It Wasn't My Car

I sort of accidentally married a guy who turned out to be a lot like my father. In the mid 1970's I moved to Austin, Texas after my first divorce. I didn't have a car so my dad let me borrow one of his. Now that he was single he had a little yellow TR-6 and a dark purple Jaguar XKE, aka the penis-mobile. I usually drove the Triumph. I don't know if my future mistake noticed me or the car first, but together we were exactly the package that a young guy, who thought just like my father, couldn't resist. I was too innocent/stupid to recognize that pretty much everything this guy told me about himself was a lie. He was so besotted with the cars that he didn't notice that, while I thought they were pretty cars, to me they were just a way to get from here to there. If I had to buy into "cars as symbols", it would be closer to the truth to say they symbolized my father's juvenile attempt to attract young Bond Girls to drink his fine wine, that he wanted to identify, sage-like, by vintage, with a mere whiff of its bouquet and to fuck without having to get to know them, just like Heff and James Bond.

One of these handsome men is my father.