Stolen Car

 

And I'm driving a stolen car
On a pitch black night
And I'm telling myself
I'm gonna be alright
But I ride by night
And I travel in fear
In this darkness I will disappear

I was listening to the above Bruce Springsteen song ‘Stolen Car’ the other day on my way home from work and it made me think of my own brief history on the subject while in high school in Waukesha, WI.  My first experience with the concept was with my buddy Mark Smith.  I used to sleep over at his house a lot on the weekends.  His room was in the basement and we would crank tunes, play pool and drink beer that we had snuck in through the basement window well.  Another cool trick that we had learned was how to abscond with his parent’s car for late night parties and midnight movies (usually Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’).

 

Mark’s parent’s bedroom was up on the 2^nd floor on the other side of the house from the garage.  So after they would go to bed, we would get the car keys off the hook in the kitchen and sneak into the garage.  Then we would pull the red latch to disengage the automatic door opener.  Slowly and quietly we would lift up the garage door, put the stick-shift car in neutral and give it a push to get it rolling.  Then Mark would jump in as he guided it down the somewhat steep 30 foot long driveway.  I would close the garage door as Mark would continue to coast backwards down the driveway and on to the cul-de-sac until it stopped rolling.  Then I would jump in, he would start it up and off we would go!

 

Freedom was ours…parties, movies, girls…whatever a couple of high school punks could get into we did and we had a blast.  Now getting the car silently out of the garage was one thing, but getting it back in was another.  Basically we would just do it all in reverse but it took some skill and timing.  We would stop the car in the cul-de-sac with his parents house about a block straight ahead.  I would get out, run up to the house, quietly open the garage door and wait for Mark.  He would then gun it as fast as he could, kill the engine at the bottom of the driveway, and hope he had enough speed to coast up to the top of the driveway.  We usually made it on the first try.  Then it was just a matter of pushing the car into place, closing the garage door and reattaching the garage door opener.  Easy peasy.  Never once did Mark’s parents catch us.

 

My other brush with a ‘stolen car’ was a little more hairy.  It was my senior year in high school and my neighbor and best friend Gary Paulson had also become good friends with a guy named Roman.  He was the guy I wrote about in my 4/13/12 blog entitled ‘Barf’…when I had gone with him in his car-paper route during 2^nd hour, drank seven beers and spent the rest of the day in the high school bathroom puking.  Well Roman had a girlfriend named Julia whose parents did not like him, and for some reason his parents did not like Julia.  All the parents were bound and determined that these two kids were not to be together.  Eventually Roman and Julia had had enough and hatched a scheme.  They would run away!

 

Roman had a really cool uncle who was a bus driver that used to drive the bus for our local minor league hockey team, the Milwaukee Admirals.  He was able to get Roman and Julia free bus fare on the Greyhound from Milwaukee all the way out to Oregon to stay with friends there.  The plan was that Gary and I were to drive Roman and Julia to the Milwaukee bus station in Roman’s dad’s car and then ditch the car.  We were to hide it out in the country somewhere so that the parents and the cops would think that the kids had ran away using the car and would not be looking for them at bus stations.

 

Well it was a good plan and we followed it at first.  We lived out in the country somewhere, so after dropping the couple off at the bus station we hid the car down a long dirt path in a little oasis of trees in the middle of a gigantic corn field across the street from my house.  We figured it would take the farmer weeks or even months to discover the car.  When we parked the car though we just could not bear to follow through with Roman’s instructions to throw the keys away.  They were perfectly good keys to a perfectly good car.  We left the car there under a bunch of branches but kept the keys and walked home.  Gary lived just up the street from me.

 

A couple of days later the Milwaukee Brewers were starting a weekend home stand against the Red Sox and we wanted to go!  Gary’s parents never let him drive, and for some reason I couldn’t get my parent’s car that night, so hey…why not take the perfectly good car across the street?  After doing it once, it became easier to do and we started using the car more and more.  It was the last week of school and one morning we decided to take the car to school instead of the stupid school bus.  We were about to pull into the parking lot when we noticed a cop car and an FBI vehicle parked by the front door of the school, so we kept on going and parked down the street in a neighborhood.

 

Having our own car was a blast, but the problem we chose to ignore was that technically it was a stolen car and the Feds were looking for the car and the kids.  Roman was over 18 and Julia was under 18 so the whole thing was a big deal.  Driving the car was nerve-racking and our heads were always on a swivel.  We were getting sporadic reports from Roman on the road that the FBI had figured out they were not driving and were using the bus instead.  They almost got caught in Denver and again in Utah, but somehow had managed to slip through and got all the way to Oregon.

 

One night Gary had tried to take the car to a Brewers game, but the distributor cap was missing.  The farmer who owned the corn field had found the car and sabotaged it so it wouldn’t work.  Gary found another ride to the game, got drunk, and when he got home the Feds were sitting in his living room waiting for him.  Fortunately I had not gone with Gary that night.  He did not rat me out, but he had to show the cops where the car was parked.  He got into some trouble, but surprisingly not much.  I believe the uncle had caved, Roman and Julia were tracked down, and Roman’s dad decided not to press charges against Gary.  We made it through all that relatively unscathed, but again...don’t try any of this at home…so very stupid.