Oh yes, where was I? I don't know, but I was writing about decorations. Well, I'm allergic to teepees (fooled ya, didn't I, were the teepees decorated?), so I wanted to drive around and look at the countryside, which was scenically orchestrated. I conned Leni into coming with me and we went driving around. We found ourselves at the Caverns of Luray. We considered taking the tour but we quickly found that it was priced beyond our means. We weren't about to leave without looking at something, so we checked out their gift shop. For $2.00 we found that we could get a 5x8 card on which was mounted labeled specimens of exotic (sic) rocks and minerals. It was just the thing for Louis. We immediately returned to the car and mounted the "mineral mascot" collection in the ash tray with electrical tape.
The mineral mascot collection travelled with Louis for several thousand miles then disappeared mysteriously. It had come unmounted and was on the floor. My best guess was that jumping out of the car to push it and get it started, my foot snagged the rock sheet and swept it out onto the ground without my noticing and I left it. One specimen remained in Louis from the collection, "crystal" had been removed for closer examination. I hadn't glued it back on the card, but had instead inserted it into the hollow steering wheel cover. To my knowledge that piece of crystal remains there today.
I mentioned one unusual coincidence above, another occurred on the way to Dead concert in June l976. We were to meet my friend, Bob, in NYC and proceed from there to the concert in Passaic, NJ. As we were coming up Rt. 3 toward the Lincoln Tunnel, who should come beeping up behind us, but Bob himself! (in a Volkswagen).
Still another unexpected coincidence occurred one day when I was driving Louis into town from school. I picked up a hitchhiker. I had to stop en route at the drive-up window at the bank to cash a check. When the hitchhiker saw me writing the check he exclaimed, "You're Christopher Allen?! So am I." He pulled out his driver's license, and sure enough, so he was.
I should probably mention the origin of the name, Louis. Credit goes to my friend Janet, who is truly gifted for naming cars. Other cars she has named with a sensitive perspicacity include Dot, Herbie, and Olive. I hadn't had Louis two weeks when she dubbed him. Needless to say, the name stuck immediately, Louis Renault.
[ Neither of us knew that Louis Renault was the founder of the Renault auto manufactury. I remained unaware of the fact until I was in a used book shop in Vancouver, B.C. and was assaulted by the sight of a book on the shelf whose spine bore the title "Louis Renault". It was a biography about the fellow. I didn't buy it, but cursed myself for not buying it as soon as I was out of range of the purchase. I got another chance a few weeks later when a friend pointed out a copy of the same book in a used bookstore in Boston (the Brattle, well worth a visit if one's near the common). I haven't read the text, but the cover sits on my bookshelf as prime Louis-iana.]
The funny high school I went to, a small, private, free form, Hippie school, was constantly on the verge of going bankrupt. The husband and wife team who ran the school (Sandy and Eleanor, alias Doodler and Doodlette) were always coming up with new ways to raise money for the school. [One of their schemes involved getting the students to sell boxes of ghastly rubbery candies called Polly-Doodles, this is a clue to the etymological derivation of their nicknames.] Flea markets were held in the school building, film festivals using films from area public libraries (and for which Louis logged many charitable miles) were entertaining for a small contribution, and so on. One such series of adventures involved gathering for craftsmaking marathons. (Your author in one of these invented the Bombay Frog Beanbag). A big seller was clove necklaces. Since we were dealing with a largely superstitious market, clove-and -bead necklaces were valuable commodities to come by. I knew it was just what Louis needed to keep the evil spirits away, so I got him one and hung it from the mirror mount. This necklace formed the basis of a long-term accreting dangling-thing. Additions to it included a dangling owl which changed colors as your viewing angle changed, the owl was once part of a color-changing-dangling-owl mobile, but a cat "played" with it until the owls were no longer attached to the mobile. ("Bird" is one of cat's favorite games, Ed.) Another addition was a piece of heavy green yarn, whose original significance is unknown; at one end of the green yarn is an orange plastic ribbon from a property line marker in the woods. Three glow-in-the-dark keychains were also attached, two owls and a stoplight. There's a Santa Claus pin which I borrowed and forgot to return until after Xmas, only to receive it as a gift. When one half of the changing- color dangling owl fell off I glued a "Coke" bottle cap in its place. All of this was held to the mirror mount by an alligator clip carefully skewered with a paperclip. I retain this conglomeration in my "Relics of Louis" collection. It now dangles from Louis' keychain which I will describe the history of next.
At one of the Philadelphia Grateful Dead concerts in June of '76, Joshua came back from wandering around at intermission and handed me a little envelope. Inside the envelope was a keyring. The Grateful Dead lightning-skull logo was stencilled onto a piece of clear plexiglass about 2 inches square. Apparently this guy came up to Joshua and said that if he would distribute order blanks for similar keyrings to crowdmembers, he could keep the keyring. Well, Louis got the keyring; but I don't know how many orders the guy got from Joshua's order blanks.
Almost a year later, I borrowed a movie camera from school and was going to take movies of the Dead in New Haven. I didn't have any movies of Louis, so before I left to drive to New Haven I had a friend film documentary footage of "Push-starting Louis". Truly it's a classic, and it opens with me dangling my Dead Logo keyring in front of the camera.
One of the few serious incidents that ever took place in Louis occurred when I was looking at colleges with a couple of friends in December of '71. We were driving along a back road in Vermont. It was about l0 in the morning and we were riding along listening happily to the album version of Not Fade Away - Goin' Down the Road. It was somewhere in the beginning of the instrumental transition, suddenly the road curved left, dipped, and turned into gravel. Louis started to spin out and slide around. It was very hairy, you know, adrenaline and all. Louis spun around and clobbered the hill on our right with his front end and stopped in a ditch. Freaked, breathless, shaky, and with the tape deck eerily spinning into Goin' Down the Road, we sat forever. No one was hurt. I yanked the tape and we climbed out of the car to inspect the damage. Louis had a smashed headlight and two bent wheel rims and some not-serious denting problems in the right front fender. To the left of the road where we had spun out there was a steep embankment and we were glad we hadn't gone over the edge. One of the wheel rims had to be discarded, the other was distinctly bent, but it was driveable (with a loud "fwap-fwap-fwap" noise) and constituted my spare tire rim forever after. A local junkyard provided a replacement for the discarded rim, a gas station sold me a headlight, and except for a prudently augmented caution and injured pride, we (Louis and myself) were none the worse for wear. On this same trip to Vermont, we were troubled by electrical problems, they had started before our abrupt meeting with the hillside and resulted in a dead battery, at all times, necessitating pushing the car to start it, always. I had recently replaced the battery so that wasn't it. During the trip, I got a new used generator put in, that wasn't it. It turned out later that there was a shorting wire to the generator, replaceable for 50 cents. In any case, we got stranded at Goddard College for a couple of days while Louis wouldn't run. (Louis never did like cold weather, and there was definitely snow everywhere, Montpelier in Decemberbrrr.) While we were stuck there, there happened to be a dance/concert by a group called the Holy Modal Rounders, I didn't know a mode from a hole in the round at the time, but I went to it. I was so impressed by their high energy output and good vibes that when, 5 1/2 years later, I saw that they were playing nearby I went to see them. They are so much music, spontaneity happening (particularly their "Clamtones" faction) that at the end of the second night of seeing them (in '77) I pulled out the $l5 I had gotten for Louis in Iowa and had been saving for a special occasion, and bought their two records.
Later in September '77 (2 months after we left Louis in Iowa) the Rounders and Clamtones were to play at an outdoor festival, I was looking forward to seeing and taping them.. For reasons still unknown (to me) they didn't play that day. In any case, when we went to leave, Joshua's car, Morphine (formerly Morph), wouldn't start. Since we were parked in a flat field of mud there wasn't' much hope for pushing the car ourselves. A friendly fellow drove up with his pickup truck, Morphine rode up on his bumper and smashed his headlight. H shouldn't have had to buy a new headlight for trying to do us a favor. So, I pulled out the remaining $5 that I had left from the Goodbye-Louis-$l5 and gave it to him. It was a fitting tribute that the last of the money I got for Louis should be spent on a push-start victim.
I've already noted the origin of Louis' crayoned upholstery in a fit of boredom in a drugstore parking lot. Once the crayoning of the ceiling upholstery was initiated, innumerable contributions of artwork, wordwork, and doodling, were made by friends, passengers, and hitchhikers. I must say, there are few automobile interiors whose creativity potential ranks with that of a white plastic ceiling.
In the summer of '76, my friend Joshua and I were commissioned to paint the parents' house. We had great fun postponing the work because it was too hot to think about climbing around on the slate roof and paint. We took pictures. Here's one of my favorites:
We also tempted excommunication by postponing the work while we went to see Dead concerts (hundreds of miles away in Passaic, NJ, Philadelphia, Hartford, and Jersey City). The folks were furious because they thought we wouldn't finish the housepainting. That wasn't the only reason they were furious. There was one hard-and-fast rule (among many) whose violation was sure grounds for volume redistribution: dinner is at seven, you are NOT to be late. One day as we went to clean our paintiness in preparation for 7:00 dinner, I noticed how extremely bald Louis was becoming. Joshua and I set to, on the roof and the engine and trunk lids, with our summer-tested all-weather white alkyd house paint. We were pleased as punch with the results (and Louis seemed happy enough) but the parents were furious. Painting cars takes longer than one thinks and we were late for dinner. We were almost banished to the Bronx.
Louis had other external decorations, from the Hampshire College parking stickers, to such Grateful Dead sentiments as: "The Dead Live", "American Beauty", "There's Nothing Like a Grateful Dead Concert", the album-cover sticker of Wake of the Flood, even the related sentiment "Oh, no. another sell-out, Capt. Magnet." There was a bumpersticker-surgery resultant: "My thing pays me weekly in life." I even occasionally got a spontaneous addition from strangers, like the evening I returned to Louis, as he sat with two wheels off the pavement so as not to obstruct traffic at the bottom of the parking lot. I'd pushed/rolled him downhill in a futile attempt to get him started. There on the windshield was a warning that I would be towed, to which someone had handwritten the addition: "Don't park on the grass! Can't you see the mess it makes. If it won't start, why is it here in the first place?"
At one point, the driver's door hinge rusted through. This was discovered one day when, to my surprise, the door opened DOWN instead of OUT. Fortunately, it was the door side and not the car side of the hinge which had rusted through. All we had to do was replace the door. This involved a trip to the junkyard, where we poked around a number of Renault carcasses in search of the best-condition door. A family of wasps had taken up residence inside the Renault with the best door. I retaliated by getting stung in the eyebrow. Now, I'm not in the habit of reacting allergically to bee stings, but over the next six or eight hours my face swelled up to the extent that my eyes were swollen shut. There is some kind of justice. My friend Joshua found my appearance very amusing. He got even for my having laughed at "Chipmunk Cheeks" when he'd had his wisdom teeth out several weeks before. He HAD been funny looking. He'd even though so himself, but when he'd started to laugh, his expression had wilted to pained. This had been funny, too, but he'd thought so less and less as he'd hurt more and more. Louis didn't seem to find any of it amusing, but he now had a new blue door.
Before leaving on the fateful trip toward Oregon, I set upon the task of building a shelf for Louis out of wooden dowels, a picture frame (5x7) and fiberglass and epoxy resin. It looked pretty ugly but finally I had a flat surface on which to set things. A couple of days later we left westbound. The first hours of the trip, before the overheating started, were spent in adding some (final) decorations to Louis. A Grateful Dead Skull-and- Roses sew-on patch was glued onto the steering wheel cover (in which was stashed the piece of crystal, still). And under my freshly built shelf, where the sun would shine through the transparent central opening in the picture-frame-shelf, was mounted, in the position of honor, none other than the eminent, Louis Tibbitts, with his testimonial, "This is excellent."
We had, with great delight, liberated Louis Tibbits and his family from a box of Post Fortified Oat Flakes where he, and the members of his family responded to the question "How does Fortified Oat Flakes compare with your favorite cereal?" Next to Louis Tibbitts, on either side, in Louis (car), as on the box, are Laurie Tibbitts (who looks like she's about to be sick and who says, "It's really good...I like it.") and Karin Tibbitts (who thinks it's "A different taste altogether.") Beneath this idyllic family unit which sanctified my dashboard was mounted a further portion of the cereal box, it read simply "FLAKES".
Some things Louis constantly carried around. When I got him there was a l960 l Franc piece. As long as I had him, there was invariable some form of tape deck, usually a supply of caffeine, an umbrella left by a hitchhiker (and left by us, in turn, at the Holiday Inn in Newton, Iowa). In a moment of pity I once rescued a teddy bear from his position face-down in a puddle, he rode in Louis for 2 years. For a long time I carried around a set of hubcaps, but since I was always changing my tires I never used them and finally threw them out. I carried in my glove compartment (Louis had two, things in the top one would gradually sift down into the lower one; entropy and all that) 3 good luck charms of the engrave-your-own-sentiment variety: "I am stoned out of mind", "I am stoned out of my mind", and "Jojobread and Rosco, Ganja Philoe". They were relics of a trip to Ocean City (MD) before the days of Louis, in "Princess', (formerly "The Brown Bastard"). Princess rated the tags that later fell by inheritance to Louis, (Maryland) AZ6789. Later, and to the end, Louis was (Maryland) CVC818.
One conundrum Louis presented to the mind was his curious odometer behavior. When I got Louis, in l971 (9/16 to be exact) the odometer read l95l7. When I left Louis in Iowa, the odometer said l9784. 267 miles I travelled in almost 6 years. One might think that there would be a constant, albeit reduced, rate of digital turnover. (or one might assume, incorrectly, that I had driven past 99999 and was on my second l00,000 miles). Not so with Louis. During the first couple of years, every so often I'd get a digit change, sometimes 2 or 3 a day. Then there was one trip from DC to Massachusetts when I flipped 60 miles! Every one was savored. Then, after another 7 or 8 increments over the next month, Louis' odometer stopped odometing completely, he never ran up another digit. It was one of the great anomalies of my life, the question of what made Louis, numbers change; it wasn't temperature, or going in reverse, or driving in low gears, or turning a lot, or whether it was a prime number calendar day, or anything that I could ever figure out. The eternal mystery is forever.
A final unsolved Louis riddle involved the mysterious mirror breakage. One day I returned to a parked Louis. He was completely locked, as I had left him. But on the floor of the car, my rearview mirror, which had always been intact, lay in shards and smithereens. A few of the larger pieces foreverafter provided a kaleidoscopic collage image of pursuing traffic, and an unfilled hole in the mirror puzzle offered a convenient mounting-point for a magnetic made-in-Japan thermometer. The temperature reading never seemed accurate, but maybe it was signalling the current temperature in Tokyo.
I guess that's too much of it, even down to the boring, non-anecdotal anecdotes. I can chalk it up to sentimental eulogizing. But if you ever want photographs of Louis, send a self addressed, stamped envelope stating your preference for size of photograph, angle of view, type of background, whether being towed or pushed or automobile (self-moving), dates of photo coverage desired...