DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION

OU SONT LES BAGNOLES D'ANTAN?

           

Anyone who knows me will laugh, but sometimes I dream I'm driving.

            …laugh, because, whatever one calls the opposite of a petrol-head, I qualify. While school friends could tell from the cradle how to take apart a carburetor, my automotive expertise excluded anything more complex than tuning the radio.

            Cars no longer have radios, of course, as radio has ceased to exist. Not in my dreams, however, since what I re-experience is the sense of driving across country, the music from one station becoming fainter as one left its transmission zone and entered another: Vivaldi's Four Seasons blurring into Amarillo by Morning.  

            Others might cruise their sleep in Cadillacs or Rollers but in dreams I drove Citroen traction avants, those always black police cars with the odd dip in the middle of their front bumper, the inverted chevron of their radiator and the sound of their siren, like the ring ring of a giant telephone. Cars for Gabin, for Arletty, for Rififi.          

  But I never saw one of these in the flesh until I came to France.  A clapped-out Triumph Herald was more my style. That one barely made it to the used car lot. I asked the owner what he would allow me on something that didn't break down daily. As he frowned and kicked the tyres, his mechanic walked by.

            "Are we buying this?" he asked. "Because I can use it for parts."

            The deal done, he returned with a screwdriver and removed the one part he needed - the metal "H" from "TRIUMPH", required for a sportier TR4.

            Not until I moved to the United States in the seventies did dream and reality coincide. My post at a small college included the use of a car; specifically, an antique Ford Fairlane belonging to the head of the department.

            "Until you find something better," he said, but I couldn't imagine what that might be.         

Perhaps it didn't have flames painted along its sides, a whip aerial with a fox tail, soft dice dangling from the rear vision mirror, and a bumper sticker that read AIN'T TOO PROUD TO BEG but in every other respect in was the car of my nocturnal fantasies. Chasing the dream, I took it to drive-in cinemas and made out with my student girlfriend on the spacious back seat. The vast faces of Annette Funicello and Troy Donohue smiled down in approval, and rats rattled empty beer cans as they  foraged for pizza scraps.

            Another automobile dream that achieved reality had me returning to the country town of my childhood and, in a sporty car with a beautiful woman, making a victory lap of the community from which I'd been so eager to escape. An influx of movie money and the presence of the French girl whom I later married provided the opportunity. With her at my side in a crimson Honda with the vanity plate MOVIE1, I drove with deliberation down its main street, an avenue of tin-roofed bungalows lined with pepper trees.

            Though she tried to see it through my eyes, encrusted with the humiliations and frustrations of adolescence, Gallic good sense prevailed.

            "Mais,” she said cautiously,” c'est mignon."

            Cute? How could it be cute? But I had to admit that it was. So much for the stuff that dreams are made of.

            I don't drive much anymore but Marie Dominique has a car that makes phone calls on her behalf, plays her favourite music, tells her where she is and where she's going.  I've never asked if she dreams about it, but suspect that the car might be doing so. How long before she orders "Take us to Montmartre" and it responds in a quietly reasonable voice "I don't think you should do that, madame."