THE BOMB

Dazed, I wondered what to do next, since you can’t live in L.A. without a car. An acquaintance of mine took me to see a hideous wreck a friend of his was selling for $50—garishly aqua, it was the size of an ocean liner and had huge fins. We took it out for a cruise, and when we stopped at a gas station a couple of blocks from my apartment, the attendant, a kid of maybe eighteen, exclaimed over it and offered to trade me his car—a sedate gray Olds in equally dreadful condition. I left him the Queen Mary and took the Olds, agreeing to meet him Monday, when the DMV would be open, to do the paperwork.

But when Monday came, he’d disappeared. It turned out he’d stolen money from the gas station, been apprehended by the military police (he was AWOL from the Army), and been shipped back to Fort Carson, Colorado. I wrote him in the stockade, begging him to send me the pink slip. In the meantime, in the trunk of the “Bomb,” as I came to call the Olds, I found some of his private possessions, including a picture of a teenage girl with a baby that I figured were probably his wife and child.

With a courteous note of apology, he promptly sent me the pink slip. But wherever I drove the Bomb over the next two years, the Highway Patrol invariably stopped me, knowing at a glance they could find something that didn’t work to cite me for.