End of a fairy tale

Jun 07, 2007

Wheels Columnist

When I was in Grade 11, a boy finally asked me out. He was tall and blond and sweet, but the most attractive quality he possessed was that he was attracted to me. When he came to meet my parents, I saw him pull into the driveway in a big red van. What my parents saw was a broken down, rusty, creaky beast the colour of off-season waxy tomatoes, emitting gasoline vapours and an air of neglect.

It was a chariot of indeterminate age, with pounds of Bondo struggling to stay adhered to the rocker panels running down both sides. It looked like someone had sprayed reddish cottage cheese onto it, and when bits fell off we spent weekends adding more.

There wasn’t a lick of carpet left in the thing, and the stick shift was a floor-mounted metal rod that trembled violently at 50 km/h. The driver’s door didn’t open, and the engine occasionally made loud banging sounds as if some tiny angry gnome with a large hammer was trapped under the hood.

After a couple months, he showed up with my nickname stencilled on the doors. You know it’s love when a guy stencils your name on his van. My mother got that stiff little smile on her face, adoring the boy, but flummoxed that her daughter could picture herself as Cinderella in this junkyard carriage.

For a year after the eventual demise of the van, my parents saw us through the succession of cars that sighed into the driveway held together with duct tape and prayers. Though several years older than me, Allan was still figuring out the man he would become, and what that man would drive.

Thankfully, my parents also saw the boy who brought me flowers every Sunday, who loved our crazy family dinners and would drive miles from work just to see me for 15 minutes at lunchtime. How could they not love a boy who always had me home on time, and performed the role of first love with dignity and grace?

And then one day it happened. He pulled up in his dream car — a 1964 Plymouth Valiant convertible, as blue as the summer sky it was parked under. My name wasn’t stencilled on the door this time, but his exuberance for the fact that the car and I were the same year was infectious. I was too smitten to consider the implication that I was being compared to something with a wonky leaf spring and a roomy trunk.

It’s generous to say Allan wasn’t much of a mechanic, and while there were various things wrong with this little beauty, they were all hidden away beneath the sparkling, metal flake surface. After years of popping clutches, jump-starting batteries and getting towed to the wreckers, he finally had a car that turned heads for all the right reasons. For a glorious, fleeting time, he was That Guy, and I got to be the girl with That Guy.

A week before his 21st birthday, and a week after my 17th, this beautiful boy was killed by a drunk driver. He died in the vehicle he spent a lifetime getting to. The gaping hole that was punched in too many lives when he died remains as tender and devastating 25 years later.

Don’t drive if you drink. Don’t let your friends do it, and don’t think it can’t happen to you. The only thing harder than living the rest of your life with this black ache in your heart would be to know you caused that lifelong pain for someone else.

Lorraine Sommerfeld appears Saturdays in Wheels and Mondays in the Star’s Life section

www.lorraineonline.ca