Part 1: Chapters 3 & 4
It’s the next day, and Dennis picks Arnie up at his house. Arnie fills Dennis in on what went on with his parents after Dennis left the night before. Arnie played hardball with Regina and Michael, threatening to take vocational art classes his senior year instead of the college courses his parents want. At that, his parents backed off. Dennis is shocked at his friend's newfound ruthlessness.
After work, Dennis takes Arnie to LeBay’s to finish their transaction. While Arne and LeBay disappear into the house, Dennis steps into the garage to examine Christine. She is, as he feared, a mess. Things change, however, when he slides into her front seat and places his hands on the steering wheel. Somehow, the view through her cracked windshield shifts and what Dennis sees frightens him.
As Arnie drives Christine out of the garage and Dennis follows in his own car, Dennis gets one last look at LeBay. To his surprise, the old man is crying like someone over a lost love. Which, in a way, may be closer to the truth than Dennis realizes...
Before we really get started on the nitty and/or gritty of today’s post, I want to circle back to something that I didn’t quite get around to last time out.
Namely: just where in the heck are we? This ain’t your grandaddy’s King Country — you know… small-town New England, coastal Maine, people eatin’ lahbstah rolls, etc. Just where is “Libertyville”?
As stated yesterday, one of the dead-icatees (heh-heh-heh!) of Christine is the city of Pittsburgh. King and Romero had just finished their first collaboration — 1982’s homage to the horror comics of their youths, Creepshow. King was a big fan of Romero’s work, even making an appearance (with his wife, Tabitha) in Knightriders (1981). So in a way, it makes sense for King to set the action of his novel in Pittsburgh as a nod to his friend.
Libertyville, as Dennis states in Chapter Two:
“…is quiet and residential. It isn't ritzy, like the neighboring suburb of Fox Chapel (where most of the homes are estates like the ones you used to see every week in Columbo), but it isn't like Monroeville, either, with its miles of malls, discount tire warehouses, and dirty book emporiums. There isn't any heavy industry; it's mostly a bedroom community for the nearby University. Not ritzy, but sort of brainy, at least.” (16-17)
Fox Chapel and Monroeville are actual towns respectively nine miles to the northeast and fourteen miles east of Pittsburgh. They are separated by five miles (as the crow flies) and the Allegheny River. In between them is the township of Penn Hills. (Marked in red in the above map.) I like to think that, for all intents and purposes, Penn Hills is Libertyville.
Now that we’ve set the scene a little better, let’s move on to today’s reading…
The radio plays a big part in the lives of Dennis, Arnie, and their friends. It played a big part in my own teenaged life in the Pittsburgh area in the 1980s. Radio stations were like clubhouses. Your identity as a teenager was made up of a blend of ingredients that could include your clothes, your hairstyle, what part of town you lived in, the people you ran with, and what radio station you listened to.
There was a radio station for just about every personality type you can think of. Teenyboppers listened to all the Top 40 hits on B-94 (WBZZ-FM). At the far right of the FM dial was WAMO-106, which played soul, R&B, and early hip-hop. WDVE — 102.5 FM — took care of all your hard rock and classic rock needs. Old people listened to jazz on WDUQ, classical music on WQED, and news on the world’s first commercially licensed radio station, KDKA (1020 AM). My father — like Arnie will in chapters to come — listened exclusively to oldies on 3WS (WWSW). And for two glorious years, those of us whose tastes tended towards weirder fare could tune into WXXP for “alternative” music. (I remember hearing “TV Party” by Black Flag on XXP and being totally confused and enthralled.)
As Dennis says while he and Arnie make their way to LeBay’s,
“‘Dirty White Boy’ gave way to ‘Jukebox Hero’ by Foreigner. It was Friday afternoon, and the Block Party Weekend had just started on FM-104. When I look back on that year, my senior year, it seems that I could measure it out in blocks of rock…” (28)
In Chapter Four, we get our first taste of the horror to come. When Dennis sits in Christine and looks out that window, he is magically transported back in time to the 1950s:
“[F]or just a moment it seemed that everything changed. That ugly snarl of cracks in the windshield was gone — or seemed to be. The little swatch of LeBay’s lawn that I could see was not yellowed, balding, and crabgrassy but a dark, rich, newly cut green. The sidewalk beyond it was freshly cemented, not a crack in sight. I saw (or thought I did, or dreamed I did) a ’57 Cadillac motor by out front. That GM high-stepper was a dark minty green, not a speck of rust on her, big gangster whitewall tire, and hubcaps as deeply reflective as mirrors. A Cadillac the size of a boat, and why not? Gas was almost as cheap as tap-water.” (33)
I’ve stated before that part of what Christine is about is the Conservative Revolution in American culture and politics in the 1970s and 1980s. In the build-up to the 1984 elections that would see Ronald Reagan returned to the Oval Office for another four years, his campaign aired one of the most famous political ads on television:
“It’s morning again in America,” states the narrator calmly (to the point of somnolence), which suggests that there was a night and that before that night there was a previous morning. For Conservative America in the 1980s, the 1960s was a long national nightmare from which the country had finally awoken. In his book Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics, Daniel Marcus notes that the 1950s existed in the American mind “as an era of stable social relations, domestic property, limited government, and American economic and military leadership” (9). These values are contrasted against those of the 1960s, which conservatives sought to associate with “social chaos, a turn against patriotism, and wasteful government spending” (9). Filled to bursting as they were with myriad social upheavals and violent rebellions, the 1960s were considered by Reagan and his fellow conservatives to be the turbulent event that interrupted the more placid and secure life of that earlier era. In order to repair the rift the events of the 1960s caused in the social fabric, in order to return the nation to a feeling of strength and security, conservatives employed the 1950s in their speeches as a symbol of a national golden age when all was right with the world. The 1960s were the dark night of the nation’s soul, but not worry — it’s morning (i.e. the 1950s) again, folks!
(It’s not for nothing that John Carpenter placed that phrase in the mouth of the aliens in his 1988 film They Live.)
What Dennis sees through Christine’s windshield can be considered “morning again in Libertyville.” At this moment, Christine is a spent force, a rusting derelict, but beneath its ruins is the promise of new life. What Dennis (and the reader) will discover is that beneath that renewed life is the stench of death.
Dennis mentions something else when he climbs inside Christine:
“I looked at that amazing speedometer again, that speedometer which was calibrated not to 70 or 80 but all the way up to 120 miles an hour. No kilometers in little red numbers underneath; when this babe had rolled off the assembly line, the idea of going metric had yet to occur to anyone in Washington. No big red 55 on the speedometer, either. Back then, gas went for 29.9 a gallon, maybe less if a price-war happened to be goin on in your town. The Arab oil-embargoes and the double-nickel speed limit had still been fifteen years away.” (32-33)(emphasis mine)
The what now?
The first of two gas shortages in the 1970s occurred in the early 1970s due to both the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War (both between Egypt and Israel). After learning that the Soviet Union was aiding Egypt, President Richard Nixon requested $2.2 billion to support Israel. OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) said, “Mmmmm… I don’t think so!” They cut their production of oil and placed an embargo on exports to the United States. (The second gas shortage — and the one I remember — happened in 1979 as a result of the Iranian Revolution.)
As usual, the average American’s reaction to a goods shortage was composed and reasoned — NOT! Panic took hold, and drivers tried to buy as much gas as they could in the same way they hoard milk and toilet paper during a blizzard. Gas stations responded by only selling gas to their “regular” customers, selling at specific times of day, or by instituting an “odd-even” rationing system: if the last digit of a car’s license plate was odd, it could only fill up on odd-numbered days and vice-versa. The fear that America could grind to a halt due to lack of petroleum was very, very real.
The National Maximum Speed Limit was part of President Richard Nixon’s response to the 1973 OAPEC oil embargo. By curtailing speeds to 55 mph for all passenger vehicles, it was hoped that the United States could better weather the gas shortage storm. The Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act (which included the National Maximum Speed Limit) was signed into law by Nixon on January 2, 1974. The maximum speed was bumped up to 65 mph in 1987 before being totally repealed in 1995.
The jury is still out over how much of an impact the national speed limit had on fuel conservation and road safety, but I think it was necessary to our country’s rock history. I mean, without it what would Sammy Hagar have had to moan about?
A few quickies before we pull into the local motor-inn parking lot and call it a night…
I won’t say that I call bullshit on Dennis having had a cat named Captain Beefheart when he was nine years old, but… c’mon. The good Captain was not a household name back then. Was he? Or is this just the author revealing himself in the story? I don’t know. I just can’t imagine Dennis and his parents sitting around listening to Trout Mask Replica.
I don’t know what kind of Raleigh bicycle the kid who yelled “Put it in the trash-master, mister!” to Arnie was riding, but I hope to heck that it had a banana seat. That was — and is — the only way to roll.
Not a bad bit of motorvating today, Blog-o-weeners, but we got miles to go yet. For tomorrow’s trip I need you to read Part 1: Chapters 5, 6, & 7. We’re headed to the local do-it-yourself garage to meet another player in our story, Will Darnell. I think you’ll like him. He’s sort of like Santa Claus, if ol’ St. Nick was a cigar-chomping low-level mobster who hated children.
Okay…okay… maybe I’m not the best judge of character, but just keep reading, because…
