Motorhead

Motorhead

I haven’t owned that many cars in my life, until recently, when I’ve been using them up at a rate of about one a year. None of the unfortunate circumstances leading to this are really my fault, but they all seem to end up with my latest Mazda 3 getting written off by the insurance company.

My first car (the first I actually owned, rather than “borrowed”) was a 1961 Ford Corttina I bought in 1975. I had no license, no insurance, and I didn’t really know how to drive, but Quebec was kind of lawless in the 70s, none of those things really mattered.

I paid $75 cash for the car, despite it’s advanced age and uncertain shocks. I put it in the local garage to have it made drivable and picked it up a week later. My friend was with me, driving wing in his ’69 Plymouth Valiant (the Valium) with the pushbutton automatic. He followed me up the hill to the family farm, and as I drove a little too exuberantly through the S-curve, watched me topple the Cortina into the ditch as the offside running gear collapsed.

I popped my head out of the now vertical door, and said “how’s that for parallel parking?”. I don’t know what happened to the Cortina. We left it there, and the next time we went by, it was gone.

Funny thing; that happened to an ancient snowmobile I co-owned once. My friend, the other owner and I, drove it down he hill to The Pub one snowbound night and left it in the parking lot for a night of drinking Cinquante in quarts and playing pool. When we stumbled out, we found the snowplow had been in to the parking lot, and buried the snowmobile under a huge drift.

We shrugged, bagged lifts home and waited for spring. The snow pile got bigger and bigger until March, and then started to shrink. It eventually disappeared completely, and, as if by magic, so had the snowmobile! We never found it.

My first car, the one I learned to drive on, was a 1967 Volvo 123GT called Greta. She belonged to oldest brother, who left her behind when he went off to college. I stayed in the area and , sort of, inherited Greta. Again, no license, no insurance, out-of-date Connecticut plates. Missing the battery and one front fender, too. But Greta moved like scalded snot. She was a rare model, a 2 door version of Volvo’s dependable 124, rounded and modest. She also had the GT package, fuel injected and the 2.0 litre motor. Greta was a sports car in hobo’s clothing. I used to drive her at 110 miles an hour down the hill on Stagecoach Road.

Without a battery, she had to be parked on hills and bumped into life. That worked most of the time, but I used to end up leaving her on roadsides around the county, and the local police would show up at the farm and ask me to pick her up. One time, bumping her nearly killed me, but that’s another story, entitled “In The Woods”.

I bought a white van, the kind clowns abduct children in, for a theatre I ran, and drove it from Toronto to Montreal, the day after I finally got my license. I was a regular hotshot driving on empty rural roads in Quebec, but getting out of Toronto was a comedy of terrors. The van had a broken leaf spring in the rear and it liked to hop around at high speeds.

The summer I ran that theatre, I honed my driving skills on my mothers Mazda GLC (which stood for Great Little Car), the model that eventually became the Protegé and then the Mazda3 as the company went through different ad agencies. It was small, tight, fast and, because my mother was cheap, it had no radio.

When I moved to Toronto, I borrowed cars for several years. A five litre Mustang with a Hearst on the floor and a Dodge Caravan (two diametrically opposed vehicles) were my whips. Then I bought my first house (the only one I’ve owned with a garage), and I decided I needed my own car.

My mother had moved on from the Mazda GLC to a Lada Cygnet (the model known as a Zhiguli in Russia). Once again, she was cheap, and I think a new Lada was less than $5000. She sold me her old one for $900, which was about $500 more than it was worth. In the business, they say the negotiations for a used Lada consist of asking "How much gas is in the tank?"

I loved that car. It came with a complete tool kit that included a plug-in 12 volt lamp to hang from the engine hood as you worked on it. It had windshield wipers on the headlights, the only car besides a Mercedes with that feature. The ignition was on the wrong side of the steering column, the heater was enormous and worked too well, the car had a power take-off through the rear bumper so it could pull a combine harvester or run a sawmill.

The transmission was heavy, and very solid, no mistaking first for third. I drove that Lada to Alabama one year for a vacation, where people had never seen one before, and it was a trusty, comfortable conveyance the whole way. I could see a nomadic Uzbeki family living nicely in a Zhiguli.

I liked it so much, I bought a newer one (still used), but a fancier trim level. Leather seats, the same tool kit, better heater and interior. It had a good 10 inches clearance; we used to go off roading in it.

When the second Lada wore out, I returned to Mazdas, and bought a 1990 Protegé. That lasted for five years until it started leaking gasoline from the tank. It got so I wouldn’t fill it past half full so the gas wouldn’t reach the hole. I had to stop smoking in the car. These were my peak earning years, and I actually bought myself a new car. A Protegé again. The build is so solid, the car so quick and responsive, they’re the best value on the small car market.

I did a research project where I rented a couple of luxury cars and took owners of other luxury cars out for “rolling focus groups”. One of the cars was a black BMW 325i convertible, a complete chick magnet, and I took it home a couple of nights. I stopped at the liquor store and the corner store on the way home and got propositioned both times. So, I understand why people drive Bimmers, but, in a direct comparison, my car was a better performance car and road handler than the rather leaky and wobbly BMW.

Here’s where the automotive slaughter begins. One fine July day, driving on a back street with a cat in a carrier in the front seat, I reached over to secure the door of the cage, which had come open, and rear-ended a dump truck. The cage flew open, the cat went out the open window like a scalded, well, cat, and the driver of the dump truck came around to see what happened. His license plate was bent. My front end was on it’s knees leaking vital fluids. My first write-off.

The insurance paid me enough to buy another Mazda. I found a used 2005 GT model, five years old, with just 16,000 km on it. This is like finding a 1963 Barbie in the box. It was the best car ever. The 2.3 litre motor, leather seats, roof, power everything, alloy wheels, low profile tires, black all over with tint. I finally had a real whip.

A winter later I wandered off a boulevard on an icy patch, t-boned a lamp post, rolled, and drove it home, dragging trim and dropping tinkling glass. Another write-off. The payout was less this time, it wasn’t a new car they were replacing, but I went up to the store that sells nothing but Mazda3s and bought the identical car. 2005, GT, 2.3 litre motor, leather, black.

A winter later (are you seeing a pattern here?) a huge tree branch fell on this Mazda3 and totaled it, Third write-off in as many years. Once again, the settlement just covered the cost another used 2005 Mazda3 GT (grey this time, I had run them out of black ones). I don’t park under that tree anymore. I don’t travel on icy roads. I don’t put cats in the front seat. I’m determined to keep this Mazda3 for at least 5 years, maybe 10. It’s one of the last generation of automobiles that doesn’t have a touchscreen, and that’s worth keeping.

If You Can Say It You Can Climb It

If You Can Say It You Can Climb It

Mt Popocatepetl hangs over the Mexican city of Cuernavaca like a towering cloud over a sunny walled garden. Popo has been an active volcano for thousands of years, and occasionally belched during the years I lived there in the 70s.

I was running an amateur theatre group for the local expat Arts Centre, and I was having fun. I knew all the Canadians and Americans and Britons in town, and most of them either appeared in our shows or attended them.

Cuernavaca was known as Cuauhnahuac when it was an Imperial Aztec resort town, and that is the name it carries in Malcolm Lowry’s seminal novel “Under The Volcano”, the volcano being Popo. Everyone in town had read the book, dined at the cafés mentioned in it, walked the parks and lived on the streets. In the book, the antihero, Geoffrey Firmin, the Honourary British Consul in Cuauhnahuac, spends the Day of the Dead (November 1) getting historically and monumentally drunk and ruining his already tattered life.

That was not my experience of Cuernavaca. It was a city full of lovely people with a beautiful climate and thousands of stories. One day in the Zocalo, while sitting at a café, I saw a black Mercedes go by with Henry Kissinger and the newly former Shah of Iran in the back seat. Joni Mitchell was in town recording her album Mingus. Ali McGraw and Dean Martin’s son, Dean Jr. filmed Players, a tennis-based bodice ripper, on the outskirts. As it turned out, I ended up escorting Ms McGraw around town for a few days, as she hated everyone on the film. 

One of the nicest ladies in my theatre group had been married to the CIA station chief in Chile when Allende was killed and the revolution put down. She used to talk of the Colonels: "They were such handsome men. And such good dancers. Especially Gustavo Leigh". Air General Gustavo Leigh was the one who invented dropping dissidents out of helicopters over the sea. Two old buddies who drank together in the Zocalo in the evening had been enemies all their lives. One was ex-OSS, dedicated to fighting communism, and the other was ex-Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War, dedicated to fighting for Marxism. My good friend, Capt John Yancey, USMC (Ret'd) was a decorated war hero whose face had been smashed by bullets in the Korean War. He owned a liquor store in Little Rock, and campaigned against Orval Faubus for integration. These were just a few of the interesting expats I knew.

I had lots of girlfriends, and there were always new ones coming into town to teach ESL as the ones I knew left, moving on down the continent along the Gringo Trail. There was Cathy, a guitarist who toured a very nice little one man Shakespeare show with me, playing ballads between me doing the chestnuts. There was Gayle, the Amazon, six and a half feet of beauty and boobs. There was Kathy, wiry, skinny, intense and furious in bed. There was a girl so blonde, with eyes so green, and a Danish accent so perfect, and a body so tastefully sculpted and curved that I’ve clean forgotten her name. Life was sweet.

My buddies were mostly Matt and Simon. Matt was from Texas and taught ESL. He wandered into an audition, and was amazed to find a fellow Dead Head in town running a theatre, of all things. He was solid, straightforward and my best friend. We shared our weed buys and our part-time girlfriends. He knew more about the seamy side of the country than I did, and his Spanish was faultless, unlike mine. He introduced me to Little Feat and the matchless voice of Nacha Guevara.

Simon was an austere Englishman, a remittance man if ever there was one. He was a commercial airline pilot. He had flown in Scotland for Caledonian Air, then he didn’t anymore. He never told me why. He was in Mexico trying to get a job with either of the national carriers, Aeromexico or Mexicana, but both airlines almost never hired non-nationals. He was in the process of getting his Mexican citizenship in the hope of filling this requirement. I got the sense that Simon had blotted his copybook so badly, there were few places that would hire him.  I’m not sure what Simon subsisted on but he had a little apartment where he lived alone and he dealt in that staple of the shadier side of expat society, selling Scotch Whisky in bond to mature at the distillery in the keg which you (ostensibly) own. Most places, it’s a racket, and I think Simon might have been drinking his inventory.

Simon, Matt and I decided we needed to get out of town and challenge ourselves. Popocatepetl is the second tallest mountain in Mexico, just less than 18,000 feet, and as tall as anything in North America. And, as a volcano, it wasn’t a technical climb, just a tiring one. Here was a challenge we could accept. We loaded into Simon’s Renault one morning and headed east from town into the foothills of the volcano. Our first stop was Tepoztlan, a unique Aztec village under the eaves of the mountain. Tepoztlan is a village where everyone still speaks Nahuatl, and the Spanish-speaking Mexicans from the Capital are the foreigners. Tepoztlan has been an important regional centre for more than 1000 years and is thought to be the birthplace, not only of the god Quetzalcoatl, but of Mezcal as well.

We stocked up on food at the market in front of the church on the town square. This church had broad steps like a pyramid leading up to the doors. No one ever went through the doors, the ceremonies (in Nahuatl) were all performed on the steps, and involved rites and icons that certainly weren’t Catholic. The steps and the door of the church were decorated with white cloth dolls the day we were there. Tepoztlan is the Brigadoon of Mexico, existing completely in another age. We climbed the stone stairway cut into a cleft in the cliff that hangs over the village and looked out from the platform of one of the most ancient temples in a country full of ancient temples. Below was the village, and off to the east was Popo, now filling our field of vision almost completely. There was an idle drift of vapour coming from the crater at the peak, and some clouds lingered on the flanks. There was snow on the crest. We wondered if the jackets and sweaters (my entire warm wardrobe) we had brought would be warm enough.

The rutted back road up the flanks of the volcano tested the suspension of Simon’s Renault, and we spent a lot of time walking along beside the car guiding Simon along the tops of the ruts. It was late afternoon by the time we got to the saddle between Popo and its sister volcano to the north, Ixtaccihuatl. The Paso de Cortés is a famous spot, for here it was that Cortés stood and looked down on the might of Mexico, the world’s largest metropolis, for the first time in 1519. We stocked up on bottled water and brandy, got some cold beers, had dinner and headed out of town to camp for the night. It was considerably colder than we had anticipated (the saddle lies at about 10,000 feet) and no one slept very well. We all suffered from altitude headaches.

This was just as well, because we were awake before dawn and ready to go. We packed our bags in the car and took just food for one day and lots of water (and our sweaters). There was a trailhead with a series of signs warning of dangers (cold, ice, landslides, eruptions) and the trail was already busy with hikers. From the saddle, the route up the mountain is basically a long spiral slog around the cone until the path gets to the brim of the crater. Because the path spiraled up the mountain, the pitch wasn’t too great, but it was much longer than the direct route.

After the first hour, we were exhausted, and we were barely one quarter turn around the cone. We paused, heaving for breath, and ate breakfast of fruit and hard-boiled eggs. We slogged on that way for 5 hours, getting to about the 16,000 foot mark. That was it. No mas. It was just after noon, and we had to get down the mountain and back to Cuernavaca. Besides, our tongues were sunburnt. This is far more serious than you might think. At 16,000 feet, the UV is toxic, and when you’re slogging up a mountain through crushed lava, your tongue hangs out. And when your tongue has third degree burns, you can’t talk or eat.

As anyone who has tried climbing up and down a Mesoamerican temple or a volcano knows, going down is actually more tiring then going up. On the way down, sun behind us so our tongues were no longer being toasted, I spotted something way down below the path, in the brush on the side of the mountain. It was round and bright safety orange. Simon and Matt, exhausted, and in a hurry to get home, implored me to leave it, but it was too enticing. Safety orange is meant to be seen.

I headed straight down the mountain towards the object, galloping through the loose scree. This was a much steeper descent than the path took and it got me to the tree line. When I arrived, I found a very expensive, very warm, very heavy duty Himalayan expedition down parka in stuff sack. Some serious mountaineer, not an amateur like us, had watched it bounce away down the mountain and decided it wasn’t worth his time retrieving it.

We got home late that night, sore and sunburned all over, but especially on our tongues and foreheads. We were crazy to allot one day to 8000 feet of vertical, to go as ill-equipped (I think I wore boat shoes), to have so little regard for our skins in the sun, and to have so little in the way of warm gear. After that trip, though, I had the warmest coat in Mexico. And, when I left the country later that year and returned to Montreal, to a winter that routinely challenged -30 degrees on the thermometer, I still had the warmest coat in the country. It saved youngest sister’s life one winter when she managed a Montreal restaurant and had to cash and close at 3 AM every night,  walking home in -40 degree weather.

I kept that coat for twenty five years, and finally let it go just a few years ago. The one little bit of the corner that had been exposed at the mouth of the stuff sack on the mountainside had faded so severely that it wore out, and the coat began to leak down, barely stemmed by duct tape. The coat got shabbier and shabbier, still safety orange and hard to miss in a crowd. It finally had to go.

Lessons learned. Don’t climb big mountains for a lark. Do get off the beaten path if you see something interesting, you never know what you’ll find.

Taxi From Hell

Taxi From Hell

This is one of my Mexico stories. I was living in Cuernavaca, a pleasant resort town south of the volcanoes that ring the capital city. The town had been the vacation resort of the Aztec Emperors, the Emperor Maximilian (the brother of the Austrian Emperor and Napoleon's puppet) and his bride Carlotta had a palacio here, and it had been Hernan de Cortes’ final home. Cortes’ palace is now a municipal building and is decorated with immense murals by Diego Rivera.

Emilano Zapata made the town his headquarters during the abortive revolution of 1919. When I lived there, it was home to a substantial community of expatriates and remittance men, ex-CIA spooks, and old socialists. They would drink together in the Zocalo at night, while the Mariachis played and the young men and women did the Paseo.

I was the director of a bilingual theatre group in town, subsidized and paid for by the local expat arts centre, which, for all I know, was subsidized and paid for bythe US State Department. We did plays with big casts, so everyone had a role. We played to ourselves, and our Spanish-language shows drew considerably from the poor corner of town where our theatre was located.

The driving force behind this was an indomitable octogenarian called Ruth, very New Yawk, who had lived with her husband Beryl in town since McCarthy had driven them out of the US. They were the kind of people who didn’t just know who Arshile Gorky was, they had known him as a friend. Ruth looked like a commanding toad, and wore muu muus. She was interested in everything and very up on modern culture.

One of my jobs was to escort Ruth into Mexico City from time to time to see plays at the bilingual theatre in that city, or attend shows at the university. The best way into the city was by bus; there was a modern highway that sliced up the mountains, over the top and down into the huge bowl Mexico is built in. The buses on that route were Primeros, First Class, with a hostess, cold drinks, snacks and a fresh doily on the headrest. A thoroughly pleasant experience.

There was another route into the city. That was the old Highway 1, which switchbacked up the moutains through the cloud forests and the mountain pines and the little alpine villages. It had twists, turns and vertiginous drop-offs, and the bus lines which used it, the Segundos, or second class lines, Flecha Roja, or Red Arrow, among them, regularly lost buses full of poorer Mexicans into the barrancas.They had the toughest lawyers in Mexico, and would routinely threaten the relatives of the victims into not suing.

Anyway, Ruth, and I, and my girlfriend, who was visiting from Canada (and interrupting a number of promising relationships) boarded the First Class bus one afternoon to go into the city to see a production of Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht, at the university, which was across Mexico City from the bus station.

Across the city sounds so innocent, but that meant it was on the other side of one of the largest, densest, yet most sprawling metropolises in the world. Twenty million people lived in that huge bowl, many of them below the poverty line. Traffic is horrendous, traffic signals are merely a notion, and every driver is a killer in waiting.

We got off at the bus station and hailed a taxi. It was the standard Renault 12 sedan. I got in the front and Ruth and Kristen in the back. We took off down the Periferico, which circles the city, as wide as a highway and as fast, but with traffic lights.

A man jumped from the centre boulevard into our lane, trying to get across traffic. Our driver didn’t even swerve. There was a bang, a double bump and I whipped my head around to see the car behind us running over the man’s lifeless body. Our driver paid no attention, and increased speed. I started yelling at him to stop. Ruth started hyperventilating in the back seat, and Kristen reached over the seat back and started to strangle the driver.

I reached for the keys, but he swatted my hand away. He was starting to lose control because of Kristen’s ministrations to his throat, when a car pulled up beside us on the driver’s side and started banging our taxi toward the curb. Every time he hit the side of our cab, our driver would scream at him. Finally, we reached a stretch where the sidewalk was bounded by iron bollards. Our savior gave one more shove and the taxi bounced off one bollard and became stuck between the next two.

The pursuing driver pulled up ahead of us, got out and wrestled open the taxi’s door, he grabbed the driver and tried to pull him out on the street. While this was going on, on the other side of the car, I was quickly pulling my two female companions out and hailing another cab. In Mexico, if there’s a traffic accident, the police throw everybody, victims, witnesses, offenders, in jail for a day or two to cool down, and I didn’t want that to happen to the ladies. Kristen was too angry to expose to the authorities, and Ruth kept saying she was about to faint (although she never did).

Another cab pulled up, and I hustled my charges into it. Our savior turned and started urging us to stay, as we were witnesses. I pretended I spoke no Spanish and didn’t understand him. We took off for the university.

The play was excellent and we had a good time, especially Ruth. She promptly forgot the death on the Periferico, enjoyed the play and probably slept well that night. I didn't really.

Stocks And Bondage

Stocks And Bondage

I’m a boomer, and when I was growing up the Dow Jones Average was a three-digit number. And it served purposes other than measuring the value of a basket of stocks. It’s said the ad agency for the makers of Colt 45, a malt liquor favoured by inner city blacks, bought the radio sponsorship of the daily closing Dow Jones Average. The client was dumbfounded. The last thing their customer base was interested in was equities. What was behind this? It turned out the Dow Jones closing average was also the “number” in the “numbers game”, the illegal gambling lottery played in every American inner city. It was the one radio hit that Colt 45’s customers ALL listened to.

I’ve had my adventures in the equities trade. The first stock I bought was a penny dreadful I bought on the Vancouver Stock Exchange (probably brokered by the legendary Murray Pezim). This was when I was working in the bush, prospecting and line-cutting. The stock was in a mining claim I had actually staked, which might yield gold. It was a true penny dreadful, 10 cents a share, 1500 shares, $150. A lot of money for me in 1977. The stock moved up a few cents, down a few cents. The assay results came in and they were inconclusive. I sold the stock back to the prospector who owned the claim for the $150 I’d spent on it. He had more faith than I, but he I think died poor.

In the mid-90s, I met a man in Alberta with the best business plan/hobby I’ve ever heard of. CN and CP were divesting short lines all over the west, spurs to grain elevators off the main routes. This was inconveniencing grain farmers no end, who now had to truck their grain farther and farther to the railhead. He was a ferroequinophile (a railroad lover, basically) from a railroad family.  He raised a stake from farmers along the short lines and made lowball bids to the two main railways, who were only too glad to get rid of the lines. He built a fleet of yard engines suitable for short line work and leased grain cars. He started to spread his operations across the grain belt, until he had lines in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. He called his venture Western Central RR and had an appropriately art deco railroad script logo. He used to go to model railroad conventions, and when asked what gauge his layout was, respond "Standard Gauge, what's yours?".

I owned 100 shares at $15 each, $1500 worth. For a long while, I’d tell people (this was the late 90s) “railroads are going to be the railroads of the 21^st century”. I firmly believed the energy efficiency of railroads would lead to their commercial resurrection.

Western Central’s stock rose past $25 then settled back down to $12. I sold it at $15 when it got back there. Those two first ventures into the stock market were strictly get-rich-quick plays, and I swore to myself, next time I would invest for value.

Well the next time came in the dot com boom peaking around 1999. I owned Nortel. I bought it about $40 and watched it geyser up to $140. I sold it the day before the stock crashed. I made rather a lot of money on that, which I turned around and put into a magazine I was involved with. I got out of that with about half what I’d put in.

Meanwhile, all these years, ever since I got my first Macintosh Classic II computer, I’d been buying Apple stock. Warren Buffett says buy what you use, and nowadays everything I use except my razor is made by Apple. I’d buy 10 here, 20 there. I started buying at $12. By the time I got out of the magazine investment, I had about 120 shares, value about $45 each. I poured the rest of my capital into AAPL. I basically stopped trading at this point and slept on them.

The next time I looked, they were worth $450 each, ten times what I’d bought them for, and were climbing towards $600. If I had kept those shares (they split 7-for-1 a year ago and are now worth about $120 US), they’d be worth six figures. You’d think I was a very smart value investor. Too bad. You'd be wrong.

The financial meltdown hit my business hard, Market research is one of the first corporate expenditures to be slashed in difficult times. I was a freelancer, with a small number of clients, several of whom were in trouble too. I started selling my Apple shares to live on, even as they climbed in value.

The crisis is over, I have 35 shares left, and I’m holding on to them for now. After all, I’ve had them since Steve Jobs had hair.