The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.)

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Yes. That made the Metro Section of The New York Times.

  “I believe she would have killed him, except she’s a vegan.”

  And fashionably dyslexic, causing her to mix up the D and the R on the shift lever.

  “Well, be careful.”

  Nick isn’t a thing like his sister.

  “I was thinking about the driveway. Somebody is having trouble borrowing a snowblower this year.”

  The great thing, Nick, about driving a car in the winter is it’s so convenient. Compare what it’s like, being inside a car in February, to what it was like a hundred years ago, being inside a horse. This was much less comfortable and couldn’t have been good for the animal. Another convenient thing about winter driving: If you have an attached garage, you can start your car, leave the garage door down, and kill yourself and your entire family. That is, you can achieve the same results using your automobile as you’d get from a gigantic flaming wreck on the highway without the bother of leaving home.

  “P.J.!” said my wife.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. O,” said Nick. “We don’t have an attached garage.”

  But, Nick, the most convenient thing about driving a car in the winter is you often can’t. This is a perfect excuse for staying home, and what could be more convenient than that? If you have to drive during the winter months, it’s important to own the right car. Jeeps, Suburbans, and Range Rovers won’t do. When your brand of automobile is shown delivering Sherpa food to Sir Edmund Hillary during every Super Bowl time-out, it isn’t convincing to tell your headmaster you can’t get out of the driveway. Buy something with no clearance, like a Corvette. Probably the best I-can’t-get-there winter driving car ever was the old Austin-Healy with the original exhaust system in place. You could get hung up driving one of those across a putting green, and I once did. But that was before you were born.

  Be sure to get a car that has no traction either—something big, with rear-wheel drive and all the weight in the front. Don’t get front-wheel drive. A car that has good traction will go fast on ice-covered roads. It’s obviously dangerous to go fast on roads like that. Also, if you have poor traction, you might go off the road and wind up in a soft snowbank, but if you have good traction you might make it to school and wind up translating Horace. Winnebago motor homes are huge and have all the weight in the front. Get one of those, and when you get stuck in a snowbank, you’ll have a bathroom and a kitchen and it will be almost like staying home in the first place.

  But if you really have to get somewhere in the winter, make sure your vehicle is properly prepared. You have to decide whether to use your regular tires, which have hardly any tread, or your snow tires, which have hardly any tread because you were driving around on them all summer. A lot of people choose all-weather tires because you can let those get bald without feeling guilty for not changing them every spring and fall.

  Of course, the best choice would be studded snow tires, but the tow truck and ambulance lobbies have made them illegal in most states. The next best thing to studded snow tires is tire chains, except it’s impossible to attach tire chains unless you are physically able to lift your car and have prehensile toes to put the chains on while you’re holding the car aloft. The only other way to attach tire chains is to drive your car up on a stump so that all four wheels are off the ground. Then wait for a glacier to come along and knock the car off. If you can’t get the chains on and are forbidden by law to have studded snow tires, you can use four cement blocks to improve winter driving. Put your car up on the blocks and fly someplace where the weather is warm. You can rent another car when you get there.

  Preparation, of course, is only part of the winter automobile problem. Getting a car started when it’s ten below can be even more difficult than getting it off the stump after you’ve put the chains on. Some people leave a light on all night in the garage on the theory that it will generate just enough heat to keep the crankcase oil from congealing. This does not work. During a bad cold snap last winter, I left my headlights on all night in the garage and the car wouldn’t start at all the next morning. It is true, however, that congealed crankcase oil makes a car hard to start. Use a lighter weight oil in the winter. Johnson’s Baby Oil, for instance. Rub this all over somebody cute, stay home, and forget about starting the car.

  Turning the engine over frequently works, too. When the weather gets extremely cold, you should get up in the middle of the night and start your car. Keep it running long enough to get to the airport, and fly someplace where the weather is warm.

  Proper use of antifreeze can also help. Alcohol is effective as an antifreeze. Gin has alcohol in it. So does vermouth. Mix eight parts gin to one part vermouth, call your headmaster, and say you can’t get out of the driveway.

  You really shouldn’t go out of the driveway, either. Once out of the driveway, winter driving requires all sorts of complex special techniques. One of these is the foghorn technique such as ships use in bad weather. When visibility is poor, drive very slowly straight ahead and beep your horn every ten seconds. This worked for the Andrea Doria. Actually, come to think of it, it didn’t.

  Anyway, the first rule is to go slow. Get up late, have a big breakfast, take a nap, have a second breakfast, call your headmaster, and tell him you can’t get out of the driveway after all.

  The second rule is steer into a skid. This is a difficult rule for a lot of people to understand, and I’m one of them. What’s that mean, “Steer into a skid”? Is it a command? Are you supposed to go someplace and find a skid? Is it a general observation? Does it mean if you steer then you’ll skid? And who are they fooling anyway? If you’re able to steer where you want—like “into a skid”—then you’re not skidding. Forget this rule.

  You don’t actually need my help, Nick. You can teach yourself many of the techniques of winter driving. Just cut the brake lines on your dad’s car, remove the tie rods, put ice down the front of your pants, and accelerate full speed into a crowded shopping-center parking lot. This will exactly simulate driving in the middle of winter on icy roads in heavy traffic. What it will teach you is not to do any such thing.

  You may call this a painful lesson, but that shows your youthful lack of consideration for others. Think how amused the rest of us will be when we read the newspaper story about how you cut the brake lines, removed the tie rods, and drove full speed into a shopping center with a Fudgesicle in your boxers.

  Many other winter driving situations can be practiced beforehand. Practice trying to operate the accelerator, brake, and clutch pedals in a great big pair of boots by playing the piano in oven mitts. Practice starting cars with dead batteries by taking a Sears Diehard to the grocery store, leaning over into the meat freezer, and thawing a butterball turkey by running a twelve-volt current through it with jumper cables.

  One type of practice for winter driving doesn’t even require any physical activity. It’s strictly a matter of mental preparation. After all, driving on icy roads has a lot to do with how you think about them. Conceive of a metaphor for icy roads so you’ll know how to behave. Think of icy roads as politicians, for instance—crooked, slippery, and treacherous. If you hit a politician on the nose (equivalent to hitting the brake pedal on an icy road), you’ll go to jail. If you kick a politician in the butt (equivalent to putting your foot onto the accelerator), you’ll go to jail also. (Going to jail is the equivalent of getting stuck in a snowbank.) Using the politician metaphor, wintertime is one long election day. Do what any sensible person does on election day and stay home.

  The rest of winter driving techniques don’t have anything to do with driving because you’re stuck in that snowbank. When stuck in a snowbank, use the “cradle” method of rocking the car back and forth: Rock back and forth, back and forth, then stick your thumb in your mouth and cry.

  Remain inside your car when you are stuck in a snowbank. This will make your body easier to find later. But, if you have your cell phone with you, maybe you should call the AAA. Anybody who does
any winter driving should belong to the AAA. Non-AAA towing services are expensive and often don’t come. AAA towing services don’t come for free. Actually, that’s not true. The AAA is a very good organization, and they’ll come get you as soon as they can in the spring. But, as good as the AAA is, what’s really needed is an organization that, instead of helping you get home in bad weather, would help you stay home in bad weather by bringing some drinks over to your house or by calling your headmaster and saying your driveway is a snow emergency area and the Red Cross has flown you someplace where the weather is warm.

  Meanwhile, as long as you’re stuck in a snowbank, this is a great opportunity to jacklight deer. Build a fire in your car so the game warden will believe you when you say you thought you were going to have to stay there all winter. Jacklighting deer, of course, is only one of the many outdoor winter activities that can be enjoyed with an automobile. Ice fishing is another. Drive car right out onto the ice. It will fall through. Oil and gasoline will seep out into the pond, and in the spring, all the fish will be lying there dead right on top of the water, and you can scoop them up with your hands and not have to fuss with expensive poles and lures. Cars are great for skiing, too. The point of skiing is to pick up girls, and you can pick up a lot more girls if you tell them your car is a Corvette.

  “Or a BMW Z8,” suggested Nick, helpfully.

  Anyway it’s all covered with sleet and ice and probably stuck in a snowbank so they can’t tell. But the very best automotive winter sport is just going for a ride in the country. Make that country Australia. It’s summer down there now. And your headmaster will never find you in Sydney.

  “Nick, maybe you should get Mrs. O to teach you to drive,” said my young assistant, Max, whose next assignment is going to be researching where the driveway is with a snow shovel. “She can parallel-park in one move. P.J. has to drive around until he finds a handicapped spot and then limp when he gets out of the car. Besides,” said Max, “the automobile is just an appliance.”

  Max, you webhead, I protested, the automobile is not just an appliance. The automobile bears a symbolic weight that the espresso maker and the Cuisinart never can. The automobile is an icon of modern existence—more so than the electric dynamo, the skyscraper, the atomic bomb, or the damn cell phone. Will you and Nick please turn your stupid ringers off? The automobile means something.

  The automobile means mastery over technology. It means power, speed, control. It means freedom, autonomy. It means we don’t have to walk home.

  Oh, sure, we could rely on other means of transportation—mule, sled dogs, our own two feet. But a walk-up movie wouldn’t be much fun—standing outside in the evening damp with that big metal speaker box hooked to our belts. If we had a wrecked donkey on cement blocks in our front yard, it would smell. And a wintertime shopping-mall parking lot full of yelping, snarling, biting Alaskan malamutes would be an inconvenience, especially when we emerged from the supermarket with a bag of steaks. Then there’s the train, but it won’t fit in the garage. And can you picture the president of the United States scooting along a parade route with one knee in an armored Radio Flyer?

  So can I. Therefore we should all be grateful to the automobile. But me in particular. I’d be a shoeless pumpkin-knocker rolling down his overalls to count to eleven if it weren’t for cars. My grandfather Jake O’Rourke was born in an unpainted shack on a tenant farm in Lime City, Ohio. There were nine other children, and great-granddad was a drunk. How much formal education my grandfather had I don’t know. He may have finished sixth grade. His spelling was approximate. And his acquaintance with higher mathematics and the classical languages was nil. But then the car was invented. Jake went to work for the Atwood Motor Company of Toledo, Ohio. He started as a mechanic, became a salesman, sold the first Willys Overland in Toledo, and went on to become the nation’s top Willys salesman, averaging 110 cars per year.

  By the 1940s, Grandpa O’Rourke had converted to Buicks. He and his eldest son, my Uncle Arch, owned a dealership on Main Street in East Toledo. My father was the sales manager. Uncle Jack was the ace glad-hander. Uncle Joe ran the used-car lot. Cousin Ide was in charge of the parts department. Various aunts kept the books. And my Great-aunt Helen cooked midday dinner for them all in Granddad’s house across the alley.

  Everybody in the family worked for O’Rourke Buick, if work was what you’d call it. The spoiled, soft citizens of the twenty-first century define everything as work. Making pie graphs on the laptop is “work.” Recreational sport is a “workout.” Lollygagging on a couch in a psychotherapist’s office is “working on personal issues.” But the O’Rourkes came from a time and a social class where work meant lifting things. And we didn’t lift anything. O’Rourkes spent the day loafing beneath the stuffed sailfish and mounted deer heads in the Buick showroom, smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze with prospective car buyers. And this was what my relatives would have been doing whether they had jobs doing it or not. It left them with plenty of energy at the end of the day for smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze with prospective car buyers beneath the stuffed sailfish and mounted deer heads of various bars, pool halls, and bowling alleys.

  Cars made the O’Rourkes happy and prosperous. And it was as a happy and prosperous little O’Rourke that I was born in 1947. My first memory is of a car, a 1948 Roadmaster convertible in electric blue with rolled and pleated red leather upholstery. It was a thing of astonishing beauty. Automotive engineering and design have not been bettered since, in my opinion. All right, aerodynamics. I’ll give you that. But there never was a quieter transmission than the Dynaflow, especially during the thirty to forty minutes required to reach 60 mph under full acceleration. And talk about safety features, the ’48 Roadmaster weighed 4,300 pounds, rode on 16-inch wheels, and—consider the size of that bumper, the heft of those teeth in the grille—could mash a Volvo flat.

  My moral and emotional life was immersed in cars. I first experienced responsibility dangling from my father’s knees steering his 1952 Special Coupe in erratic wiggles down the highway while he worked the pedals. My idea of loyalty was measured by the Buick trademark. I fought the kid across the street whose parents had gone so far as to buy a De Soto. And when my father died suddenly in the fall of 1956, my grandfather could think of no way to console me except to bring over a 1957 Century hardtop a week before the introduction date and drive me around for hours.

  Not to sound callous, but I think those 1950s new car introductions affected my outlook more than my father’s death. The annual all-American excitement over the latest models shaped my philosophy and politics. I have faith in democracy and free markets. I believe in human progress. I know in my heart that, given the vision, the commitment, and the will, all mankind can achieve attractively updated chrome trim. Indeed, automobiles have taught me most of life’s lessons. The existence of evil, for instance, was revealed in the person of a bullying lumpen stepfather who also sold cars. And I found that evil did not go unpunished. The stepfather arrived at the beginning of the 1958 model year, and soon after marrying my mother he landed a job as manager of an Edsel dealership.

  My own first employment was, of course, at O’Rourke Buick. I worked on the used-car lot, cleaning and waxing clunkers with Shorty and Rubin, who had a number of teachings. “Always leave some lint in the corner of the windshield,” said Shorty. “That way they know you washed it.”

  From my first car I learned how, if you remove the hubcaps, reverse the tires so the whitewalls don’t show, ventilate the muffler with an ice pick, replace the giant oil bath air cleaner with something cool in chrome, and pound aluminum spacers into the coil springs to jack up the front end…you’ll still look like a dick in a 1956 four-door Ford Customline sedan your grandmother gave you. The more so if it’s salmon pink.

  And there was my first wreck. I was driving my stepfather’s appalling 1959 flathead-six Plymouth. (He’d quit the Edsel dealership and bought a Dairy Queen on the road to Detroit, but the expressway opened in
1960 and it had been four years since anybody’d stopped for an ice-cream cone.) I made an unsignaled left turn from the far right lane on a four-lane street and ran door-to-door into a passing Impala. This taught me that Satchel Paige was exactly wrong when he said, “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.” My stepfather decided to teach me a lesson, too. He sold my Ford, emptied my save-up-for-an-MGA bank account, and declared I’d never drive another of the household vehicles as long as he lived. Which wasn’t long. He got cancer in 1965, and I remember the words I used to comfort my mother the night he passed away. “Mom,” I said, “can I borrow the car?”

  Naturally there came a time when I rebelled against the automobile. For a while I was infatuated with motorcycles. But I kept falling off them. I had a nasty little X6 Suzuki that I put over the high side of a windy road through my college campus. I went sailing on my back across the dew-lubricated lawn, looking up and thinking what a beautiful night it was with the sky full of stars. And I saw all the more of them when my head hit the tree.

  The bike was unhurt except the front brake cable was snapped and the rear brake pedal was jammed against the frame and useless. I rode home gingerly, parked the Suzuki behind my apartment building, and that night some idiot stole it. The police called a week later and said they had my motorcycle. I went to get it. It was a pile of rubble. Apparently the idiot cranked the Suzuki through all six gears and then came to a curve. “We found it way at the bottom of a ravine,” said the police.

  I owned some other motorcycles too, but I fell off them and (possibly due to head injuries) became a hippie. Cars no longer meant anything to me, except as a means to an end. That is, it’s very rare to be given a lift by a pedestrian while hitchhiking to Big Sur. I was above thinking about cars. I was concerned with political liberation, world peace, spiritual enlightenment, and convincing Moonbeam Feinholt that the ecosphere was in imminent danger from man’s rampant waste of fossil fuels and that she and I had better double up in the shower to save earth’s precious resources. I could care less about cars. Although I do remember sticking an enormous doobie out a vent window and attempting to use a Volkswagen microbus as a room-sized bong. I was so fully recovered from my boyish enthusiasm for automobiles that I made appreciative noises about an old bread truck somebody had painted with a five-inch brush in ten colors of Dutch Boy semigloss interior vinyl. Cars were for squares. Or so I said. But while leading a life of outward conformity with its drug binges, orgies, and rioting in the streets, I also maintained a fantasy existence. I’d get a haircut and a job and a Ferrari California Spider, an Aston Martin shooting brake, a Lotus Elan, a Morgan Plus 8, a Pegaso Z-102, an E-type Jag, a 289 AC Cobra, and, for practicality’s sake, in case I daydreamed up a wife and kids, a Facel Vega.