Being poor as a teenager in an aspiring, upwardly-mobile "bedroom community" meant that country kids had to bum rides from their friends in the rural Rockland County of the 70s and 80s. People still hitchhiked their way across the USA, though me and my friends never had much luck with it. Cabs were slow to arrive from neighboring towns, and our unmarked country lanes were even harder to find, if the car even bothered to show up at all. We had one county minibus that went to the mall every couple of hours during the daytime, and that was it.
When my dad told us there wasn't any money for college after his divorce (after years of telling us that we had to go to school to get a job), a luxury like a used car was so far out of my reach that I knew better than to inquire about it to any of the adults around me. I should be grateful for food! I was "lucky" to be alive! It was always the same answer from our disordered parents, anyway: if we wanted something bad enough, we had to earn it for ourselves (unlike them), and if I couldn't get a job that paid me well enough to buy a used car, oh well. Them's the breaks, I guess. Tough luck, kid. Maybe get another job?
This, from pampered city folk who always upgraded their own cars, while we walked several miles to make up for the differences in their finances that they couldn't earn, to properly provide for children living far away from an easily accessible school or town. It was always our fault and our burden to bear alone, because well-meaning people who asked after our well-being or expressed their concerns about us were harassed or shut out of our lives, forever. Our parents knew how to maintain a tightly controlled circle of abuse and fear around us, to keep away the good (while telling us it was to protect us) so they could get ahead at our expense, because they saw children as disposable and/or replaceable items in their commercially-fueled halcyon fantasies about "suburban living" from 50s-era t.v. shows.
Because we had to, we figured out often insanely difficult transporation situations, as one of the most mobile and independent generations of children to be raised in America since The Great Depression. By senior year of high school, my best friend Steve drove me to school almost every morning and back home. If he was having car troubles and/or "crazy mama" problems, my other best friend Karen would pick me up and drop me off at home, though that was much less frequent. She worked a lot of hours. Both of them worked in the town of New City that they lived close to. Karen worked at a drug store (both before and after college) and Steve ws a check-out clerk at the grocery store.
We all came from rough homes, so there wasn't anything leftover to go around in our crowd. Karen's parents were chain-smoking drunks, and Steve hadn't seen his dad for many years. I don't know if he even remembered his father, because he took off one day to leave them boys alone with one seriously crazy Jewish mother struggling to pay a big mortgage and hold onto her remaining sanity. But, we got by, and we all got into college despite the abuse. Because we had it more or less the same at home, it made hardship conversations easy for us to have. Needing a ride might be the least of our problems, on any given afternoon.
In between the struggle to survive, we managed to have some really good times, albeit simply country pleasures like riding around the surrounding hillsides with the windows open and our hands out of the car to feel the cool passing breezes, something that had been taboo for us during our childhoods. We had Clarkstown South H.S. gatherings in the parking lot of Rockland Lake, and after a few beers, Karen might let me ride on the hood of her car in another test of courage that had us in a game of chicken: more speed or hang on for dear life?
We'd skip school to go sailing on the hood of her car in circles around the parking lot, splashing through puddles of rain that'd collected during school hours, now glowing like liquid gold in the fading light of another autumn day. That dang thing was as ugly as sin and covered almost entirely in a dull flat primer for whenever she saved enough money for a new paint job, but, until then, it just didn't matter what it looked like. That car got us to school and back, and really, at the time, what more could we ask for? Though "The Grey Beast" has surely been in Car Heaven for quite some time now, I can't help but feel grateful for it, especially during these days filled with schoolkids walking home from school amid the slanting rays of a beautiful October sun. Thanks, mate.
