Requiem for a 1979 Ford Econoline Van (1979-2005): Part One

"You really wanna buy this thing, don't you?" Jeremy said as we drove it up and down Lake Street on its test drive.

"Yeah. I do." I said, spinning the steering wheel in the frantic motions needed to execute the 22 point turns the van needed just to turnaround in a Chicago alley, exacerbated from the additonal manuevering needed to get around the steel girders holding up the el tracks overhead.

The exhaust was shot, making the van rumble like a dying muscle car. The right mirror was held together with a complex intertwining of duct-tape. On the dashboard was a giant row of red and blue on/off switches that used to turn on and off reading lights in the back, a bathroom light, a CB, a sink (Uncle Ted from HoZac later christened this a "dick washing station"), and a fridge.

Yes. There was a toilet in the back at one time, fit into a tiny closet for midget babies.

Inside, it was shag-carpteted EVERYTHING. The dude who owned it added a leopard-print steering-wheel cover. Fuzzy dice obligatorily hung from the rearview mirror. There was a requisite air-bubble window, curtains covering the back side windows and the back windows. It had all the makings of a late-70's shaggin' wagon, 25 years too late. There was a cardtable behind the two front seats with four drink holders. Two "captain's chairs" behind the front seats. A couch-bed perpendicular to the whindshield on the van's back right side.

Outside, it was tan and brown, with red and orange stripes. The exterior actually looked like a textbook for a college class from 1979, some attemtpt at flash to get an 18 year old excited about College Algebra.. On the top was a TV antenna and two airhorns on either side. In front of the driver's side window was a Q-Beam light. None of this worked, and it hadn't in some time.

"I like it. I want it. I'm gonna buy it," I said.

At first, the van was owned by Born-Again Christians, who drove around and spread the Bible. Before me, the van was owned by this hard rock band quite fond of the usual things hard rock bands relish: marshall stax, jack daniels, poon-tang. They were pros and they needed a bigger van to lug their massive equipment around. Our band wasn't crippled with such excess in the amplification department. Or professionalism.

"You need to take this to a mechanic and find out how much it's gonna cost to get it legal, because right now, it isn't." Jeremy said. This was two months before his two month stint in the band, and his own band was still just something he was talking about with Frank and Anna and even me (for about a minute). He used to fix cars, and even if he didn't used to fix cars, he would still know much more than I do because I have the mechanical inclinations of a right-brained, left-wing, college knowledge liberal prof.

"Definitely," I said, seduced by the ridiculousness of it, how beattohell and glorious it was, this choking dying relic from the van culture of the 1970's. Immediately, I thought it was like a van version of Keith Richards--an unremorseful outlaw living the way it wants to live in a sea of sterile white Honda Civics whose exhausts will never choke from too much poison, whose rugs will never get pissed on from too much beer, whose wrinkles, lines, nooks and crannies will never stash anything the least bit illicit. Shit--only the front seats had seatbelts, and those were only lapbelts!

Driving a van like this around town and around the country, I thought, there would be no way anybody could possibly mistake who I am and what I do. There was nothing subtle about it, and in its present condition, it was perfect for the band.
*
After buying it, and before fixing it, I immediately drove Rosinante (as the van was christened, after Don Quixote's old mule) to Milwaukee. MOTO needed a ride, and I was filling in on drums for them. The exhaust was too loud for conversation, and the smoke filtered into the back enough to make those sitting in the back a little dizzy.

Paul slammed the side door while the windows were open, and the first of many window cracks started. It was like everybody who ever set foot in the van once I purchased it figured out a way to damage it in ways big and small. I lent it to Dr. Filth so he could go to work; he kicked the side door to make it shut all the way and put a dent in it. Cigarette burns. Stashed and forgotten old takeout food found months later, molded and redolent of truckstop toilets. Broken cabinets. Shattered windows. Torn curtains. Drinkholders disconnected from the cardtable. It was always something, and it started with Paul.

Driving it to Milwaukee was just to see if it could even go 100 miles, much less way out West for touring. There's nothing like a rumbling 1979 customized van with 200,000 miles to make you want to live your life completely in the moment. After all, this thing could self-destruct at any time. Or so it felt.

But it didn't and we made it to Circle A, filling in on drums for the last time for MOTO before Dennis was made permanent. The audience smiled and some danced and many sang along, and it was a noticeable contrast with sitting behind the drums for the band I was in, where people just stepped back a little bit and brooded on their miserable early-21st century American lives.
*
The exhaust was fixed through brilliant West Side Chicago Latino Mechanic Engineering. Hole-ridden pipes were removed and replaced and remolded into a complex calculus of criss-crossings bent and redirected into one pipe that emerged from above the van's back right tire. However, it would have set me back another $300 to get Rosinanate to pass the emissions test. As it stood, it was about as good for the environment as an Eastern European/Soviet-Bloc era power plant, but it was enough to deal with that when the demand for the test came in. For now, the exhaust was silent and it actually went out the exhaust pipe instead through the van's floor.
*
The previous owners had it breakdown in Tupelo, Mississippi, where the mechanics were nice enough to repair everything that possibly could have been repaired, as well as guaranteeing the parts for 100,000 miles. Naturally, this kind of above-and-beyond repairmanship ran the hard rock dudes a bill that ran into the thousands, so they had to work their rockclub jobs for months before they could get it out of Mississippi. So, when I got it, I was given a receipt of all the work that had been done on it, culminating in a rebuilt engine, but also including enough to fill an 8 page receipt.

So. The lesson to be learned is this. If you're a musician from Chicago, or any northern city for that matter; hell, if you're a musician from any large city anywhere, if your touring vehicle breaks down, you should pray that it happens in Tupelo, Mississippi, because Mississippi mechanics, especially Tupelo mechanics, care about the vehicles of musicians and want to do everything they can to make sure these modes of transport are in tip-top shape, and damn the cost!
*
These hard rock guys knew that band Nashville Pussy. One of the members, not one of the two women who french kiss onstage to the delight of thousands of intoxicating concertgoing men, told them that he wanted to keep the van in his backyard.

It was, after all, that kind of van. It was the kind of van nonchristians of the 1970's would take their dates and drive them someplace far away from civilization and present these not quite suspecting women with the ultimatun: "Screw or walk." I remember a party my Aunt and Uncle threw in Peoria when I was 8 or 9 years old. There was this guy there in his early 20's who was a friend of my cousin J who was also in his early 20's. There was a lot of snickering amongst the adults because they knew that this girl was coming to the party who was friends with my cousin K (she was just a little bit younger than J) who went on a date with this guy who was friends with my cousin and was pretty much given this ultimatum from his van. When she showed up, there was considerable laughter, like a marginally funny practical joke at the office, the kind of joke you don't hear in offices anymore. Or parties even.

When, long after the van was no longer mine, the hard rock dudes told me this story about the Nashville Pussy guy wanting to keep Rosinante in his backyard, I imagined the van there in Van Heaven. I saw it as a large grassy square of a backyard on the edge of a deep forest. Birdbaths and a mulchtrail would lead right to the van's sidedoor. You'd go in, and God would be seated in the far captain's chair, holding a case of Billy Beer. "Want one?" God would ask, and you would take the Billy Beer because it's God.

Clint Howard dressed exactly as Eaglebauer from "Rocknroll High School" would be in the other captain's chair, rolling a joint on the cardtable between he and God. "Ready to party?" Clint would ask.

On the couch would be, of course, the three ZZ Top girls from the video to "Give Me All Your Lovin'," acting kinda frisky, not unlike the way they might if they would be interested in taking off your clothes and having their way with you, while God and Clint Howard cheer you on. Rosinanate would be a rockin', because that's how it happens in Van Heaven, and if I knew what purgatory I sent Rosinante and if I had the financial wherewithal to do it, I would tow it to the home of the dude in Nashville Pussy, and he could keep it in his backyard as a kind of protected preserve for what's left of Van Culture.
*
The band I used to be in booked a tour of the West Coast. In Chicago, the van didn't stand out quite so much because you see beaters wheezing down Western Avenue all the time...ancient Oldsmobuicks like what your grandparents drove only with more dents and shinier rims. Outside Chicago, into the rest of America and the teeming masses of fools who will go down in history as being stupid enough to give George W. Bush a SECOND TERM in the White House, the van was severely out of place.

I loved that. I loved how this thing was built under the assumption that people would drink beer in the van because that's what you do in vans. I loved how there were hardly any seatbelts because, come on! nobody wears those things anyway! I loved how there was a couch in the back to just stretch out and relax. Rosinanate hearkened back to a less paranoid less puritanical, freer time.

I think this was in some ways why the van always made people happy, even if the brakelights didn't work and even if the right rearview mirror hung by a thread and it backed up traffic for miles when climbing mountains. In Central Washington, a lady in a neighboring car took a picture of us. In Seattle, the people hanging out outside the gig applauded when we pulled up in the thing right in front of the club. Before shows, after shows, hell, even during some shows when the other bands were average mersh, the van was the best place to hang out as long as the temperature outside was neither too hot nor too cold, because the a/c didn't work and the heater only worked in the front.
*