The Way It Was When

I found myself in Hollywood again. I can't remember the date or the circumstances, but it was a beautiful evening – balmy, with a breeze that ruffled the palm trees nodding over the boulevard like sleepy sentinels. My destination? Burbank, and home. But though traffic was mysteriously light – almost non-existent – I found myself in no hurry to get there. Between the weather, the open road, the superb tunes rolling out of the radio, and my general state of relaxation, I was enjoying myself thoroughly. As I shot past the Hollywood Bowl to the 101 Freeway, equally and suspiciously free of cars, I was struck by a realization which made me laugh out loud: quite by accident, I had re-discovered the joy of cruising.

Cruising, or in the parlance of my parents, “going for a drive,” is something which used to be an important part of my life. It is one of the few distinct pleasures which I remember from high school, which otherwise was not all that pleasurable of an experience. The ages between, say, twelve and sixteen are a continuous struggle to define oneself as a adult, at a time when one is still actually a child both physically and mentally, and the acquisition of a driver's license bestows upon the teenager a precious commodity: temporary freedom. You may live, as I did, in a too-small house with too many people and animals, and spend the rest of your time jammed in school with a couple of thousand other equally frustrated young humans; you may exist in a state of simmering sexual frustration, the victim of hormonal mood swings and the quasi-tantrums that result from them. You may be oppressed by parents, homework, chores, bullies, elder siblings, and the sense that one's life is not your own and there is no such thing as privacy; but when they hand you that license and a set of car keys, everything changes, if only for an hour or two, here and there.

When I was about seventeen I had a specific ritual I followed, beginning the spring and ending somewhere in the fall. When the weather was just right, in that period of day known as the gloaming – when the sun is down but light still fills the sky – I would swing into the '77 Olds Cutlass Supreme that was my temporary chariot, fire up every one of the 350 cubic inches in its engine, set the four-barrel carburator to rumble, and have myself a drive.

I grew up near the Potomac River, among trees and ivy and rolling hills. It was suburbia, but not the sort that desecrates the landscape; the houses all seemed like hobbitons, growing up out of the earth in the shade of the trees. Natural phenomena, as it were. Just a few minutes from my house were single-lane railway bridges, fast-moving streams, brooding woods, and sprawling fields unbesmirched by a single man-made structure. In the summers, after a thunderstorm, mist would hang thickly over the woods and the open pastures; in the fall, the sharp October air was full of the spice of decaying leaves and woodsmoke. All of this was perfect backdrop for cruising. I would steer the great Cutlass through the landscape, passing the homes of schoolmates, inhaling the perfume of growing things, and listening to the mix tape I'd jammed into the dashboard player. In those days, every kid was armed with a tremendous collection of mix tapes, mostly recorded off the radio, and there was one for every mood. Nowadays you say, “There's an app for that.” In those days you said, “There's a mix tape for that” – “that” being your state of mind. If you were angry, if you were lonely, if you were feeling confident, happy or just plain horny, you had a collection of songs you could fall back on to enhance those feelings. The construction of a mix tape was a science that had to be carefully apprenticed before it could be mastered; I could probably write a book about the techniques necessary to produce the perfect one, if I thought anyone would read it. At any rate, I had more tapes than I could count, but there was one in particular which always accompanied my when I went cruising. After all these years I can only recall two songs on it – Guns 'n Roses “Patience” and “You Don't Move Me Anymore” by Keith Richards – but the effect it produced in me on those lazy, moon-lighted evenings in the summer I can remember perfectly. It was a sensation of freedom, coupled with the knowledge that in that moment you were completely unreachable by telephone, parent or teacher. Nobody knew where you were; nobody could tell you what to do or how to do it. Cell phones did not exist. GPS tracking did not exist. When you got in that car, you were like a deep-sea diver with a thousand feet of water over his head: immersed in, yet disconnected from, the world around you. Returning from a good cruise produced in my teenage body and mind the exact feelings which a cigar and two fingers of Irish whiskey produce in my middle-aged ones: peace and contentment.

At the moment of my Hollywood epiphany, I realized that it had been nearly a dozen years since I had simply “gone for a drive.” When I moved to Los Angeles in '07, I quickly discovered that the traffic here, along with the inadequate road system and the brutality of the summer and early fall weather, were not conducive to cruising. Indeed, nobody around here drives just for the sake of it. Though L.A. is famous for its car culture, the automobile here is either a status symbol or a means to an end. The idea that it can be used as a balm for one's soul is not even considered. Conditions simply make it impossible. The circumstances which allowed me to cruise by accident were simply a set of perfectly aligned flukes which I'd never experienced before and have not experienced since. Nevertheless, having “gone for a drive” by accident, it got me thinking about how much life has changed since my cruising days, since the times I used to spend hours in the basement or in my room, patiently waiting for the right song to come over the radio so I could add it to my latest mix tape. I realized that I am now old enough to mourn The Way Things Were When.

Being born in the early 70s, I have layers and layers of intricate memories of a now-extinct society, a world before cellular phones or mobile devices or the Internet, before microchips in cars, before recycling, before CDs and MP3s and podcasts, before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, before streaming services and cloud drives, before almost everything which makes our modern society work. A world in which “going for a drive” was a significant act, and creating a mix tape was a rite of passage, like a Native American boy's learning to track a deer. A world of newspapers, cassette tapes, watches, Walkmans, Atari computers, VCRs, 200 lb television sets with rabbit ears, and mail-order catalogs with six-to-eight week delivery times. A world of Encyclopedias and TV Guides. A world in which it was not possible or even desirable to be called or contacted at any time. A world in which the simple act of climbing into a car unplugged you from the world.

Lest you think I am simply indulging in nostalgia, let me say that I am quite well aware at the world of the 70s, 80s and early-mid 90s was hardly perfect and we who lived through those times are were old enough to make conscious judgments of them knew it even then. There is no word in the English language for the frustration which a person feels when he desires a technology or a device which does not yet exist, but I felt that frustration quite keenly as a child, a teenager, and a young man. Simply put, we knew a much more sophisticated world was around the corner, a world of instantaneous gratification and all-hours convenience, but we weren't there yet. We were stuck with cassette tapes and clunky VCRs and a choice between ABC, NBC or CBS; stuck with telephone cords that inevitably twisted into knots, and the very real possibility of breaking down a lonely stretch of highway in bad weather with absolutely no way to call for help. So no, this is not nostalgia; not all nostalgia, anyway. It is simply an awareness that time is marching on, and that as it so marches, certain pleasures which were unique to my generation have been left behind in its dust, probably forever. Cruising – at least in Los Angeles – is one. Assembling mix tapes on clunky tape-recorders is another. But the list, if I were to sit down and really think about it, is immense.

In Anne Rice's novel Interview With A Vampire, the character of Armand explains to the neophyte vampire Louis that the reason the undead do not really live forever is because very few of them have the stomach for immortality. The vampire, Armand explains, is born into a particular era and belongs to that era alone; as time passes, language changes, clothing changes, custom changes, architecture changes, and at some point, the vampire finds itself unable to relate to the present. It is still looking for the accents, the styles, the sounds of its own era, now long extinct and never to return. In the end the loneliness, the imposed isolation, the sense of being “in but not of” the world becomes unbearable, and the vampire steps deliberately into the light and destroys itself. I do not, of course, feel that way just now – like destroying myself, I mean. I'm way too young for that. But I have come to understand the grumbling, the carping, the endless complaining my grandparents were guilty of as far back as I can remember – a constant, ne'er-ceasing lament about the Way The World Was When. They talked about things like coal-fired stoves, milkmen, nickel beers, listening to soap operas on the radio, and the pain-in-the-ass necessity of having your collar turned or your hat reblocked. They talked about how you had to wear a suit or a dress to a movie theater and how a dollar could buy you a steak dinner with all the trimmings and a cold beer and still leave you enough money for the tip and the trolley home. At the time, I didn't want to hear any of that sort of talk and it is only recently that I have come to understand what a wonderful insight it gave me into the world in which they experienced their own youth. But it also lends me an understanding of just what it feels like to be the Vampire Armand, struggling endlessly to keep up with a life that never stops moving, that allows each of us a certain time to be both “in and of” the world, and then slowly begins to pull away from us, to make us living anachronisms, who bore the younger folk with our tales of The Way The World Was When.

I do not, at present, have children, but I do have a niece and a nephew and sometimes, when I am regaling them with tales of my own childhood, I can see the boredom glassing over their eyes. They cannot relate, and there is really no reason why they should: they belong to a different world, one which is growing more different, more alien – to me, anyway – with every passing year. Yet at the same time I cannot look at them without feeling a twinge of pity. Just as I will never know what it is like to go to school in the horse-drawn sleigh that pulled my grandmother through Indiana snow, they will never – so long as they live in Los Angeles – know the joy of cruising through somnolent streets on lovely summer evenings, alone with their thoughts, knowing they are unreachable, untouchable, totally, wonderfully alone. Nor will they ever grasp the complex mixture of method and patience which was required to construct the perfect mix tape. But I'll tell you this much, friends and neighbors: they don't know what the hell they're missing.