capable, so dependable, so easy to drive fast with confidence.

The speedometer needle continued to move down into the right side of the gauge, into the black numberless area of the speedometer. I watched the tach after 100. The tachometer was hovering around four grand and climbing as well into the yellow. I slapped the radio off, killing Sammy Hagar just as he screamed out "Your love is dri-ving …!" and concentrated on doing just that… driving! If this was going to work, I couldn’t afford to be distracted by anything.

A long scan in the rear view and side view mirrors showed no sign of pursuit, yet, but that wouldn’t last long if the trooper was determined to nail me. MHP could be ruthless and quite determined in their pursuits, and hauling in a black Trans-Am in those days would have been worth any trouble. It was getting darker and even though I didn’t see blue lights behind me in the mirrors, that didn’t mean the trooper wasn’t back there, somewhere, closing fast. I had a small advantage and if I kept my wits, I could win this little contest of reflexes and brains. At triple digits, I had covered the distance from the start of my run to the intersection in less time that I had guessed I would. I saw the intersection appear up ahead, more rapidly than I would have anticipated, and I let off the gas, placing my foot over the brake pedal to cover it. The Trans-Am started decelerating, the nose of the heavy Pontiac dipping noticeably. I waited, watching and judging, juggling my timing. I would have to make a quick right hand turn and some fancy steering to get out of this but I had confidence in my own capabilities as well as that of the Trans-Am.

This was an awesome machine. My money had been well spent.

There was an out-of-sight, fully hidden place set at an angle behind the package store where you could pull back there and watch the back of the Chevron and the highway. It was off the parking lot, hidden back in the shadows of the building, big enough for the Trans-Am to get into and hide at night, even from people in the parking lot just a few hundred feet away. It was the ultimate make-out place with just a hint of public voyeurism thrown in, dangerous in a provocative / exciting way. I’d used it a few times before when making out with members of the fairer sex, I knew the spot well. I was about to use it again for a far different purpose than it had ever been used for before.

The intersection was about half a mile ahead and the TA was still doing the better part of ninety miles an hour, thanks to the aerodynamics and the high gears in the rear end. My gloved hand clicked the shifter indent and slapped the selector backwards from "D" to "S" and the big V8 roared even louder as the power train was forced to downshift. The tachometer jumped a good thousand revs as the transmission went from third gear to second gear. The speedometer fell more rapidly now and the overall feeling was of a more comfortable performance envelope, something I could more readily manipulate to my advantage. I liked it, a lot. This car had a lot of guts to it.

I waited, judged, prepared all the while my speed was falling below sixty. I cut the apex of the turn hard, doing a long bank into the turn, turning the wheel into a gentle turn off the highway. I applied the brakes to the point of almost locking up, let off of them, and then pumped them repeatedly, riding the threshold of braking. Four wheel disc brakes clamped down, bleeding speed in a predicable and controllable way. The fifteen by eight inch snowflake aluminum wheels and Firestone performance radial tires dug in and stuck like nails. The big TA left the highway in a much more graceful manner than I would have guessed, locking my seat belt solid and inertia pushing me against the driver’s side door. It gave me pause enough to praise the WS-6 suspension setup and realize that even as good as the factory setup was, there was room for improvement in the long run. The car and I entered into a decreasing graduated right turn that eventually went forty-five degrees from where I was originally headed. The four wheel disc brakes of the WS-6 suspension package and the bigger sway bars were simply incomparable to the front disc, rear drum and the wimpy sway bars found on my old ’78 Rally Sport. This TA was one serious handler, with the power to back it up!

I was careful to control the brakes and tires, to keep them from breaking loose and to prevent any slide across the pavement if I could help it. I didn’t want to leave any fresh tire marks or indications on the pavement that the MHP unit could follow, and I kept the tires from screaming in the turn through a coordinated combination of brake pedal manipulation, manual gear selection of the THM350, and hard, quick but precise steering. The TA left the highway onto the service road with just the hint of rubber squealing, no more than normal for someone leaving the turn at a little above the rated speed. Nobody at the Chevron even looked up as the TA passed by on the street in front of the pumps. My speed was hovering around 45 miles an hour or down to the local speed limit. The turn had been rated at 20mph according to the yellow and black sign at the entrance to the turn. Letting the TA coast in Super gear, I turned the steering wheel gently, losing speed as I passed by the Chevron and headed for the stores of the abandoned strip mall a few hundred feet away. When I wasn’t casting a shadow on the pavement due to the white spots at the Chevron, I slapped the light switch on the dash hard against its rest, killing the quad halogens in the hawk-like nose of the TA, plunging the area ahead of me into darkness and merging the TA in with the shadows.

My eyes squinted, and I went more on memory than anything else as I entered the side parking lot of the abandoned stores of the little failed strip mall at a speed that would not attract undue attention from the customers or workers at the nearby Chevron gas station. I looked over my left shoulder and then my right shoulder, rising some out of the seat, balancing myself on my elbow planted on the center console but still held in by the seat belt, looking for my pursuer.

Nothing.

Good. He’d be here any second though, his own engine was probably screaming hell bent for justice. In the time it took for me to scan left and right, I had covered half of the parking lot of the abandoned strip mall at a ever decreasing speed, coasting down from thirty-five to just below thirty. I cut the wheel gently and eased the TA slowly around the side of the strip mall, waited for the end of the pavement and felt the front tires bump off the pavement onto the softer surface. I turned the wheel again to the left, gently, slowly, feeling the resistance as the tires left asphalt for hard pack ground and gravel. I shifted down from Super to first gear and felt the Pontiac lug down and slow even further, the gear shifter all the way back in the console selector housing. I maneuvered the Pontiac easily into my chosen spot, using the floor mounted emergency brake (my left hand holding the release handle out as I bent over the steering wheel) using my left foot to apply the emergency brake instead of the main brakes, pumping it to slow the car to a stop. I didn’t want my taillights to give me away. The Pontiac came to a slow stop with gravel crunching under the Firestones. I shoved the gear selector up into neutral, ratcheting it through the dual gate design, letting go of the emergency brake release and jamming the emergency brake to the floor with a satisfying "crinnnnnchh". The TA rocked slightly as the emergency brake bit fully. The TA rocked twice on its suspension and then was still. It was quiet then, very damn quiet and all I could hear was the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. I breathed in counting to two, held it for two, and let out again for two. Doing this twice brought my heartbeat back down to manageable levels and cleared my head.

And the TA and I waited and watched, there in the shadows. Black on black, the exhaust burbling authoritatively as only a set of dual resonators can.

Nothing.

The car and I sat there in the abandoned space behind the strip mall. Just the trees, the back of the vacant stores, and the darkness of the shadow cast by the building itself, as illuminated by the white spots of the gas station nearby blazing over the roof of the abandoned strip mall. There in that small spot, motor idling, I was completely invisible. I sat, took a deep breath, and listened. I heard the sound of a siren, muted at first, off in the distance, a warbling wail that was all too familiar. Soft at first, then louder and then growing louder and more angry with each heart beat. It was getting louder and louder, almost matching what I felt was surely my pulse rate. I looked back over my shoulder quickly to make sure I hadn’t left any tell-tale signs of my passage, there were none that I could see, not even tire marks where the heavy Pontiac had left the parking lot surface for the unpaved ground.

Good. This was either going to work or it wasn’t. I was either going to be really happy, or sitting in jail waiting on my parents to bail me out. Like all things in life, it was a gamble. I was anxious to see how good a gambler I was at such an early age.

I gripped the steering wheel with one gloved hand, the console mounted gear shifter held tightly with the other. Hell yeah, I was alive at that moment. If this didn’t work, I was in big time trouble. Serious big time trouble. But… If it did work…

The warbling siren grew louder, almost like it was right on the other side of the strip mall parking lot. A chill ran through me as a little bit of doubt began to creep in. What if the MHP knew of this make-out spot? What if someone else had tried this trick before? I leaned my head back on the high back custom vinyl seat and reached over for the glass bottle of Pepsi, lifted it out from between the side of the center console and the passenger seat cushion, and took a long drink out of it.

I didn’t realize how dry my throat was and I almost seize-coughed as the Pepsi swished around in my mouth. I leaned over, spit the mouthful of warm Pepsi out against the side of the building, watching it slowly run down the faded, chipped and cracking beige paint, soaking into the hot and thirsty bricks. Bored, I took another swig. I turned to stare out the front windshield of the idling Pontiac, downing my third swallow. The siren was a deafening scream now and I watched as the MHP Crown Vic seemingly exploded out the side of the Chevron gas station in front of me and several hundred feet to my left, but it was an optical illusion generated by the play of the flashing blue lights on the huge glass front windows of the gas station and the high speed of the MHP unit. The highway patrol blew by the front of the Chevron gas station in a roar, flying down the highway, lights flashing, siren wailing, heading away from me at an angle and I watched it go, glass bottle to my lips ready to take another shot.

"Go, cat, go!" I thought and laughed. "Don’t stop for nothing!"

The highway patrol unit never slowed down, never tapped his brakes, and I watched as the flashing blue lights vanished down the road, and the siren soon faded into silence. I held the Pepsi bottle out the window, turned it upside down, and poured the rest of the now luke-warm soda out on the ground next to the Pontiac, listening to it fizz as it hit the ground. Then I high arced the bottle over my head and onto the roof of the abandoned buildings, hearing it land and roll around on the tar paper roof. Soon it clanked next to another glass bottle and made a distinct sound. There were a lot of bottles up there on that roof, I’d used this place many times before.

I reached up and rubbed my gloved hand across the dash over the engine turned aluminum dash instrument pod, patting the dash of the Pontiac and caressed the steering wheel.

"Girl…" I said to the TA. "You and I are going to get along infamously."

I laughed, depressed the gear selector switch, moved the gear shifter up into reverse, looked over my shoulder, and backed out of the spot I had just months before been occupying for a wholly different reason. My heart was slowing down, and the chemicals racing through my body were like the nectar of the gods. It was incredible, I had actually pulled off a stunt of large proportions. I backed the Pontiac out completely the way I had entered, dropped the transmission into drive, turned the wheel, and slowly left the parking lot, using the vacant buildings as cover. Once I was back on the service road, I reached up and brought the headlights back on, turning up the radio again to a more normal volume and watching my speed. I took the long way home that night, going through the old part of town. An extra thirty minutes out of the way, but it kept me off the highway and the major roads, just in case my adversary had gone into the city to go prowling for me. I bet he was pissed.

I never got in trouble over that. I never heard anything, no troopers came knocking on my door to haul me off in handcuffs. I considered it to be just a learning experience to pay more attention behind the wheel and to lose the hot-headed youth traits that I was apparently currently endowed with. They say that experience is the hardest teacher, for it gives the test first and the lesson afterwards. I passed the test, it was the lesson I was having trouble mulling over.

What I did was wrong, but… well, yeah, it was wrong. Period. Next time, I vowed, I wouldn’t run, I’d pull over and take my medicine for being stupid. Maybe I could talk my way out of a ticket, maybe I could have THIS time, I don’t guess I’ll ever know. I kept thinking back to all the tales of kids running from the police and ending up wrapped around a pine tree, dead at 16. Nope. Not the future for me. I would like to think that it was skill and cunning, but it was probably more like dumb blind luck.

I didn’t think anything else about that incident, which went a long way to maturing me as a driver.

Fast forward to four months later. My senior year in high school. Being somewhat of a loner and an outsider, I of course attract the same kind of non-cheerleader / non-jock / non-nerd outcasts and misfits who gravitate to me. I meet a guy named Chris. Funny, seems to be a popular name around here. He owns a ’75 Monte Carlo that he’s going to shoe in a ’70 solid lifter LT-1 into when he gets the chance. He loves my Trans-Am, so we start swapping tales of our car adventures and one day during break, the ‘me vs. MHP’ story gets told much to the obvious pleasure of the hair band angst filled outcasts that meet with me every day at the same time. Chris has a Cinderella "Night Songs" T-shirt on under his denim jacket.

"You outran a highway patrol?!" he asks.

"Yeah." I say softly, not exactly proud of what I see as a story that is going to be blown way out of proportion when it makes the full circle.

"Wow!" he muses over that, the others are in awe as well.

And I have to retell parts of the story, adding more detail, keeping my group totally enthralled until the bell rings and we have to go back inside. I don’t think anything about it. It soon gets to be the talk of certain circles in high school, and I find myself, my outcast loner self, being invited to the more ‘popular’ events. I’m the one always at the home foot ball game, laying on the hood of my TA near the fence, watching the game as the motor pings and cools, me with legs down the hood and my back and head up against the front window glass, arms folded, leather jacket or denim jacket, just being what I thought was ‘cool’. I usually drew a crowd who stayed near me or pulled their cars up next to mine and we would all watch the game and just hang out. I was the first there, the last to leave. Kind of like a magnet.

So it went most of my senior year.

My friend Chris gets his graduation present early; it’s a 1981 two tone blue Camaro Z28, T-tops, posi, automatic, 350 under the hood with the factory "air induction" solenoid activated scoop, factory five spoke aluminum wheels. It was smurfy. We used to race some on the back roads, his 350 powered Z28 never could catch my 403 powered Trans-Am. It used to make him mad to no end, all the time he would be claiming he had a Chevy motor in a Chevy car and I had a worthless Oldsmobile boat anchor in a Pontiac.

Life was life, that Oldsmobile 403 gave his Chevy 350 fits, left and right, believe me. He never pulled on me, not once. We started swinging wrenches at his parents house, at my house, and just hanging out together. We went in half and half on an old rust bucket ’68 Firebird with a 350 under the hood. $100, we put in half each. He sold the car, later found out it had a Ram Air 400 under the hood, and we both cried, me more so than he because I had told him it was an old 400, yet he had believed the guy when the seller told him it was just a 350 Pontiac. I never got my $50 back either. That Ram Air 400 would have screamed under the hood of my Trans-Am. But now we’ll never know.

I went away with a group of friends to Florida for Spring Break, taking the TA and enjoying cruising the beach in it. When I got back, I found out that Chris had apparently tried to imitate me in a sad fashion. He had tried to outrun a highway patrol, but to a much lesser degree of success…

His particular tale goes something like this ...

It was late one Friday night, the last weekday of the Spring Break week, and just after dark. Chris was coming back from the beach, about the same spot I had been 9 months ago, when he was speeding, pegging out his Z28 and just feeling his power. This thing was sure faster than his Monte-Carlo. He looked over, saw a highway patrol unit sitting in the median, and remembered my tale of running from the cops. Well, he decided that if I could do it in an Oldsmobile 403 cubic inch V8 powered Trans-Am, he could certainly do it in a 350 cubic inch Chevy powered Camaro Z28.

He punched the Z28 and threw the shifter into second gear. The hood scoop blipped open, sucking in cold air from the boundary layer at the base of the windshield, feeding the Rochester Quadrajet under the hood. As he ran from the pursuing MHP unit, he came upon the exact same intersection that I had. Only this time, Chris made a left hand turn across the intersection, breaking his rear end loose and leaving long tire marks across the highway from the start of the turn until the end. His rear tires smoking, he barely managed to keep the car under control, manhandle the steering wheel to get straight again and then head down Elks Lake Road at high speed.

Giving the Z28 all it had, he came upon a dirt road and decided to duck down it to hide. He slammed on brakes, leaving long tire marks again on the asphalt and lots of tire smoke, cut the steering wheel to the right, slid on the dirt road, and roared down it about three hundred feet before he came to a stop and killed his lights, foot still resting on the brake pedal. Chris then held the steering wheel in both hands, staring back over his shoulder, and his blood ran cold when the MHP unit casually pulled in right behind him.

What had happened? He had done everything like I had, so how did they catch him and not catch me? Easy. He didn’t do everything like I had, in fact, Chris had made many mistakes, the first was leaving so many fresh dark skid marks to clearly mark his direction of travel. He should have just gone ahead and painted big orange or white arrows on the pavement showing where he was going. The second was to run down a dirt road where his high speed passage would raise a large dust cloud in his passing. The third was to sit there, three hundred feet down that dirt road, lights off, but with his foot on the brake, clearly illuminating his tail lights in the dust cloud there in the Mississippi dusk.

The MHP hadn’t had to work too hard to track down Chris and the next thing he knew, he was on the far end of a rough cuffing and sitting in jail.

The funny thing about this story is that Chris’ mom, at that time, was the radio dispatcher for the Hattiesburg police department, and when all of this was going on, she was listening in on the chase over the radio. When the MHP officer called out the tag number of the vehicle he was pursuing, as well as the make and model, she immediately recognized it and had kittens. Well, the MHP hauled Chris down to the HPD jail and booked him on many charges, and his mom, in her police uniform, was waiting on him when they brought him through lockup.

It wasn’t pleasant, so he told me, but after everything blew over, he and I had a long laugh about it. Stupid teenage kid stuff. His remark about hiding in the dust cloud with his foot on the brakes and the rear tail lights illuminating the dust cloud made me laugh out loud. I think he realized that was probably the biggest mistake he had made. He was lucky not to get seriously hurt the way he had been driving.

So, whatever happened to Chris?

After high school graduation, Chris and I kind of drifted apart. He went up north to college while I stayed further south. We met once while he was passing through the town I was going to college in, and we went out and parked the two F-bodies in a big open field at night, had a few beers, sat on the hoods of our cars, our backs to the windshields, and just caught up on old times, chased memories, watched some storm clouds pass over, etc. Being all alone in a new town, off at college my first year, it was good to see a familiar face. Chris left that night, and that was the last time I ever saw his 1981 Z-28.

About three years later, I met Chris again. Life had not been kind to him. I was in my junior year of college, dating a girl rather seriously, and I had just purchased a 1989 Chevy Camaro IROC-Z. On our way to her parents’ house in Jackson, I had a nail in my rear tire. I stopped by the local Goodyear tire center to get the nail removed and the tire plugged before we went on the trip. When the manager took my work order, he called in a mechanic.

That mechanic was my old friend, Chris.

It was a small world.

Chris had dropped out of college. He had lost the Z-28. And here he was, working full time at a tire service center to make ends meet, and my friend was about to repair my tire. It was kind of awkward, seeing my friend doing menial labor like that, him being an employee and me a paying customer, but he seemed happy and all he wanted to talk about was cars. I thought for sure that Chris would have been halfway through engineering school by then. Chris was a smart kid, he just had his priorities in the wrong place sometimes, spent too much time swinging wrenches, not enough time with his nose to the school books.

After the Goodyear Eagle Gatorback was patched and put back on the IROC-Z, Chris and I talked. His Z-28 was gone, it had been stolen and demolished before being recovered. When I asked for the details, the story went like this…

Chris liked to party, hard. He met some friends, went to their apartment, and they began to act like sponges dropped in a bucket of liquor. In a short time, people came in and out of the apartment to the party like it was a train station. Chris kept drinking. And drinking. And drinking. And finally passed out in a corner. By this time, the alcohol was running a little low, and a beer run was planned by his friends. Chris’ good friends decided that they would take HIS Z-28 on the beer run, since it was such a cool looking and sounding car, so they got his keys from his unconscious ass, popped the T-tops off of the car, and drove it like hell down to the local convenience store. Being somewhat wasted themselves, they had long ago thrown common sense and sobriety to the wind. Since they had cash in hand, and they couldn’t make up their mind what kind of booze to get, both of them would have to go in. Obviously, the car would be okay sitting right out in front of the store, so this led to a great idea of leaving the keys in the Z28, the motor running, the car unlocked, and the T-tops off while these two mental giants went inside to buy more beer. Five minutes later, they emerged from the convenience store loaded down with two paper sacks each of beer and wine coolers, but discovered that they had no ride back home.

Surprise! The Z-28 that they had left right in front of the store, running, unattended, was gone.

Chris woke up from his drunken stupor to find the worst news of all; his car had been stolen!

Three days later, the light blue 1981 Chevy Camaro Z-28 was recovered by the county sheriff’s department. It had been twatted up in a ditch, it was a total insurance write-off. Chris’ stereo system was the only thing of value in the car, and needless to say, it was long gone.

I didn’t see Chris for about a year after he changed out my tire for me. The next time I saw him was in early 1992, he was married to a girl that worked at the local Taco Bell and he was going to be a father. He was still doing full time mechanic work, but he had gone to another garage.

The last time I ever saw Chris was late 1993, a little over six years after we had first met my senior year in high school. He had an old Plymouth Road Runner with a 440cid under the hood. He had heard that I was in town, and he came to look me up. He pulled up at my parents house and noticed that the black Pontiac Trans-Am wasn’t anywhere around.

"Where’s the Tee-A?" Chris asked.

"Sold it." I said solemnly. "I didn’t have time to work on it, it needed a full resto, and I just didn’t see having the money in the next few years. I didn’t want it to sit here rotting, so I sold it to a kid who promised to take care of it."

"Damn." Chris said. "I didn’t think you would ever sell that car…"

"We all get older." I told him. "Sometimes growing up isn’t exactly pain-free. You have to make some hard choices in life, selling the Bandit was one of mine."

We talked until the sun started to go down at which point he said he had to leave before it got dark. Since he didn’t have any lights hooked up on his car, he couldn’t drive it after dark.

When I asked him what was wrong with his lights, he told me he had a short in the wiring, he had wired his lights up so that he could turn off the tail lights when he wanted to outrun the cops and something had shorted out all the lights so he couldn’t drive at night now until he fixed it. Simple problem, he said, he just didn’t have time that day to fix it and since he drove the car only during the day, it really didn’t matter until he could get around to fixing it.

Chris bragged a lot about the power of the big Mopar under the hood, and when he left, he waited until he was three blocks away before he stomped the accelerator to the carpet.

I heard the motor roar, I heard sticky tires frying on fresh black asphalt, and with that sound of old style performance fading away into the distance, I kind of realized, sadly that I would never see Chris again. To this day, I still wonder what ever happened to him. He had a lot of hard knocks in life, and I hope that somehow he managed to turn things around and pull out of what I considered a nose-dive into oblivion.

Chris was a good friend, he was truly one of those kind of friends who just rode off into the sunset never to be heard from again. He wasn’t even at my ten year high school reunion in 1997…

Chris behind the wheel of his Z28

The '81 Z28 and the '79 "Bandit" Trans-Am parked in front of my parents house, circa Spring 1987

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