WOW

We were these three high school yo-yos cruising along a county road one boring Sunday afternoon in my friend Bill's '52 Chevy coupe, a car that didn't interest girls or even us too much because, among other shortcomings, it only had six cylinders, though it could go nearly 100, which, because of slackened minds, blue balls, and Chuck Berry playing "School Days" on station WOW's Top Twenty, was how fast we were going, when, in the words of news items about traffic fatalities, the driver lost control, despite what I now remember as a road straight and flat as a runway. Oh well. So there we were: sitting quietly on the beltless bench seats as the car whipped around like the Tilt-A-Whirl at Playland Park, spinning toward the ditch on our right, closer and closer for one of those moments expansive enough to contain that well-known highlight film of your life. But nobody seemed to be reviewing his. Instead, we glanced at one another, like Beaver and Wally and Lumpy trying to be polite by letting someone else be the first to rise from the table or like the 3 guests on the TV quiz show To Tell The Truth, when they would try to tease the audience after host Bud Collier concluded the game by saying, "And now, will the real Ira Gershwin please stand up," with each of us remaining seated in the still-spinning Chevy, waiting to see how this episode of his life would turn out, whether the real him would stand up and not just a transparent image like Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys got stuck with when they died in the car wreck at the beginning of Topper, each of us occasionally glancing out his own TV -sized window at what looked like one of those scenes where Peter Gunn's been slipped a Micky and they're trying to use the camera to show how it feels – till, at last, the car, minus a tire, the muffler, and two kick-ass '55 Olds spinner hubcaps, gouged to a stop at the edge of the road and, feeling both like transparent images and real high school yo-yos, we stepped out and walked around it, the front end of which slumped like Mr. Gillespie did when we didn't practically shit our pants during the gory film he showed us in driver's ed. "Wow," we said, cocking our heads and hooking our thumbs in the pockets of our Levi's like the transparent image of that coolest of traffic fatalities, James Dean. "Man."