The first caper of my car theft career was a simple matter. It happened in Gainesville, Georgia, 1952. I was almost three. My dad was 21. He left me alone in the car with the motor running while he darted into the dry cleaners about fifteen feet from the curb. His last words to me were, “Don’t touch the gear.”
As soon as he was gone, I touched the gear and it was game on.
As Dad picked up his suits another customer came in and said, “Whoever owns that car outside better hurry—it’s headed down the hill!”
Dad ran out of the laundry and saw the ’52 Buick traveling backward down Myrtle Street with me standing in the front seat gripping the steering wheel. Face to face with me, he ran full speed but the distance between us lengthened as the car hurtled down the hill.
The chase came to an abrupt end when I made a sharp right turn onto Main Street, ran over the curb, bounced the Buick off a guy-wire and came to rest against a telephone pole.
My next adventure in a car that didn’t belong to me was more a case of fraud than grand theft auto. I lied to get my Uncle Wint to lend me his car. He had moved from Georgia to Pine Knoll, the Lee Road version of a country club. I walked from the parsonage on Kenzy Fitzgerald road, all the way to Wint’s rented house near the second hole of the five-hole (?) golf course. I gave him a cockamamie story about how Daddy would have lent me his car but he had to see someone in the hospital.
Wint couldn’t have believed a word I was saying but he just smiled that sly smile of his and handed over the keys to his ’64 Buick wagon.
The party of 14 and 15 year olds was just getting underway when the phone rang. It was my dad. His instructions were crystal clear and his tone left no room for argument. I considered disobeying him, but as soon as I hung up the phone, my fantasy (Lydia King) asked me to dance and that scared me so bad on so many levels that I obeyed my dad and got out of there.
The next time I stole a car it really was grand theft auto. My cousin Stanley Appling and I met two girls at the Georgia Camp Meeting and had a great time sitting in someone’s unlocked car throughout the evening service. (Which was sort of like stealing a car, though we didn't take it anywhere. We just sat in it.) Stanley and his girl took the front seat, me and mine had the back where we fell in love over suicide snow-cones (a mixture of all flavors.) Our parting was sad when the service was over, but I promised her I’d come to see her the following day.
We were staying with my Dad’s folks in Gainesville, Georgia, and the girl lived an hour’s drive away in Doraville. My plan was to borrow my Aunt Katrina’s car, and I pitched the deal while she was hanging out the wash on the clothesline between the smokehouse and Papa’s barn. I said, “Do you remember all those times you smoked Salems and I kept a lookout for you?”
She narrowed her eyes against the smoke of the Salem in her mouth and laughed.
“Well, now you can pay me back,” I said. “If you’ll loan me your car, it’ll make us even.”
She wasn’t about to do it, but she wanted to get the whole story. “Why do you need a car?”
“I want to go see this girl in Doraville.”
“Shit, that’s fifty miles, honey! You can’t drive that far.”
I told her that I was disappointed in her, went back to the house, sneaked Daddy’s car keys from his suit pants hanging on the back of the guest room door and stole his car.
Having never driven in traffic any heavier than that of rural St. Tammany Parish, I should have been traumatized by the crowded expressways, but I was in love and mere traffic couldn't keep me away from my girl.
Daddy, working with the State Patrol and my cousin Stanley, soon figured out which girl I was going to see. He called me there to tell me the State Patrol was on the way to arrest me, but if I could get myself out of there before they arrived, and if I would drive straight back to Gainesville, he wouldn’t press charges. The girl and her parents were upset by this time, so I lit out for Gainesville and turned myself in to my dad.
The punishment he meted out didn’t discourage me from stealing his car again a few weeks later at the Louisiana camp meeting. The evangelist told everyone in the tabernacle to stand and lift their hands to Heaven and when my mother did so, I lifted the car keys from her purse. Then I invited a girl named Gayla on a date.
We sneaked into the car from different directions and drove out of the campground with the lights off and Gayla crouching low in the seat. We parked for a little smooching and groping, but nothing that rose to the level of what I had heard Karen Goodwin describe in a speech in Miss Hutcheson’s 10th Grade English class as “necking.” I think her speech was called “The Art of Necking” and I remember that she got an “A.” Gayla and I didn’t go nearly as far as the examples in Karen’s speech. We covered very few bases at all—just enough to make us thirsty, so we cruised on down to Frances Barker’s drive-in and drank root beer floats and then snuck back onto the campground.
We got there at the end of the sermon when some people were shouting in the aisles and others were running to the altar. My mother’s hands were raised in praise again and her eyes were closed, so I had no problem slipping in beside her unnoticed and returning the keys to her purse.
The only other car I ever stole was when Daddy tried to ground me and took my keys away. I jerked the keys out of his hand, ran outside and started up the Volkswagen he was allowing me to buy from him. He got his hand on the car door, but I released the clutch and spun away on the wet grass of the front yard. He gave chase on foot and caught me twice more before the VW hit its stride.
I drove it to work at WARB where, in due time, a deputy showed up and talked for as long as it took for one side of Frank Sinatra’s September Of My Years album to play. I told him nobody but the FBI could arrest me because I was an announcer on duty at a federally licensed radio station. He said that could be arranged, but went on to preach a nice little sermon about obeying my father. I was especially touched by his description of what jail would be like, and—as far as I can recall—that was the last time I ever stole a car.
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Two years later, at Youth Camp, I saw Gayla standing with a girl named Sherry and as I walked toward them, the sun, the moon and all the stars fell on me...
http://reynoldswriter.blogspot.com/2007/12/permission-to-marry-famous-writer.html
