Cadillac Dreams

Allegra Waldron

Word Count 1508

When Dad drove up to the house with Mr. Tutt’s Sunday drive car–a mid-1980s Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham painted a decidedly aftermarket shade of matte fool’s gold, my cousin Q and I snickered.

The joke was on me when Dad tossed me the keys.

“Tutt give me a good price for it,” he explained.

Mom was out of her seat on the porch swing with hands on her wide hips. “He should have paid you to take it,” she replied.

“He got no use for it no more,” Dad continued. Story was, old man Tutt had shot his right foot off while cleaning his shotgun.

“Let Lil Bit drive it to school.”

The Caddy was the last thing I needed socially, but also a prayer answered.

One thing that happens when you live in a crack house until you’re eight or nine, before your grandparents step in and become Mom and Dad, is learning all the things that happen to little girls when no one is watching. The other thing is that your teachers, people at church, even your own family, all believe that old life is a boomerang, ready to catch you and bring you back to it. No amount of perfect grades, perfect attendance or strict adherence to Mom and Dad’s rules makes anyone try harder with you or allows them to forget where you came from. I knew, the way all sixteen year olds know everything, that I had to get out of Springfield.

Months earlier, I had asked Mom if I could sign up to take driver’s education at school. Denied. I knew the $60 for the course would be a stretch. But then the school district suddenly discontinued their half-hearted, decades-long effort to desegregate schools by bussing kids like me from the south side, to schools on the north side. My cousin Q, my best friend Saleema and I were forced to take the city bus, racking up tardy slips, as the bus meandered from the liquor stores and boarded up windows of our neighborhood, to the green lawns and adults running for pleasure in the neighborhood surrounding our high school.

Around then, my AP bio teacher invited all the top students, all girls, on an overnight trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to collect soil samples.

There were bonfires and midnight nature walks with my teacher and his buddy who served as chaperone. When the male chaperone dropped me off at home at the end of the trip, there were questions.

“Who was that?” Mom asked.

Like most of their rules, the prohibition against riding in the car with strange men was never explicitly stated. I was expected to use common sense. Boundaries were learned while experiencing the consequences, like the one time I slammed my bedroom door and dad unceremoniously, relieved my door of its hinges and placed it in the garage where it still sits today.

“Oh, that’s just the chaperone from our trip.” I answered. “He gave me a ride because I was the only one who didn’t have my own car.”

I imagine the final thing that made Mom and Dad reconsider buying me a car they couldn’t afford, was when the low-level neighborhood drug dealer offered to give me a ride to school in the morning.

Mom and I were sitting on the front porch. Most everyone who drove down the street waved from their cars or honked their horns at Mom. She knew everyone in the neighborhood and their mama. When Tony Powell, who we called “TonyPow”, the biggest crack dealer in town, parked his brown and tan Chrysler LeBaron next to Mom’s silver Chrysler New Yorker, she started to wave but let her hand fall.

“How you doin’ Miss Green?” TonyPow asked.

 “How’s your mama doing, Anthony?” Mom asked while looking directly at the stranger by his side who was staring directly at me.

 I didn’t know Terence’s name, although he had been lurking around the corner where we caught the city bus for weeks. One morning, he pulled up in TonyPow’s car and asked my cousin Q if he had clean pee. He would give Q fifty bucks if he could pee in a cup.

We heard stories in the neighborhood about Terrence, who was just back home from doing a bid and ambitious in the worst way.

 If it would be helpful, Terrence said he would be happy to drive Q, Saleema and me to school so we wouldn’t have to take the city bus anymore. Mom politely declined, then suggested they both remove their asses from her property.

Dad started cleaning his guns on the front porch after that. Within weeks, he brought Mr. Tutt’s car home.

I got a job at Chess King in the mall and saved up enough money to send out a few college applications.

One day, after all of my applications were sent out, Saleema, Q and I were sitting in the car, in the school parking lot, listening to music with the windows down. Outside, a joint was being passed from car to car.

For the first time ever, I took one hit of the thin joint, held my breath as I’d seen it done, then passed it to Saleema. She looked at me with large, surprised eyes, then inhaled before passing it back to Q. We were all coughing and laughing when we passed it along to the next car.

Driving home, I swore I felt nothing.

“Do you guys feel anything? I don’t feel anything.” I said.

Saleema sat upright and stiff in the passenger’s seat with her eyes focused just outside the car, but not speaking.

“Do you guys feel anything? Did I just say that out loud?” I repeated.

In the back seat, Q was doubled over on the floor between the bench seat and the passenger seat, coughing and laughing.

I called Saleema’s name again. Nothing.

“Damn, she like a statue.” Q said.

Her mouth moved like she was going to speak but her lips were glued shut.

Following her eyes, I realized that I had been stopped at the intersection, with a long line of traffic behind me on the Main Street overpass. I don’t know how long I had been waiting for the stop sign to turn green.

“You’re stupid and high as hell.” Q laughed, holding his stomach.

I pulled into the nearest parking lot, which belonged to Schuler’s bakery. Q laughed until it was clear his stomach was actually in pain. Saleema stared forward and made no sound except for smacking her lips. I held my head in my palms trying to stop the thoughts about being arrested for DUI, blowing my chances of escaping Mom and Dad’s house and being stuck in Springfield forever, ending up with someone like Terrence, taking my young kids to his funeral then turning to drugs myself.

Without warning, Q jumped out of car and sprinted into the bakery.

“Damn, it smell like weed in here.” Q said, returning to the car.

We sat in silence eating the best Boston Crème’s we’d had in our entire lives.

Someone had the brilliant idea to take the car to the U-Wash car wash on Limestone St., as if cleaning the outside would fix the smoke smell inside. At the U-Wash there were four bays with spray nozzles suspended from the ceiling and brushes that filled with soap. I took the quarters that Mom and Dad insisted I keep stashed in the ashtray, (in case I needed to make a hundred phone calls?) and spent what felt like twenty minutes dropping them and picking them up from the soapy concrete before inserting enough to make the machine come to life.

I flipped the switch to soap and spray, to activate the handheld water gun. Out shot a powerful mix of bubble gum pink soap and high pressure water.

I saturated the front and top of the car, then moved to the sides. Suddenly, snapping from her daze, Saleema screamed and threw up her hands as her wet hair blew backward. Q howled with laughter and slipped in the soap climbing out of the backseat. They were soaked. The vinyl seats and brown carpet were drenched. No one had remembered to roll up the windows and I was spraying Saleema in the face and pouring water directly into the car.

If Mom and Dad knew, they never said, but the next day the car was gone along with all the freedom and independence that came with it. My world became small again.

I was watching Little House on the Prairie with Mom and Dad one night when we heard the gunshots that ended TonyPow’s life on the front porch of the house down the street.

No one was charged, but we had our suspicion. After that, Terrence was in charge, until he crashed the LeBaron head on into a tree one day, running from the police.

Now, thirty years later, I still don’t know what happened to that car and I never smoked weed again.

Until college.

Allegra is a girl-mom, a wife, a lawyer by training and a story-teller by nature.  She writes and reads mostly fiction and is now writing a memoir on the causes and cure for the generational curses of poverty, physical and sexual abuse and addiction.  Allegra lives in the bucolic Upper Catskill region of New York state.