By Peter Behrens


My father liked to get on the road early. We were across the border an hour later, stopping for breakfast at St. Albans, Vermont. While my family enjoyed their eggs, sausage patties and toast, with the curious individual packets of jam, marmalade and "mixed fruit" jelly, I was out wandering the sleepy elm-lined streets, pursuing my fetish.

I relished the pungency of American air that was flavored, just outside the cafe, by the sweet complex musk of American cigarette smoke, so unlike the acrid flat aroma of the British-style cigarettes--Player's and Black Cats--my parents were addicted to. Rocks and trees and river water were now American. Main Street was strung with cars parked in neat diagonals to the curb, something we never did in Quebec. The cars themselves came in brighter, more confident shades than the ink blues and depressive grays popular in watchful, careful Canada.

As I strolled the early morning streets, a squinting, skinny ten-year-old in baggy shorts, with a fuzzy summer bean shave, I kept an unnaturally sharp eye out for '59 Pontiacs. If I happened to spot one I'd slow my walk to preserve the excitement, not looking at the car directly, but behaving as casually and diffidently as I could, husbanding most of the thrill until I was right alongside, then letting the--whatever it was, tactility, passion, fetishism, love--have its day.

The style of my longing was sexual, but transposed to another key. What I needed to do was to stand as close to the car as possible and stare inside. Touching wasn't banned but was not an important part of the ritual. The talisman of my worship was the Catalina steering wheel. (The Canadian Pontiacs' wheels, subtly different in detail, were no good; the gaudy American Bonnevilles' wheels, crusted with chrome, studded with clear acrylic sections, meant absolutely nothing to me.) Every other aspect of a Catalina was peripheral to the troubled, yearning delight I experienced staring at its steering wheel. Though I did get a dimmer, more diffuse buzz from the familiar dashboard layout, the embossing on the vinyl seat covers, and the boxy chrome ashtrays; and the exterior lines--the little star burst twin fins above the oval taillights, the split grill, the awesome width--also gave me jolts of pleasure.

The style of my veneration may have been shaped by the fact that I was born and raised in Quebec, before the profane secularizing revolution of the Sixties had forever changed a country as steeped in Catholicism as Poland or western Ireland. The iconic, fetishist side of French Canadian and Irish Catholicism was soaked into me, a Catholicism dangling its earthy, animistic roots. My family lived literally in the shadow of St. Joseph's Oratory, a domed shrine on the slope of Mount Royal. Pilgrims from all over eastern Canada and New England came by the chartered busload seeking cures from physical disability through the ardor of prayer. Every day we saw them on their knees ascending the wooden steps. Up the mountain to the church, where a chapel bristled with racks of hand-carved crutches, yellowing prosthetic limbs, corrective shoes, and ugly iron braces the handicapped and faithful had deposited there, like coins tossed into a fountain.


Objects were venerated. The priest polishing his chalice and paten after Holy Communion, carefully tending the rest of the altar hardware, only emphasized that things could possess tremendous power. Every parish church had relics of a saint embedded in the altar, even if it was just a scrap of thumb bone. Churches were crammed with objects: in St-Bonsecours, the sailors' church down by the harbor, ship models dangled from the ceiling. In a side altar at Notre Dame Basilica, a wax dummy of the Blessed Marguerite Bourgeoys slept on satin pillows, behind Plexiglas. On the day of my First Communion I had been presented with a rosary in a tiny silver box, a scapular holy picture to wear under my shirt, and a crucifix with a scale-model Jesus, which my mother hung on the wall of her bedroom and kissed each time she went out, so that the tiny feet were smudged with scarlet lipstick.

In 1962, the year we traded in the Catalina, I was finally old enough to be enrolled at St. Kevin’s, the nearest English-language public school. Near but far: we lived on the green slope of Mount Royal, and St. Kevin’s was on the grim flat of Côte Des Neiges, a zone of cheap postwar apartment blocks laid over what had once been melon fields. I was sent to my first day of class wearing a grey flannel suit my English grandmother had mailed across the ocean. This loathsome get-up—short pants, elasticized snake belt, thick woolen knee socks, brown oxfords and all—was apparently what proper British schoolboys wore, along with belted navy blue gabardine overcoats and weird peaked caps, all utterly unsuited to the Montreal climate of muggy river heat in June and dead-cold Januarys. St Kevin’s playground resembled a location set for an infant West Side Story, with nine year old Italians standing in for Puerto Ricans and underfed Montreal Irish and Newfoundlanders cast as the Jets. Kids named Marcello, Stefano, or Billy O’Doul greased their hair into miniature ducktails, carried combs in their back pockets, and would not have been caught dead in short pants.

My yearning for the Catalina—for the fast painless transitions it had once offered—may have been a response to the isolation I felt when, outfitted as Little Lord Fauntleroy, I went mincing into the slums. I was unique at St Kevin’s, a weird vision in scratchy uncomfortably authentic British flannel—and so were my parents. Maybe a dozen kids at the school had cars in the family, and they were used. Lots of mothers were cleaning ladies and walked as if their feet had been permanently damaged. My mother, with her Jackie Kennedy suits and bouffant Black Irish hair, had only worked for a couple of years, booking VIP passengers on transatlantic flights during the war, flirting with RAF pilots, and shooting craps with cabdrivers and Negro porters at Dorval Airport, men who would recognize her twenty years later, calling out from their cabs-- “Frankie! Frankie O’Brien!” I always thought she had the perfect name for owning an Irish bar--Frankie O’Brien’s--a racy downtown joint with great food and beautiful women and jazz players blowing horns into the small hours, and probably a high-stakes crap game in a back room. Picking me up at St Kevin’s she looked carefree and younger than anyone else’s mother, lounging at the wheel smoking a Black Cat cigarette, its cork tip stained with the ubiquitous lipstick, listening to Nat King Cole.


By then I was the sort of boy who watched Highway Patrol out of love for the stubby, aerodynamic 1950 Fords that Broderick Crawford drove. Who preferred Jeff's Mom's two-tone station wagons to the canine herself on Lassie. Who caught Sky King reruns for the chrome snouts of the mid-50's Dodges and Plymouths that natty Sky and his pony-tailed niece--the tiny, feisty, blonde Penny--piloted at speed across the Mojave when they weren't able to fly Sky's Cessna. The sizable Chrysler products raised pearl-grey plumes of dust that went feathering across the high desert of my imagination so that when I was in the second grade I developed a fantasy that I would somehow get my hands on a car and travel west with Linda, a small Irish girl with freckles and weird, pale eyes, whose desk was rooted on the far side of the classroom. She would, I told myself, make a great traveling companion. When I was bored, I discreetly wedged a wooden ruler under the lid of my desk and pretended it was a gearshift. There was me behind the wheel and Linda in her tartan tunic, snug and safe beside me, in some massive Dodge Crown Royale, barreling west.
To Be Continued...

"Love Cars" originally appeared in Matrix (Montreal) no. 48, 1998, edited by R.E.N. Allen & Terence Byrnes.