| The Blue Chevy
An Essay by Andrew D. Cohen Just before my tenth birthday, when he still seemed as unyielding and inescapable as Time itself, my father decided to buy a car. This was no small matter; my father had always insisted that only an idiot would own a car in New York City, where garages are expensive, street parking impossible, and public transportation some of the best in the world. “What do I need a car for?” he’d say. “The whole reason people live here is because you don’t need a car.” But my siblings and I were getting bigger, and the cars we rented every couple of weeks to visit my grandparents in Jersey were getting smaller and more expensive. So one spring morning my father did the unthinkable: he changed his mind.
This shift generated a great commotion in our rent-controlled apartment where all that ever seemed to change were the patterns of the cracks on the ceilings and the volume of my father’s tirades. Like GIs on furlough, my siblings and I began trilling with ideas. “I think we should get a Porsche 911,” said my older brother, fifteen, and a year from getting his license. “We want a Mercedes,” shouted my little sister and I, whose best friend’s parents owned one. “Don’t be silly,” said my mother, the daughter of a proud Polish butcher who bought a new Lincoln every few years. “We’re not buying a German car. But a Town Car would be nice.” A few weeks later we found ourselves sitting in a red-white-and-blue-flag-draped Chevrolet dealership in the Bronx.
This was 1981. Leonid Brezhnev was still running the Kremlin, Ronald Reagan was recovering from bullet wounds, and my grandparents were relatively healthy. That year, Chevrolet, the best-selling marque of the world’s largest automobile manufacturer, maintained its grip on the domestic market with the help of its top-selling, top-of-the-line Caprice Classic, a roomy, four-door sedan with a 229 V-6 Engine, three-speed automatic transmission, power steering, power breaks, automatic locks, and an electric clock. Smaller, more fuel-efficient than earlier models, but big enough to appeal to a middle class that still loved big, rear-drive cars, the Caprice was “a Cadillac at Chevy prices,” or, as Chevrolet put it, “a symbol of success, but not of excess.” And for my father, who’d spent his childhood doing damage control for his debt-ridden, alcoholic father; who’d bulled his way up from a raucous Brooklyn street corner to an elegant corner office of a Wall Street law firm; who wore his suits until they were shapeless and glue-gunned the heels of his old sneakers rather than buy new ones; for my father, it was perfect.
For my siblings and me, on the other hand, that car—its gruff, growling engine, its gargantuan frame and gloomy interior—was a bitter disappointment made
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