Garage Days: Where Grease, Aqua Net, and Forever Collided

We didn’t need a fancy shop. Hell, we barely had tools. What we had were garages — dimly lit, oil-stained concrete caves that smelled like smoke, sweat, and cheap beer.

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I am at that particular age where there are far fewer years left in front of me than there are already behind me.

Conversations about aches and pains, financial planning, what you are eating, what meds you are needing, how the grandchildren are doing are the norm now.

Sadly, the who is no longer with us, and what happened conversations are also the norm.

But there was a time when losing friends was happening, just for different reasons.

We think back on those

losses with sadness, but also with some youthful reverence to a time now long gone.

A few weeks ago, I was back home in small town Iowa where I grew up.

There to see the kids, the grandchildren, and other family, and of course some friends.

While there, downtown a 1980's street party was happening, and friends were blowing up my phone asking if I was coming down since I was in town.

Umm yes, of course, you had me with 1980s. (Take me back there please!)

There was food, bands playing, drinks flowing. (In other words, FUN!)

I was seeing a lot of people I haven't seen in years.

Along with a lot of "Hey that looks like XYZ over there" then realizing yes indeed it is.

People have changed a great deal over the last 4 decades or so. Hair and waistlines may be significantly different.......

I walked around, talked to a lot of people, it was so nice to catch up (I notice as we get older, we get huggier " if that is a word, if not it should be).

As always there were the "Have you heard about such and such" conversations. The who is doing what, and with who, and sadly the who is no longer with us.

After the evening my wife, "who grew up in a very different place and time", was asking me about some of the people she had met, and some of the conversations we were having.

She was curious about what it was like here 40 years ago.

So, I started telling her about how we used to "Cruise the ones" how that was the place to see and be seen.

Relationships started and ended there on a regular basis.

It was a standard question at that time. "You cruising the ones tonight"?

I explained how downtown used to be a series of one-way streets a few blocks long each and the sidewalks were full of teenagers jumping in and out of each other's cars, music blaring, driving around, trying to find where the next keg party was, or who was where, and where to go to for the next good time, the next drag race, whose parents were out of town.

All of the usual stuff we teenagers did back then. (Much of this was met with disbelief that we just went out so freely)

On the weekend arcades were open, little diners, shops, stores, and the drinking age was 18.

So, people were in and out of the bars. Herbal smells filled the air, cigarette machines were still on the street corners, and in every gas station, bar, bowling alley, etc.

$.50 in the slot and you could just grab a pack. No ID needed.

The norm was built engines in muscle cars, sleeper cars, trucks, and motorcycles, all out on the ones cruising around and around.

Sometimes disappearing to head up to the mall, or down by the bowling alley, but eventually returning for a few more swings around the ones.

Seeing a hood open with a crowd around to take a look at and engine, or intake set up, headers, etc. just anything someone was proudly showing off was a common sight.

That was our social network! Once you hit a certain point and passed the "Whose house, are all the bicycles sitting in the front yard of" age.

You got a car, freedom, and you hit the road, and cruised the "Ones".

Yes, it was a very different time, and my wife listened with amazement that this time ever existed outside of a movie set.

It did indeed. I was there.

I started talking, telling her about how life just "was", what typical days, or weekends looked like for us.

Jobs we had, things we did, the drive-in movies, the parks, the little fairgrounds all over the counties where stock car races and corn dogs were a weekend staple.

She was amazed how we drove an hour, or two to see or do something, see a concert, go to a fair, go camping, and how we thought nothing of it.

How we cruised and raced and partied in the "woods" or a "field", just had her in disbelief, it was so alien to her, but we took it for granted.

She then asked, "how we afforded these cars"?

"We worked, cars were cheap, everyone had one" I answered.

Where she grew up no one had a car, no one drove until they were older, and hell many of her friends still don't drive today in their late 40's and early 50's.

She grew up in a big city, a place of traffic jams, public transportation, apartment buildings. Keggers in the woods??? Umm no, never happened. Any real woods were out of the reach of public transportation.

Having these conversations is when I started thinking back to the garage.

Not just mine, almost everyone I knew had some place they worked on stuff.

Almost everyone knew something about mechanical things back then.

Yes, the garages where we spent our time, hung out, worked on cars, talked about our futures, and thought hanging out building stuff would always be a part of our lives.

My thoughts wandered back to my place.

One old first generation boom box with a cassette player with one half blown-out speaker blasted AC/DC, Zeppelin, or the Hair metal hit De Jour, into the night, a few partial packs of cigarettes, and cans of whatever beer we could scrounge up, was enough.

We were a bunch of skinny kids, usually shirtless, drinking cheap beer, chain-smoking Marlboros or Camels and rolling joints with dirty fingers.

The work was all done manually: a one-ton chain hoist creaking over an engine block, cement blocks stacked like Jenga towers to prop frames up, homemade transmission jacks cobbled together from whatever we had lying around.

We’d hold steel in place with one hand, mark it with the other, then cut, drill, and pray it would fit.

Trips through junkyards.

Well, these were pilgrimages, the rows between the old junk heaps of automotive treasures were like the well-worn paths of the silk road (treasures to be had).

Yes, they were traveled by many seeking treasure, the automotive version of silk and spice.

Holley carbs, 4 bolt main blocks, 202 heads, HD transmissions, posi rear ends.

One never knew what could be found crawling around through the piles of old automotive corpses.

Yes, these paths were beaten into the Earths memory by the feet of those seeking the treasures of steel.

We didn't just search out of need, oh no, often we may find a motor in something, or a transmission, or rear end, grab it, then look for a car to drop in into.

The ingredients for automotive alchemy. Maybe automotive mad science would best describe it!

We were not engineers; there were no YouTube videos to guide us.

No google searches to check for answers. It was trial and error, hard work, and stubborn youthful drive.

Maybe some guidance from old timers who knew their way around a wrench, or a warning here or there to think about.

Often though, the answer was just: "hell I don't know, give it a try".

When money was around, well, then a trip to the auto parts store may be possible.

Oh yes, bolting something brand new on was much like Christmas, and we would proudly proclaim to anyone that would listen, "yep, bought that part new".

Safe? Questionable at best.

Fun? For sure.

And the girls — One cannot think of the 1980's without thinking of the girls.

Enter a long thoughtful sigh...... Mmmmm.

They’d swing by in tight jeans and enough hairspray to hold the space shuttle together, leaning on the garage door frame, asking when we’d be out cruising the one-ways.

They were the chorus to our chaos, watching us bloody our knuckles while we dreamed of horsepower and freedom.

These weren't the shallow, "what can he do for me" looks you see all over social media today.

These were not today’s curated selfies, self-absorbed sizing someone up looks; these were the hopeful glances at shirtless grease-monkeys.

These were the "Someday, I will marry that man" looks.

Greasy, skinny, garage dwelling, future husbands and grandpas.

We didn't know it yet, but they had our futures already mentally planned out.

Money was always short, so we’d pool change for another 12-pack, or pack of cigs, laughing like idiots when we came up just enough for a case of the cheap stuff.

Normally a combination of bills, change, and empty bottles to take back for deposit money, just enough for the brews, and some hope that we had enough gas to make it back.

Nobody cared, our focus was on the steel we were working on, rock and roll, and the lovely aqua net artist that would be riding along once we could bring the machines to life.

We weren’t just working on cars.

We were inventing ourselves.

That was the rite of passage in those days: you didn’t buy speed, you built it with your own hands, even if half the job was duct tape, wire, and stubbornness, it was all ingenuity, sprinkled with courage.

And let me tell you, what hit the roads, well some of it was impressive indeed.

Some beautifully detailed machines, some with horsepower stuffed into things never intended to house it.

Some would just make you laugh and shake your head asking why.

All fun, all interesting and all very personal.

But the truth is — not everyone made it out.

Some of those cars ended up twisted heaps of steel.

Some of those nights ended with flashing red lights and parents sobbing on front lawns, and a cold stone in a lonely graveyard.

We lost people.

Friends, neighbors, kids who should’ve been cruising beside us for decades more.

Now a growing list on "the classmates no longer with us page".

That’s the bittersweet edge to those garage days.

They were priceless, but they were dangerous.

They built us, scarred us, and in some cases, took some of us away too soon.

Looking back now, I smile with a tinge of sadness.

There was an unstoppable innocence to it all — a belief that we could drink, smoke, wrench, and laugh our way through life forever.

That is of course what everyone thinks when you are only a few years into adulthood. And forever is still decades away.

But those nights taught us more than mechanics.

They taught us loyalty.

Grit.

To really think outside of the box, because no box was there to contain us.

The joy of making something out of nothing.

The flash, laughter, rumble, reckless abandon of it all.

And the harsh reality that life doesn’t promise anyone a morning after.

That grease, aqua net, tight jeans, and stale smoke also formed a glue. One that has held some of us together as friends, well, for our entire lives so far........

The story of a time now long gone, that still lives within a shrinking population of those for whom, it was our reality.

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