Here is the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen on television: A woman is seen standing next to her son, who towers over her and looks to be somewhere between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six.
“Liberty Mutual stood by us when this guy had a flat tire in the middle of the night,” she announces, whereupon said son grimaces sheepishly—as one might expect of someone who’d been run in by the cops for trafficking in stolen firearms.
Cut to a re-enactment of the infamous “Night of the Flat Tire.”
“Is this a lug wrench?” asks the befuddled teen as he holds up an unidentified object.
“No, stupid! That’s your cell phone. The object you’re holding against your ear is a lug wrench.” That’s me, screaming at my television set.
Back when I was a teen we didn’t have cell phones, and even if we did, we surely wouldn’t phone home for parental advice. Such a call would run the risk of alerting our parents to our whereabouts—consequences of which information would surely prove to be far graver than just a flat tire. So what we did instead of calling for help was, we just changed the tire. No big deal, considering how many times tires used to go flat in the Fifties.
At the time, I was driving a 1950 Mercury similar to the ’51 that James Dean drove in “Rebel Without A Cause.” The premise of that movie is that teenagers are smarter than their parents—or, at the very least, not pussies like the apron-wearing, ineffectual father portrayed by Jim Backus. The last thing any teenage rebel in the Fifties would ever want to do is share information regarding his nocturnal activities with a parent, and I say this even though of the three Menzies brothers, I was always thought to be the “good” one. My brother Chuck, for instance, would routinely come home from a date with a drive-in speaker dangling from one car door handle and a bloody hook from the other.
Shortly after I inherited that car, the reverse gear gave out. Did I alert Mommy and Daddy? I did not. No, I just took care never to park diagonally. I also learned to think ahead and make sure I never ended up in a situation where I might have to back away—say, for example, a scenic overlook. Thanks to a faulty transmission, I never got a girl in trouble; that is, unless you’re of the opinion that a young girl struggling to push a clunker away from the edge of a precipice in the middle of the night is in some kind of trouble.
