MY TEMPEST
My father located and purchased my first car in my hometown of Sacramento in 1982. I was 23 years old, living and working in Los Angeles. He paid $1100 for the car, which I was to repay in monthly $100 installments. He was afraid I might not like the 17-year-old automobile, but he knew that I needed a vehicle no matter what it looked like.
I had been taking the bus to work from the ritzy Brentwood section of Los Angeles, winding along Sunset Blvd. through Westwood, along the edges of Bel Air and Holmby Hills, through Beverly Hills and past the Sunset Strip clubs, so swanky in the 50s, now frequented by safety-pin-pierced punk rockers... winding further and further east all the way into the heart of Hollywood and my job captioning TV for the deaf at Sunset Gower Studios. The facility where I worked was a bit rundown at that point, but it had been the venerated Columbia Movie Studios back in its glory days.
The morning wait and ride to my job were not bad, as the bus picked me up at a corner near my apartment in a prosperous part of town. The only other waiting passengers were tired-eyed Hispanic ladies who must have been heading home from jobs as night nurses and overnight nannies. The evening bus journey was not so safe or smooth...
I needed a car.
I got a ride from Los Angeles to Sacramento with a friend, anxious to see this vehicle my father had bought - which would free me from the discomfort and danger of sitting after leaving work at a bus stop at the corner of Sunset and Gower... perched uneasily on the bus bench in the dark, alone in a seedy part of Hollywood, being approached and propositioned by strange and sometimes truly frightening men. I HAD to have a car.
My father’s fears about my reaction to the car were completely unfounded. I fell in love with it at first sight. It was a 1965 Pontiac Tempest, a great, solid boat of a car... the front of the vehicle slanted forward, as if it could not wait to speed off. The body was painted a fantastic aquamarine metallic fleck. The hard top was bright white. There was plentiful chrome trim, from the shining perforated hubcaps to the fabulous divided front grill. Heavy chrome bumpers front and back were clearly designed for protection, not just aesthetics. This car looked retro COOL... and it was built like a tank, which turned out to be a very good thing.
The interior of the car was also shiny aquamarine, from the paint on the metal dash to the vinyl padding on the doors to the brocade-like textured fabric on the seats. The aquamarine steering wheel was enormous, and in the center was a clear plastic disc with black backing incised in silver with the Pontiac logo, an elongated indented arrowhead design... There were round Jetsons-like chrome bullet vents jutting from the dash. Everything glistened and gleamed... it was all in pristine condition. The Tempest had only been driven to the grocery store and church by the original owner, a woman who was already elderly when she purchased it. She must have felt safe, and maybe a little sassy in this huge, snazzy vehicle. I hope so. By the time the car came to me, she had passed away. Her son sold it to my father as he was disposing of her effects.
When I drove the Tempest around Los Angeles, other cars would often slow down, some would even honk. Almost every time I pulled into a gas station the mechanics would come out to look at it. They marveled at the spotless engine and the vehicle's incredible condition. They frequently offered to buy the car then and there. Many people offered to buy my Tempest, but I always declined. Thank God.
Because one night when my 16-year-old sister Annie and her best friend Tena were down in L.A. to visit me and tour the UCLA campus, I agreed to take the two girls for a drive through Beverly Hills to look at movie star houses. My friend and co-worker, Tim, came along. He sat up front with me. Annie sat behind me, with Tena behind Tim.
The last thing I remember is sitting at the stop sign at the northwest corner of Sunset and Bedford, waiting to cross the busy road. The next thing I remember is coming to in the Emergency Room at UCLA. The Tempest, we later learned, had been broad-sided by two men joyriding without permission in their uncle’s Porsche. Police accident scene investigators determined that they had been going 70 miles an hour and never hit their brakes. They may not have had their headlights on.
Unlike my little sister Annie (the only one to miraculously escape injury in the crash) I do not remember the horrific sounds of the collision, I do not remember the blood, the wails of pain and terror, the sirens, the crowds of people who spilled out of the nearby mansions and cars along Sunset Blvd. I do not recall how the police closed down Sunset Blvd. in both directions, because the Porsche had spun my huge solid metal tank of a car and thrown it across the grass median, where it landed on Sunset, facing the opposite direction, my drive shaft flung half a block down. I remember none of this. I know these things happened only because of what I was later told by my passengers, what I read in police reports, private investigators’ findings, photographs.
That Pontiac Tempest saved all of our lives, though my passengers and I were not unscathed. Tena, my sister’s exquisitely beautiful best friend, had her jaw shattered and lost many teeth. Now seems as good a time as any to mention that not only was Tena a girl I knew well and loved, having babysat her for many years when she was little, before I went away to college, but she was also my orthodontist’s daughter. Her father had straightened my teeth, and now his daughter was on a gurney in an emergency room far from home, bandaged so only her eyes showed, bruised and bloodied, in pain and afraid. It was unspeakably awful.
My friend Tim was one curtained bed over from Tena, and I was on his other side. The doctors had shaved a sizable patch of Tim’s hair away in order to stitch up a large gash in his scalp. I had suffered an injury to my lower back and I had a concussion. This physical trauma -- along with the horror of the accident scene -- had contributed to temporary hysterical amnesia. I could not tell the doctors my name or where I was. I knew I SHOULD know these things, and the panic at not being able to answer such simple questions just made things worse.
I was agitated and terrified that my memory would not return. I just kept repeating, “I’m disoriented, I’m disoriented.” Apparently I had been doing this from the time of the accident on, trying everyone’s patience and adding to the tension of the scene. The nurses were attempting to calm me, but it was only when Tim started to joke about his new shaved hairstyle in order to make me laugh that I began to settle down and to regain my wits to some degree so that little by little I could answer questions about who I was, where I lived, what day it was... but I could not tell the nurses or doctors what had transpired over the previous couple of hours. That never changed. The memory of the accident has never come back to me, and for that I am deeply grateful.
The morning after the accident I was taken to a cousin’s house over Coldwater Canyon in Studio City... I needed to be observed to make sure that I didn’t fall asleep until the doctors could be certain that my concussion had improved. I also could not keep my balance too well. My lower back and my equilibrium were both faulty at that point. After a couple of days, my cousin Shawn drove me to the wrecking yard to identify the remains of my beloved Tempest. When I saw the twisted, mangled mass of steel that had been my car, I could not believe all four of us had survived. The enormity of what had transpired finally sank in. I sobbed for several minutes while Shawn rubbed my back.
I took Polaroids for the attorneys of what was left of my poor old Tempest, and almost as an afterthought, I pried that plastic disc with the Pontiac logo off the middle of the enormous aqua blue steering wheel. I still have it in my jewelry box, amidst my other valuables.
