All Put Together with Alligator Leather: Remembering a Mustang Family

The first car I ever drove was a '66 Mustang. Cherry red with a black hardtop, it had belonged to Nana, my mother's mother. Nana, my mother told me, passed on the car on her death bed. "Take it," she told my mother, "I want the boys to be able to drive it." I had already heard that story countless times before that day when my mother handed me the keys and asked if I wanted to take a drive.

We still lived Greenbrae, California then, near the cul-de-sac of a dead end street high in the hills. The hill itself was steep -- at age 15 or 16, I clocked myself pushing 50 miles an hour screaming down its main artery on my mountain bike -- but our lane rose and fell more slowly. Still, the roads in those hills meandered, hugging the hillside around blind turns and through stretches too narrow to let a car pass without someone pulling over. Usually when someone learns to drive, I've gathered, their parent hands the keys over in a parking lot with little traffic, not on some road that, even relatively free of traffic, still provided a bit of a challenge. My brother was in the car when my mom handed me the keys. I didn't know whether I could say no, so I didn't. I didn't have my learner's permit yet, but I was going to drive. When I decided to turn around, the nuances of the three-point turn eluded me, and I found myself stuck between the hillside and a wall. My mother had to get out and extricate the car. That was the last time I drove for a while.

Maybe the first drive is always shot through with such anxiety, but this one, I knew even then, had that other meaning. I was driving the Mustang, Nana's car, carrying on the legacy. When Nana had been alive, someone had stolen the Mustang. Nana filed a police report, of course, like you do when a car is stolen, but received little help from the SFPD. Instead, a few weeks later, she saw the car in the street in another neighborhood. She had the keys in her purse, so she opened the door and started the engine: she called the police later to tell them that she'd gotten her car back, and not to arrest her if they found her in it.

The red Mustang wasn't Nana's first. I remember a white one before that (which must have been pretty early, because Nana died when I was eight or so) and I have reason to believe that the white one wasn't the first, either. Her affinity for Mustangs was just another aspect of the woman, like her Francophile affectations, or her belief in instilling manners in her grandchildren -- they all seemed of a piece, and it wasn't until a good deal later that I started to realize that, while the Mustang was a cool car, it was hardly obscure. It was, indeed, a touchstone of postwar American auto making, as this Times piece on its recently deceased creator, Donald Frey, makes clear.

I'd thought the Mustang was a sports car, growing up, but I suppose that wasn't an accurate description. Sure, there was V-6 under the hood of that '66, but I think the real sports cars by then had eight cylinders, and when you opened the hood, you'd see just how much empty space was in there. The Mustang was a triumph of marketing and, yes, design, because it was, I'll grant, a beautiful body, even if the chassis was less thoroughbred than burro. It all looked great, of course, but it didn't exactly haul, even when you wanted it to. But, I gather, it still drove right into the American mind. There was that episode of The Wonder Years when, for a brief moment, it looks like the family is going to buy a Mustang and Handel's Messiah, I think, plays, and while, of course, the Wonder Years was a retrospective view of an era, it told me as much as I needed to know as a kid in the late 80s: we remembered the Mustang as a cool car. And it was.

Even before I drove the Mustang, when it was still my mother's car, I knew it was cool. There was that night when my mother took me to dinner at that restaurant in some San Francisco Victorian with chamber musicians on one level. I couldn't drive yet, but when we pulled up in front, I got out and, as if rehearsed, walked around the car and opened the door for my mother, before handing it off to the valet. What was I, 12 years old? I wore a suit, probably purchased at Young Man's Fancy, my mother looking it over, her mother's memory hanging over both of us. Everyone at the restaurant that night seemed quite impressed with my behavior. There was a prix fixe menu, and I recall eating smoked salmon and escargot, and, following the bread course, the waiter efficiently produced a crumb scraper to clear the linen's surface. On the way out, I may even have placed my jacket over my mother's shoulders. She was trying to teach me something that night, as Nana had tried at our fancy lunches, but I'm not sure whether I ever figured out exactly what it was.

Eventually, I did get that license, and, somehow, for a while, the Mustang was mine. It probably wasn't the best car for a 16 year old to drive, a 16 year old who, like all the others, had poor impulse control and a propensity for risk taking, but I drove it all the same. The windows were slow to defrost, especially when multiple teenagers were talking and yelling inside, and there were real mechanical problems, too, problems mechanics could never quite diagnose. It constantly drained transmission fluid, but as the level got lower, the power steering would begin to give out, sometimes mid-turn, causing me to place both hands on the wheel, tugging it, hoping to make the car track the line around the curve, until I could pull it over and refill it. Years later, I asked a mechanic and Mustang hobbyist about that problem, but he told me there was absolutely no reason that the transmission fluid should have affected the steering. "It's likely," he speculated, "that somebody along the line fucked up and patched one line into the other or something, and that's why nobody can figure it out." Perhaps he was right. That made as much sense as anything else. By then, though, I didn't have the car anymore.

The women who loved my mother bought Mustangs, too. They all worshiped her -- she was always the center, the most important one -- and I figure the cars were a way of deferring to her taste. One purchased a '67 mustang, in an aquamarine hue. That one was a convertible. Even though I liked riding in that one with the top down, it just wasn't as sexy as the '66 with the hardtop. Mustangs are supposed to be red; they are for me, at least, since the first one I truly came to know was red. (The one in Bullitt wasn't red. I know. Still, you'll never convince me they're not supposed to be red. Like Corvettes. Or Ferraris.) Or there was that one another partner got, the V-8 1994 model, with a five speed manual transmission. '94 was the first year Ford revamped the Mustang after those boxy 80s models, adding curves and removing nearly all of the corners. It was a fun car, not the least for what was under the hood, but it wasn't driving a classic, not by a long shot. But it was red, the same red as the '66, so that was something.

But it was still that first Mustang, the red '66 hardtop that will forever remain, for me, the real Mustang, both in my family and the larger world. Nana had passed it on to my mother, and I always thought that it was in that driver's seat that my mother most felt herself growing into her own mother. They both had terribly bony hands, Nana and my mother, skin just barely stretched around their frame, and my mother later told somebody else, when she seemed to have forgotten that I was with her, that, driving down Lincoln Boulevard from the Golden Gate Bridge, Baker Beach and the Pacific Ocean shimmering to our right, she glanced at her hands on the steering wheel and, for a moment, thought she saw her mother's hands. After hearing that, I paid more attention to my mother's hands, especially when they rested on the steering wheel's black leatherette. They did look like Nana's, or at least they became what I remembered Nana's hands looking like.

Though I did get to drive the Mustang, my brother did not. He was in the car with me, I think, when, in the rain, turning off of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the car fishtailed. For all I can remember, perhaps it was one of those times when the steering began to give out, too, though, more likely, it was just my inability to handle the car in that kind of condition, a mixture of gravel and water and youth that conspired to wrench control of the car from me. I turned the wheel one way and then another, and the car continued to slide. It came to a rest when the left front made contact with a Jersey barrier, and the nose crumpled in on itself. I was lucky. I wasn't hurt, and the car still drove -- all that empty space under the hood meant that no vital components were damaged. Only the looks were compromised. But in the case of a Mustang, perhaps the looks are the worst things to lose.

A few months later, Mom sold the car. She took out a classified ad and a hobbyist and his son came to take a look at it. They'd restore it, he told my mother, they'd get it looking good again. That assurance and $500 was all she needed. They drove it away that afternoon, down the winding road that I'd first driven on. In a few months, Mom bought a deep green 1970s BMW 2002, a great little car that, to its credit, always looked like it belonged in Europe and not the US. I liked that car too. But it would never live in my dreams quite like that red one. Before that crash, I'd dreamed that, one day, my child would drive it, that I'd tell him or her about Nana -- my mother, in those dreams, would of course still be alive, and, in deference to her family traditions, would be Nana to my child -- and how the car would live in our family, and how he or she should feel lucky to know that Nana would have been so, so proud of them, if only she could see them.