Recorded Books Inc. - Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years Of Vehicular Hell-Bending, Celebrating America The Way Its Supposed To Be? With An Oi

Car journalism is not a solitary artistic endeavor. Obviously. You need a car to write about cars. And if that car is going to be more than four inches long and do something beside roll across the playroom floor for the amusement of my five-year-old son, Buster, then it has to be made by people other than me. Nor is there much thats artistic about car journalism. Cars are a broad subject with all sorts of sociological, political, and even aesthetic ramifications. But a car is still a car. And there are only so many ways to say some lunk did something in a clunker. Thus there is a certain strain upon the language in car journalism. Take the accelerator just for instance. This must be pressed hundreds of times in even a cursory test of a car. As a result, to press the accelerator becomes:

Put the pedal to the metal

Push the go-fast pump

Lead foot it

Slip it the big shoe

Give it the boot

Give it some Welly

Stand on it

Crank it up

Ramp it up

Gin it up

Wind the speedometer the tach the gears

Wind it up like a Hong Kong wristwatch

Drop the bottle and grab the throttle

Floor it

And so forth. For this I apologize to the reader. And to the extent that such euphuistic rodomontade does not drive you crazy in the following pages, credit must be given to car journalisms editors. Credit must also be given to fellow car journalists, car jockeys, and car nuts who can be counted upon for genuinely clever turns of phrase, which I can be counted on to swipe.

For some reason automobiles attract good people, the kind of people with whom youd gladly go on road trips. And thats the secret right there. You need a car to go on a road trip, and the kind of people you wouldnt take on a road trip arent in the car.

Over the past thirty-odd years Ive had the pleasure of going on road trips with all sorts of good people. Many are named in the text and more are named below. But I have neither the space nor the memory left to list them all. My apologies to anyone whom Ive forgotten. I promise to pick you up if the Obama administration reduces you to hitchhiking on your road trips.

At Car and Driver and Automobile there variously are and were David E. Davis Jr., Jeannie Davis, Jim Williams, Brock Yates, Bruce McCall, Humphrey Sutton, William Jeans, Don Sherman, Patrick Bedard, Don Coulter, Michael Jordan, Mike Knepper, John Phillips, Kathy Hoy, Jean Lindamood/Jennings, Csaba Csere, Rich Ceppos, Aaron Kiley, Larry Griffin, Philip Llewellin, Harriet Stemberger, Trant Jarman, Greg Jarem, Mark Gilles, and Bill Neale. They can drive like crazy, every one of them.

At Esquire there were Terry McDonell and David Hirshey, the last two Esquire editors worthy of having the publication attach itself to their names.

And at Forbes FYI there was the inimitable Christopher Buckley who founded FYI because his fathers publication, National Review, did not devote adequate space to good food, good drink, good cars, and high living. Thus the question was raised, What the hell are conservatives conserving? At FYI Christopher had, fittingly for a conservative, two right hands: Patrick Cooke and Thomas Jackson. Let me shake (not stir) them both.

This book is a mixture of old things and new, not to say a mishmash. Mostly its a collection of car journalism from 1977 to the present, a sort of social history with all the social science crap left out. Ive reworked many of the pieces because the writinghow to put this gently to myself?sucked. I may not have become a better writer over the years but Ive become a less bumptious and annoying one, I think. Also many of the original articles dealt at length with then-current minutiae that now has to be explained or, better, deleted. A couple manuscripts (especially The Rolling Organ Donors Motorcycle Club) were so bad that my old tear sheets served as little more than aide-mmoirs for the present chapters.

Anyway, to give the publishing history that is required by copyright law or publishers custom or some damn thing, the aforementioned motorcycle saga, the journal of a trip across America in a 1956 Buick, the story of Rent-A-Wreck, the tale of an off-road drive from Canada to Mexico, my record of discovering Jeep worship in the Philippines, the log of my trudge to Denver in a station wagon full of children, and the first two parts of the Baja memoirs were originally published in Car and Driver.

The third and most disaster-filled saga of the Baja ran in Esquire about the time that Terry McDonell and David Hirshey were getting out of there. The whole article is about what a godforsaken, star-crossed hell the Baja is, and some idiot from the Esquire promotion department called to ask me if I could write a sidebar about wonderful places to stay and fun things to do there.

The piece on NASCAR appeared in Rolling Stone, also under the editorship of Terry McDonell.

Automobile published the essays about buying a family car and about traveling across India in a Disco II.

Forbes FYI printed the description of the California Mille where the Fangio Chevy was codriven by Fred Schroeder, who was the worlds bravest investment banker until collateralized debt obligations and credit swaps came around and showed that other bankers were more foolhardy than he. The California Mille is the brainchild of the estimable Martin Swig, whose car nut credentials can be summed up in the following anecdote: I was looking for the proper model designation of the Tatra T87, the Czech car from which Ferdinand Porsche stole the Volkswagen design. The Tatra looks like an over-scale VW Bug but has a big metal fin on the back, earning it the nickname Land Squid. I called Martin, described the Land Squid, and he said, I own one.

FYI also underwrote my Kyrgyzstan horseback ride where I discovered the six-wheel-drive Soviet Zil truck.

My obnoxious defense of SUV obnoxiousness was written for the London Sunday Times, and given the number of times the MG I owned in college broke down, the Brits had it coming.

And my proposal for a linear National Park went off into the ether of some Webzine called Winding Road that never paid me. The Internet in a nutshell.

I confess to a bit of self-plagiarism in this volume. The chapter about my trip across India was, in part, previously anthologized in The CEO of the Sofa. Ive re-reprinted it because I wrote two versions, one for Rolling Stone emphasizing culture, politics, and economics in India and one for Automobile emphasizing the Land Rover Discovery II, out the window of which I was seeing the culture, politics, and economics of India. In CEO I mainly used the Rolling Stone article. Here Ive combined both and written more about the driving. The driving was gruesome. If it bleeds, it leads, is always a wise rule in journalism. Another reason for giving India a second chance between book covers was that The CEO of the Sofaan assortment of light and frivolous sketches from the happy-go-lucky Clinton erahad a publication date of 9/10/01.

I also palmed an item from Republican Party Reptile. Its an instructional tract called How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink. I couldnt collect my automotive writing and not include this. Plus Ive wanted an opportunity to respond to my youthful ravings ever since I turned fifty and my drug of choice became blood pressure medicine.

Speaking of age, my friends seem to be getting older. I dont know whats the matter with them. A number of the good people mentioned in this book have passed on the double yellow line of lifespans highway. Most notably the car world feels the loss of Jim Williams, Humphrey Sutton, Trant Jarman, and Bill Neale. Fortunately they were all careful to live so as to never miss a drink, a romance, or a fast drive. Every pleasure that you forego on Earth is a pleasure you wont get in heaven.