Dying To Be Cool

What exactly does it mean to be cool? Though difficult to define, you know it when you see it. Guns are cool. So was Steve McQueen. You get kind of a gestalt about such stuff.

Some of us spend our entire lives striving mightily to be cool yet fail quite to get there. However, many’s the young man’s unscheduled trip across the river Styx ’twas precipitated by a poorly reasoned effort to be cool.

The Perfect Day

It was one of those torrid Mississippi summer afternoons when the sun burned like a furnace and the air was so humid you could rip off a chunk and gnaw it. School was out; I had not a care in the world.

In my day you got your driver’s license at 15. I wouldn’t trust today’s 15-year-old males unsupervised with gum, much less an automobile. However, this was a different time.

While I have indeed never been mistaken for cool, my dad did see to it I rolled in a cool car. A young man’s ride is so much more than transportation. It is style, personality, character and status all packaged up on four spinning wheels. My car was pure unfiltered awesome.

The year was 1981 and the car was a 1970 Buick Skylark convertible. The sole ragtop in my small Mississippi Delta community, it was metallic blue and immensely, nay ludicrously, powerful. I would frequently go sit in the back seat and read science fiction tomes with the top down while parked in the driveway. As I said, being cool was more a journey than a destination with me.

On this particular day I was sporting cheap, mirrored aviator shades while tearing down a preternaturally straight stretch of Lee Drive, so named for the esteemed General. Like all adolescent males I was young, bulletproof and immortal. Harm could never befall me.

The Power Of Stupid

Overcome by the moment, I pushed myself up such that I was sitting atop the headrest. A gangly, long-legged lad, I manipulated the accelerator with my right great toe and kept the wheel nominally managed with my fingertips. My face was fully in the slipstream above the windshield.

Seatbelts were not the religious sacraments they are today, so mine were tucked down out of the way behind the seat so as not to interfere with my signature dynamic entry into the vehicle — vaulting over the door to land gracefully in the driver’s seat, ready to rock. During such a maneuver, one does not desire the painful inconvenience of seatbelt buckles. As a result, I perched atop my charging metallic blue steed, restrained not one whit.

My nemesis lurked anonymously within the tall Johnson grass that lined the rural road, happily munching his mid-afternoon snack. Whether driven by boredom, hunger, or love will never now be known, but he did for some reason then spontaneously take flight. Spreading his broad green wings, this massive 4″ Delta grasshopper flexed his powerful legs and leapt into the ether.

I perceived a scant flurry in the periphery of my vision and my entire world exploded. The gargantuan insect caught me squarely in the forehead and detonated like an antitank grenade, knocking me bodily back into the rear seat and leaving my legs draped limply astride the headrest. At this point my trusty Skylark was still making some 70 miles per hour, though now charging randomly sans pilot.

I clawed violently back over the seat and dropped in behind the steering wheel again, seizing the appendage in an involuntary rictus. By some miracle throughout it all the car remained within the two white lines of its own accord. No doubt the vehicle was guided solely by my guardian angel, himself a both overworked and underappreciated spook.

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