STORY OF MY LIFE - Little Deuce Coupe

My parents dragged me to A LOT of car shows as a kid. I hated them... the car shows that is. I recognized from a very early age that I just didn't give a shit to invest time and/or money into fixing up "old cars" and hanging around shooting the shit about cars with car guys in car t-shirts tucked into ill-fitting jeans on 106 degree days.

My poor brother & I didn't do well in the sun, we burned easily... so we'd always have to pack a canopy & a shitload of our WWF Superstar wrestling guys (along with 2 wrestling rings b/c Fuck sharing) into the trunk of my dad's non-air-conditioned hot-rod for these long, loud, and all but abusive road trips.

I really liked to draw as a kid, but a car show was no place to give off the impression that you were "some sort of faggot", so I stuck to the wrestling figures in hopes of being left alone by the commonplace (half-in-the-bag) passerby.

Sometimes we'd be up at 4 or 5am on a Saturday morning to make it up to "Nationals" in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Other times we'd be out until midnight or 1am at a summertime drive-in only a town or two over.

Either way you look at it, I was miserable. There usually weren't even pretty women at these god awful car shows. Long before Sir Mix-A-Lot turned me on to the importance of curves, I knew something was off with the stick skinny white trash whores languidly wallowing in the heat, smoking Winston 100s with a nervous tick.

"Mom... why does that lady sound like a bullfrog?"

"Mom... how come there's no butt in that woman's pants?"

I know now that a lot of these people were full fledged racists only a generation removed from the Tennessee hills. Genuine assholes with names like Bud Lackey, Hoyt Johnston & Murph Murphy. Others like my dad & his crew were just people who really enjoyed working on cars and would drive halfway to hell & back to show off their handy work / dedication in hopes of taking home cash & a plaque... which at least 1 of 'em usually did.

But yeah man... Fuck a car show!

One of the only things that saved me during the hours spent on a blanket fending off heat exhaustion was the music. Generally it was a familiar mix of '50s rock'n'roll, '60s pop & '70s southern rock. I wasn't particularly a fan of any of it, but it did help pass the time.

However, every great once in a while something special would happen. There'd be a group out from Southern California that would blast nothing but the Beach Boys. They were a different sort of "car guy". Their women were interesting, they had full body tans and they talked and moved in a much "cooler" way than the majority of the mid-western muscle-heads I was familiar with.

It wasn't long before I owned every Beach Boys cassette known to man. I was probably 8 or 9 by the time I grew tired of their most popular "car" & "girl" songs and was off to the more obscure tunes I felt would be perfect for the mix-tape that I decided MUST accompany me to every car show from that point on.

See, there was a cousin of a family friend's kid that was coming to car shows now and I loved her... I was sure of it, and the only way to set the summer mood was with my well crafted playlist of Beach Boys gems.

Of course, I never talked to her until high school, but as soon as she was present and ready to play, I'd pop my mix into my little portable Sony boombox and just sit back and watch her laugh & suffer right along with me. I imagined us older... like 13, living somewhere awesome like Huntington Beach, California and spending all of our waking hours together in the coastal sand.

It was a magical escape from the bees circling a garbage can of trash only a few feet away in the humid Illinois outback... our actual nearest water source a hose attached to a barrel filled up miles away by a hillbilly out of his hillbilly spicket.

None-the-less... still to this day I find myself tossing random Beach Boy songs into the summer mixes I make when I know I'll be taking it very easy outdoors.

The only difference now is that I don't envision a future on the Pacific horizon... but reminisce on glorious days, that in my life, never actually happened.