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STEVEN IVORY: Fast Car to Self
*The powerful, purring engine of the gleaming black '69 GTO pierced West Hollywood's wee morning silence, shifting into park, idling for a second and then revving one last time before shutting down.
Devin's here.
It was the late '80s. We struck up conversation six months earlier at an L.A. bakery/cafe, where we agreed that a dessert shop not using sugar or flour was pure sacrilege.
You could care for the emotionally elusive, cocoa-skinned, 28 year-old Hawaiian-born Canadian Devin only casually. She wouldn't allow anything heavier.
For instance, I couldn't talk to Devin about visiting me more often or at hours that didn't make me feel like the stray, desperate prey of coyote or a random neck for Dracula; that would only push her away.
The next morning, watching her dress from my bed, I'd routinely gripe about the rambunctious SOUND of her midnight-hour arrivals.
Devin's answer was always the same: "You ain't complaining' when that big engine gets me here. "
We'd chuckle at our impasse on the subject--again--and then, with a quick kiss, Devin would be gone until the next time she wanted to roll up from Long Beach and climb into my bed.
Covertly, though, I worried about Devin. Worried that she lived alone with no family in the States; worried that her naivete kept her just arm's length from trouble.
And, I worried that Devin drove entirely too fast.
The one time she allowed us a real "date," I pretended that my heart wasn't in my throat as she drove like a bat out of hell, weaving through Ventura Blvd. traffic.
However, once, when she complained about getting two speeding tickets in a month, I gave her a piece of my mind. "Where," I asked, rhetorically, "are you going that you have to drive so fast to get there?" She went solemn.
I figured my reprimand had sealed my fate. But a month later Saturday night we were in my bed with Hawaiian take-out watching David Mamet's "House of Games." Slowly, quietly, Devin did something she'd never really done with me before: Talk.
She'd been into fast cars, she said, never looking away from the TV screen, since age nine, when her uncle gave her a ride in his souped-up Camaro on an empty Toronto race track as her father lovingly looked on.
As tears streamed down her face, Devin continued the story.
The horsepower and speed, she said, wasn't merely exciting--as the Camaro zoomed away, through the mirror on the passenger door, the nine year-old could see her father's image quickly getting smaller and smaller. The sensation of escaping his clutches, even only as long as it took to get around that race track, felt liberating.
"My father," Devin said stoically, "taught me every thing I know about sex." That first time, he dutifully took her into their bathroom, closed the door and put his penis into her mouth. She was four years old.
The abuse continued until she was 20 and "escaped" to college. She'd have left sooner but for two younger sisters whom she protected from her father's sinister wrath. When their mother, deep in denial, finally divorced him, Devin felt her siblings safe.
Speed, if only metaphorically, said Devin, has the power to take her from her ever-haunting pain and deliver her to the place of her true self. "Every time I get behind that wheel, I'm racing to my joy," she mused. "Problem is, it always seems just up the road." She said my posing the question about her driving made her connect her desire for speed to her abuse.
That night, Devin held on so tightly, I literally had to pry her arms from around me. Amazingly, she slept until noon.
Standing out in the sun, our parting kiss was perfunctory. The hug, however, was great and mighty and our tears bitter.
When the engine of Devin's funky chariot finally revved up, I waved good-bye, knowing it would be the last time the neighborhood would endure it.
If she hasn't already, I hope dear Devin reaches her special destination--a painless place in her soul where she feels loved and safe and free.
Steven Ivory's book, FOOL IN LOVE (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster) is in stores now or at Amazon.com (www.Amazon.com) Respond to him via STEVRIVORY@AOL.COM or MYfeedback@eurweb.com
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