Maiden Voyage of the Battleship Phoenix
“We’re off,” I told Chloie. Nothing more was said by either of us until we reached my car. The panty show was still working in my mind. It did feel like I was going out on a date with this beautiful young woman. Was she flirting with me? Why?“Which is zee car?” Chloie asked as I unlocked the passenger side of my 25-foot General Motors luxury car. Well, it had been a luxury car in the 70’s.
In the 80’s it had been used to drive my nieces and nephews to school and back and on the weekends my ex-brother-in-law used it for deer and duck hunting in the east Texas bayous. That’s why it had bullet holes in one side and a big tree stump dent on the other.
The doors were a slightly different color than the rest of the body. I’m not sure what happened there.
“What kind of car is this?” she asked. I checked to see if I had her question translated right.
"It’s a Buick Electra. A fine car. I keep it in shape, don’t worry. Just turned over 300,000 miles and I’ll bet there’s not an original part left on it, " I bragged.
Chloie looked at me dubiously and struggled with the ancient seatbelts to buckle up. The passenger side seatbelts hadn’t been used in nine years.
I cranked the big 452 cubic inch V8 engine and switched on the radio. The first song I hear on the radio will set the tone of the night. It’s a superstition I indulge myself.
Police whistles blared over the radio. My hand froze on the knob.
“Bad Girl,” the magic radio yelled at me, “Talkin’ ‘bout the sad girl. Sad girl, talkin’ ‘bout the bad girls, yeah. . .Picking up all kinds of strangers if the price is right. . .”
“Do you see zee map?” Chloie asked as I made a sharp u-turn on Hauser.
“To get downtown, where all the lights are bright? Nah, I know where I’m going,” I assured her.
“She rides smooth, doesn’t she? I got this car as a joke. I blew up my regular car in the desert outside Van Horn, Texas and when I hitchhiked home to east Texas, my mother joked that I could have the car sitting in the back yard.
It had been there a year or so and man what a mess. The grass had grown all the way up to the windshield. I had to use a lawn mower to get to the car.
The tires were all rotted and there was a rat’s nest under the hood. A window had been left cracked so the carpet was all rotted with mildew. I cleaned it up, charged the battery, changed the oil, bought new tires and drove it from Texas to here in L.A. No problems. That was five years ago. I call her ‘The Battleship Phoenix’ ‘cause she rose from the dead and has about the same turning radius as a battleship.”
Chloie’s deep blue eyes looked at me as if I were a madman.
To convince her further, I added, “See this big crack in the windshield?” pointing to a three-foot crack across the passenger side, “That’s 13 years old. I would fix it, but it’s got sentimental value.”
Chloie tightened her seat belt. She looked worried, but I knew I couldn’t be any scarier a driver than Lynnie. He takes his eyes off the road for long moments when he’s talking to his passengers, crossing into other lanes and sometimes hitting the curbs.
Holiday Inns and Outs
In nine speeding, lane switching minutes we were pulling in to the downtown Holiday Inn off Figueroa, the smell of burnt brake fluid reeking out of the front of the Buick.“Stay ere,” she commanded, looking relieved to get out of my car, “I wheel be back so soon.”
I was too green as an escort driver to know better. It was my first night as a driver of suspicious women doing suspicious things in suspicious places.
I was too stupid to know that parking a muti-colored ‘75 Buick Electra (with bullet holes and a tree stump dent) in the check-in lane of a downtown hotel at nearly nine at night for a whole hour was an activity some people might find a little suspicious.
Some people, for instance the night desk manager who was staring at me the whole hour, who had seen the black leather jacketed blonde woman in black with tattooed makeup get out of my car and head straight for the elevators . . .some people might find all that more than a little suspicious.
But I sat there, like some low IQ hillbilly cartoon character, staring back at the night clerk. I was as hapless as Vinnie Barbarino saying ‘What?’ to Mr. Kotter. To his credit, the desk manager got bored with the multi-colored barrio wagon parked in his driveway and went back to his paperwork.
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