My mother, five-two in high heels, claims to have hauled us around in a '46 Ford pickup while in her third trimester. Fecund and diminutive, Mom was "clutch challenged." As the oldest of four sons, it was my job to depress the clutch at her command. Dad used the truck in his coin-operated Laundromat, touted as the post-war financial opportunity. This from the same generation that gave us backyard bomb shelters, the Edsel and Joe McCarthy.

By 1957 I got my first bicycle, a twenty-seven inch Schwinn with road-grader size tires. Riding it was delicate science: my feet barely reached when the pedals bottomed out. Puberty loomed, and I hoped to emerge on the other side without a falsetto lilt in my voice. Whoever designed the bike had recurrent nightmares about an anvil on balloons. Its handlebars had the wingspan of a pterodactyl; as for maneuverability, imagine guiding a wheelbarrow full of wet cement across an ice floe.

Freshman year in high school I campaigned for a car, begging and whining my way through a pubescent fog. My father, an articulate man, was forever concerned his progeny understood the rationale behind his actions. Following our forty-eighth (I kept meticulous records) "auto-dialogue," Dad explained the facts of life to me, employing a word not in my mother's vocabulary: "NO!" Two years later, having mellowed, he said, "HELL NO." I figured I was making progress since he left off the exclamation point.

Dad relented my senior year, forking over $150.00 for a '37 Buick Roadster. The car, originally green, had turned a dull shade of phlegm. Its doors opened inward, the "Bonnie and Clyde" option. The sunroof could be manually cranked if Charles Atlas happened to be riding shotgun. With an in-line eight cylinder engine, the car was so long its hood ornament reached the top of the driveway five minutes ahead of the trunk. It sucked fuel like a Hoover Upright, weighed slightly less than the Lincoln Memorial, and cornered like a dream, if your dream involved a runaway oil barge.

During the summer of 1965 I drove a '58 Ford coupe with a "police interceptor," 352 cubic-inch engine. A four-barrel carburetor gave it "muscle" status, not to mention its very own island at the Esso station. Even in third gear you could lay a wheel and leave a quarter-mile of Goodyear's finest on the asphalt, a tour de force my brother George ("Lead-Foot with Acne") would often demonstrate to the delight of his hooligan friends. George once revved the engine to 4,000 RPM's and popped the clutch, leaving the transmission in a twisted heap near Lilburn, Georgia where AAMCO memorialized it under a photo of James Brolin. In college I drove a Plymouth Valiant the color of Fido droppings. Little wonder double dating was never a problem.

Since then I've had a Volkswagen Rabbit whose window cranks, muffler and oil pan fell off the day my check cleared the bank; a Chevy Nova once the "wheel" car of a known marijuana trafficker; and, a '78 Toyota Corolla coupe whose owner told me with a straight face: "The air vented through it is just as cold as REAL air conditioning." That car - "Gas Shortage Gertie" - took 4.3333 of us (wife three months pregnant) to the beach in August, 1980. As summer's rancid breath washed over us, the black vinyl seats went into meltdown. Through the shimmering heat I could just make out a bank thermometer as we passed Macon, Georgia: "106 DEGREES...12:35PM...Y'ALL SMILE..."

Gotta run. Brother George just pulled up in his adult "Big Wheel," and says he'll let me have a turn. Time for a little pay back.