The cars of our dreams
They were part of our American dream
by Dimitri C. Michalakis
My uncle owned all the cars I ever wanted. In the early 1960s when he still had hair, combed into a pompadour, he visited us in Montreal in a two-toned Chevy that he parked in our driveway, and we all ran out to gawk at the very first car in our family. We even got to jump on the seats with the leather stitch and fiddle with the lids of the chrome ashtrays that kept flipping open and shut, the height of elegance.
I sat in the back when Thio took us for a ride and I flapped open the ashtray lids while we drove around the suburbs, past all the houses with their swimming pools and manicured lawns, the very picture of the Canadian dream. My family and I used to stroll through those neighborhoods, so new they still had piles of red dirt from the excavations, and the adults would talk and gawk at the lucky Canadians in their Bermuda shorts mowing their lawns or adjusting their sprinklers or putting away their kids’ bikes in their two-car garages, and who studiously avoiding looking back at us, the straggle of foreigners eyeing them in their perfect world like street urchins peeking through the windows of a perfect home.
Not that I cared, I was a kid then, and all I wanted to do was climb every mound of red dirt to show these Canadians how nimble I was, because I came from Greece and I was a practiced climber of mountains and hills.
But when Thio Stelio visited with his two-toned Chevy, though it was probably five or six years old then, it was still a car and it spoiled us because now we could zip through the Canadian suburbs and make the homeowners with the garden shears pause and take notice, since we had a car like them, until they realized that it was only those foreigners driving an old wreck and with their noses pressed against the glass.
Then Thio Stelio drove his Chevy back to New York where he lived, and we went back to walking and gawking at the swimming pools and taking the bus while I dreamed of my family owning a car, any car, but preferably one as sumptuous as the black Chrysler New Yorker parked at the bus stop downtown under the marguee of Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. The car was always there, with its vast chrome bumpers flashing in the sun and its seats looking so inviting as we boarded the bus for the weary trek home.
On holidays, we might visit New York and see the new car Thio Stelio drove, he never seemed to drive the same car for very long. One summer he was driving a huge old Chevy, or Pontiac, or Buick, it doesn’t matter, it was huge, about ten or fifteen years old, with the gears on the wheel, and the wheel as big as a hula hoop, with the latticework of a horn that he used to blast and sounded like a brass band. That was the horn of a real koursa, like the ones that used to clear the streets of urchins back in Greece and then roar by leaving a trail of musky exhaust smoke and the licorice smell of hot rubber tires.
Thio had picked up the old Chevy, or Pontiac, or Buick second hand and was using it as his truck while he did some work on a house, perhaps the first house he ever owned, and I remember how I sat in the car by myself while he worked in the house, and it had a tape recorder and I would click the buttons and listen to the music, probably Kazantzidis, probably Perpiniadis, groaning about the familiar sorrows of xenitia.
My uncle also drove a truck for a while and delivered bananas in Brooklyn for Thio George Sideratos, who owned the tiny banana store. The truck had doors that were never shut and Thio swung in and out of them like a monkey from his perch, or rattled around the back and came out with a stalk of bananas on his shoulder which he delivered to stores and vendors on the avenues of Brooklyn with all the dash and gallantry of a young cavalier. I wanted to be just like him and deliver bananas on the avenue, and comb my hair in a pompadour, and drive a truck with doors that never closed, and wink at the single girls we passed, the ones on Fifth Avenue with the pretty ribbons in their hair, who I would never have the nerve to look at, if I wasn’t with Thio Stelio, and we were young and single and driving his hot rod of a banana truck that backfired on cue and got their attention.
We moved to Chicago and one day my father came home with a white 1960 Chevy Impala with a red stripe and a red leather interior and a red steering wheel with grips and I remember every morning how his ring from Columbia Teacher’s College would click on the steering wheel as he finished warming the engine and steered the car into traffic. The car was often laid up, I remember whole mornings spent trying to start it and gagging on gas fumes. But when it drove it was beautiful, our first car, and it had a red dashboard with round gauges like a submarine and a radio that played Paul Anka and the Everly Brothers, which we listened to just like all those American kids we passed hunkered over the jukebox in the soda shop.
When our car didn’t work, Mr. Sakellariou, whose ring would click on the steering wheel as well, might pick us up in his beautiful two-toned cream and cafe latte Ponrtiac Bonneville with the exhaust that sounded like a tiger’s purr and the white wall tires as white as powdered donuts. Mr. Sakellariou always used his ash tray, tapping ash into the tray on a dashboard that was a blaze of chrome, and adjusting the knobs of the radio which looked as shiny and gaudy and as numerous as the buttons of a jukebox.
Someday, I thought, if we worked hard and lived right we might step up to a Pontiac like Mr. Sakellariou, or an Oldsmobile Rocket 88 like Mrs. Prevolos, or a two-door Thunderbird with a red interior like Rich, our landlord. But I never imagined we would ever be rich enough to own a Cadillac, which had fins like a Saturn rocket, and the bumper of the Queen Mary, and once pulverized a Volkswagen that ran into it on our corner. A Cadillac was the great American dream.
When we lived in Chicago, we often took the Greyhound to New York to visit relatives on holidays. I stayed up watching the driver, of course, and wanting to be just like him when I grew up, commanding the American highway between Chicago and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Newark and New York in my double-decker Greyhound Scenicruiser with the white dog running on the side.
We usually stayed at Thio Stelio’s when we came to New York, his house in Bay Ridge and the street clogged with traffic heading to the pier for the Staten Island Ferry. When Thio got married he started losing his hair and eventually he got a station wagon, a 1964 burgundy Chevy Impala with seats that were permanently white from the sacks of flour that he carried to the donuts shops he owned, first in Brooklyn, and then on Long Island.
I remember one morning at the crack of dawn driving on the empty stretch of the Belt Parkway to his luncheonette and donut shop in Hicksville and then being treated to a breakfast of pancakes and a grilled hamburger for lunch. And I remember him taking me once to pick up a relative or friend arriving on the Queen Frederika, which we found berthed and looming huge and white at one of the docks in Manhattan.
But most of all, I remember Thio packing all of us in his station wagon, the young bucks tumbling in the cargo hold, and driving us to the beach in Riis Park, with the tape recorder blasting Panos Gavalas, Marinella, Yiota Lidia, and Thio blowing his horn at the pretty girls, while we wallowed on our elbows in the cargo hold and sang our lungs out.
Thio was still fun, even though he was shedding hair like a dog, and he wore shoes caked with grease from work, and he was getting a belly, and he always had to go to bed early because he had to get up in the middle of the night to make the donuts, and he now drove a station wagon, but it was a station wagon he drove with the aplomb of a convertible.
And then one day when we returned to Chicago, we walked into a Mercury showroom. A Mercury wasn’t a Buick, but it was a sort of Oldsmobile and it did cost $5,000 in the mid 1960s. So we bought it and for a while we lived the American dream in our Mercury, driving from Chicago to New York every holiday and summer, staying overnight at the “town of motels”, Breezewood, Pennsylvania, wondering on every trip if Indiana really had no snakes, as my father claimed, arriving in New York to stay with Thio Stelio in Brooklyn and watch the snarl of cars nosing up the street to the Staten Island Ferry. And then driving back again and staying in Breezewood, or any other roadside motel with a pink vacancy sign, stopping along the way at the Howard Johnson’s, before we reached Gary, Indiana and we knew we were practically home.
The big event every year in Chicago was the picnic where they drew the raffle for the Cadillac that had been parked for months on the curb outside the church. We would leave church on Sunday and there at the bottom of the steps would be the answer to many prayers, a Cadillac with a chrome grill like a pipe organ and fins like a jet, with seats as creamy as tapioca, and with a steering wheel surprisingly small for such a huge car but glamorously done in Cadillac’s distinctive two-tone black-and-white.
We bought our one or two tickets and for weeks I imagined our family being handed the keys at the picnic and our driving home the car, while my father’s ring clicked on the two-toned wheel, and I wallowed in the creamy seats stitched with the Cadillac emblem. But, of course, the shopkeeper who bought half the roll of tickets every year usually won, and then life would return to its petty pace, and I would forget about the Cadillac for a while and settle for our Mercury.
Until the year rolled around, and the tickets were on sale again, and a new Cadillac with longer fins and bigger bumpers was parked on the curb outside the church, and then I and others would start spinning out our fantasies about the great American dream.
