NATALIE SAN SIMEON AND THE 1971 FORD TORINO BROUGHAM - 1980

The first time I saw Natalie San-Simeon was at 2:51 in the afternoon of October 13, 1976 standing near the Kresge’s, at the midway between Bam’s and Gimbel’s at the Garden State Plaza. She had deep brown eyes with a slightly Asian look about them. Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled. She was a Wella Girl. Her hair had Wella Balsam Shampoo full body. She wore a V-necked velour sweater over a synthetic satin shirt, Levis Boot Cut jeans and ski down vest. She was five solid feet of stunning.

We were at the mall to hear President Gerald Ford speak. I was holding a Kodak Tele-Instamatic 110 camera high over my head, snapping pictures of the President, while sporting a stained Sears t-shirt, threadbare work boots, and a Kodak Tele-Instamatic vinyl belt case that labeled me a, “Card Carrying Member of the Audio-Visual Squad.” Sensing it would be smartest to hide, I was hypnotized by Natalie. I stood there, in my worn-out yellow Sears windbreaker, next to my mom, and I stared at this Italian-American princess, this unspoiled paradigm of “spectacularness.”

The next day at school, I passed Natalie San-Simeon in the hall and discovered that the world’s most perfect woman went to Paramus Senior High. I quickly developed a case of unrequited love that lasted for six years.

Natalie didn’t have a boyfriend in Tenth Grade. I never asked her out. Natalie didn’t have a boyfriend in Eleventh Grade. I never asked her out. In Twelfth Grade she began hanging out with a friend of mine. Soon, they were walking down the hall together with his arm resting on her shoulders, like an ape limb hung over a Bottecelli. They went to prom together on a night that I stayed home to watch MORK AND MINDY. Natalie’s boyfriend and I both wound up at GW.

During freshman year, whenever Natalie came down to visit I knocked on my friend’s dorm room door every… fifteen minutes or so until he answered. And there would be Natalie San-Simeon, the cutest girl ever to walk the planet Earth, sitting with her knees under her like a cat, smiling at me and talking to me about D.C., New Wave, and Paramus gossip She was a cross between Stewardess Barbie and Mary Ann on GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.

Sophomore year, Natalie enrolled at the Ameican University up by the National Cathedral. My friend came to me upset. His parents had spent two hours on the phone with him telling him he had to stop dating Natalie. It was getting serious and she wasn’t Jewish. My friend was devastated. I thought because he was going to disobey his parents, but, I realized he was devastated because he was going to dump Natalie. He was going to dump Natalie San-Simeon. How crazy was that? I was so stunned; I actually tried to talk him out of it.

A few months later, on Halloween night, my now single friend told me he was going to hide. Natalie was on campus looking for him. I gave him my sympathy as he trudged away. Then, I tore up to my room and took a scalding high-speed shower, liberally spilling Clairol Herbal Essence on my scalp. I put on my roommate’s Yves Saint Laurent cologne. I put on my Fiorucci jeans, my Capezio shoes and matching purple Polo knit and Oxford shirts, with the knit’s collar up. I even had a knit purple belt to match. I ran to The Exchange, the GW bar, and searched for Natalie, but she wasn’t there. Finally I slogged back to my dorm with my head hung low, and I walked right into Natalie. She was with a group of Long Island looking Amrican University students. She talked to me until her friends dragged her away. But, before she left, she told me that she lived in Anderson Hall…on the fifth floor.

I ran up the steps, three risers at a time, to get to my room and write down “Anderson Hall, fifth floor.” I told my roommate, Johnny Napali, about Natalie. My passion scared him a little and he pulled out his guitar and held it on his lap to steady himself. He told me that he was going to make sure that I got a date with Natalie. It was why God had sent him to George Washington University.

The next day, he dragged me into my room and slammed the door, with an admonishment that I was not allowed out until I called her. I tried to open the door, but Johnny found allies who would help him shove me back. Kids from my dorm took turns standing guard. Either I called Natalie or I lived out my life in Thurston Hall, Room 608. The trouble was that even though I was 19, I had never, ever, ever asked a girl out before in my entire life. I needed to learn how fast.

I picked up the phone and dialed the fifth floor of Anderson Hall at American University seven times, clicking the line dead before it rang each time. On the eighth call, a girl answered before the phone rang. My stomach tapped against my throat. I asked for Natalie San-Simeon. The girl asked who was calling. I said, “Chuck Freericks.” Fuck, that’s a stupid name! But, I couldn’t think of a better one.

Minutes of silence passed. Then there was flurry of phone movement… fvwishwkumpawmmm…and I heard Natalie San-Simeon saying, “Hello?” Even writing these words down now, 24-years later, my palms are sweaty, my heart is pounding against my ribs, my stomach is tapping on my throat and all the rest of my innards are melting. Do you understand? I was on the phone with Natalie San-Simeon. Holy fucking shit.

Natalie and I spoke for about an hour. I said what a funny coincidence it was that I ran into her in my lobby and wasn’t that fun? I talked about Springsteen and Rockpile, because someone had told me she liked them. And as the conversation finally came to clubs, she mentioned Scandals, and I realized that this was the opportunity, so I asked her if she’d like to go to Scandals sometime. When she said yes, I said it would be good to have dinner first. She said yes. Now, up to this point, I had mentioned going with me. I’d just asked her in general terms if she wanted to go to Scandals and dinner and not wanting to spoil things by having her reject me for a Friday or Saturday elite level date when she realized that I was coming with her, I suggested Tuesday. She said yes.

I hung up the phone and opened the door, to find that the hall was empty. I guess everyone got bored with the long call. I ran up and down the dorm, singing, on the top of my lungs, the barely known hit by The Tremblers, “I’ll be taken her out tonight, out tonight, out tonight…When I said I want to meet her they said boy you’re just a dreamer…just a make believer…but I’ll be taking her out tonight.” It was then that I realized that my car was in New Jersey.

I had a 1978 Buick Regal Limited with crushed velour pillow seating, opera lamps, a five liter V-8 and a padded landau roof. But, I didn’t have a mechanic in D.C., so I’d driven the car to New Jersey for an oil change. I’d borrowed my brother’s avocado green 1971 Ford Torino Brougham to get back to D.C. Problem was that it was Sunday night. I had class Monday morning. I had class Tuesday morning. I had a date Tuesday night. My car was 240 miles away and I was not going to take Natalie San-Simeon out in an avocado green 1971 Ford Torino Brougham.

Luckily, Johnny Napoli did a lot of cocaine or the events that follow probably never would have happened. He told me that I had two choices, fucked, or really fucked. Really fucked was calling Natalie back and changing the date to another day. Fucked was we drive five hours to New Jersey, swap cars, and drive five hours back to D.C., only missing our 9:00 classes in the process, getting back in time for our elevens.

It was One A.M. when Johnny Napoli and I got into my brother’s 1971 Ford Torino Brougham, and hit Pennsylvania Avenue, driving by the White House, before turning onto New York Avenue for the ride up the BW Parkway. I had enough adrenalin pumping through me to keep me up for the next couple hours easily. We sailed through Baltimore just before two. We stopped at the big rest area south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and Johnny took over driving because, to quote him, I looked like I was about to keel. It was close to 3:30 by then. We passed the Cherry Hill water tower about thirty minutes later. Within an hour I asked Johnny to pull over and let me drive again, because he was alternating which eye he kept open while driving. An hour and a half later, I pulled the car into my driveway in Paramus, New Jersey, at Six A.M. exactly. My father had already left for work.

My mom made us breakfast, and gave Johnny some coffee. She said how pleasant it was that we’d come to visit. At 6:30, half-an-hour after we arrived, we left again. I don’t remember the drive back to D.C. at all. I know it was in the Regal, which drove like a marshmallow on satin sheets. I know that we didn’t crash and die, but I do honestly believe that there were moments when we were both asleep, even though one of us was always driving. We got back around 11:30 and I dropped Johnny in front of his 11:00 class, before I drove back to the dorm and fell asleep.

Tuesday night, I found a message in Johnny’s handwriting, taped to the black rotary wall phone. It said that Natalie called and was sick and couldn’t keep our date. On Wednesday the same rotary wall phone rang. It was Natalie calling to reschedule. I suggested next Tuesday. She said yes. Next Tuesday, the phone rang. It was Natalie. She didn’t feel well again, but this time she rescheduled for Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I skipped a midterm to drive out to the Chevy Chase Syms, where an educated consumer was their best customer. I bought a European cut fine tweed jacket, Jordache jeans, a pink Izod-Lacoste oxford and a fake gold chain. I drove the Regal to AU and walked into the Anderson Hall lobby. I called the fifth floor and Natalie said she’d be down in a minute. An hour later, the elevator opened, and there she was, in a suede jacket that was – well… let me just say that I wanted to be that suede jacket. That was all I needed in the whole wide world.

There were three other girls with her…all staring at me…like I was the cool guy in a movie picking up the cool girl for a date, and they were the giggling friends wishing they could be my date instead. They were all pretty, but none of them was good enough.

Outside, I opened the car door for Natalie and sat her in my Regal. She reached over and unlocked my door for me. She then pulled the handle and tried to push the door open. Tears of joy sprang from my eyes. She petted the crushed velour on her seat and told me that I had a really nice car. She asked for a hairbrush, and I pulled my brand new, never used, Goody out of the glove compartment. She said I had the perfect kind of hairbrush. I drove very slowly and carefully. I looked at her hands and I thought, those are Natalie San-Simeon’s hands. Those little hairs on her arm are Natalie San-Simeon’s little arm hairs. Wow!

As we waited in the bar for a table at the restaurant, I went to the men’s room, looked at my reflection in the mirror and said, out loud, “I’m Chuck Freericks and I’m on a date with Natalie San-Simeon.”

At our table, Natalie glowed, as the candles flickered on her face and in her eyes. I tried not to stare at her while we talked. I tried to act indifferent to the fact that we were on a date, the way a real guy would act. I had onion soup and fettuccine alfredo. Well, I ordered onion soup and fettuccine alfredo. I didn’t actually eat anything. Neither did she. It went well.

Next I drove her to Scandals, but even though I had figured out a way to ask her on a date, I still did not know how to ask her to dance, so we spent the next two hours watching other people dance. Moreover, because it was a Wednesday, there were no college students there, just grownups, in their twenties. Finally, she told me she needed to go home. I got lost trying to get back to AU, but it was cool, because it kept her in my car longer. I turned up the radio, and I swear to God, I’m not making this up, Supertramp was singing “Take The Long Way Home…Take The Long Way Home…So You Think You’re a Romeo, Playing a Part In A Picture Show…Take The Long Way Home.” Natalie looked at me and we shared a moment of non-verbal communication, smiling at each other the way couples in love share spontaneous insights with just a look and a smile.

When I found her dorm and pulled to a stop, she said to me, “I had a really good time. You can call me again.” It was one of those moments, you know, one of those moments when all the other shit just doesn’t exist, when you think, “it’s all going to be all right, I am going to have a grand and wonderful life.” It was one of those fuck yeah moments. And as she walked up the steps to her dorm, I took out the hairbrush to hold for the ride home. It was 12:07 at night, seven minutes into November 21, 1980, when I started back towards D.C.

In the weeks that followed, I took Natalie out a few more times, but never got up the nerve to kiss her. On our last date, she brought friends along. Then, the Buick Regal began leaking oil and antifreeze and I had to sell it. Johnny Napoli moved back to Connecticut, never to be heard from again. And me? I let go of the crush…one…two years after our first date. As to Natalie, she married one of those Long Island looking guys she’d come down to GW with.

But, you know what, that’s not important. What’s important is that no matter what, I will always know that my life was charmed, on the night of November 20, 1980 when I took Natalie San-Simeon to dinner at an Italian Restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland and I took her to watch old people dancing at Scandals in Washington, D.C. How many people get to say that their first date ever was with a girl that they had already been in love with for four years?

A CAR TO NAP IN -1967 to 1979

What does a $40 car look like? Ours was held together with baling wire, Bondo and duct tape. It had 226,328 miles on it. The front seat consisted of springs and gaping holes. The after-factory air conditioner hung from the dashboard by a single bolt. It was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant 100 that had been my mom’s car for five years. It had been my dad’s car for six years. It had been my car for less than a year.

In August of 1979 my dad sold it for $40 to a friend of our handyman. The handyman’s friend touched each knob and dial on the dash repeatedly saying, “This is great,” over and over again. He turned to the handyman and said, “I can’t believe I’m going to have my own car,” and then he misted up, not ever noticing the two dozen coffee cup rings my dad had left on the top of the dashboard.

He lied down on the back seat and looked up at the torn roof liner. “I could nap back here,” he announced.

He pulled two crumpled twenties out of two separate pockets and shoved them into my dad’s hands. When my dad gave him the keys, he hoisted them up and down in his palm to feel their small heft. Then he yelped a rebel yell, started the car, and drove it out of our lives forever. We heard the motor roar when the handyman’s friend made his turn onto Spring Valley.

Twelve years earlier, I was about to turn six and my brother was turning four, when my mom began a search for a car that her children could nap comfortably in while she drove. She had a 1960 Valiant 200 that smelled like dust, maple syrup and celery. You couldn’t see the floorboard though my mom’s paper collection of flyers, handouts and catalogs.

The 1960 Valiant was a space-aged compact with a push-button transmission, a raised wheel on the trunk, tailfins and a silver embossed dash. My mom was a 32-year-old budding children’s book author who got upset with salesmen, bank tellers, checkout clerks and the like when the real world butted up against her fantasy of what the world was.

She dragged us from car dealer to car dealer, forcing us to lie down in the back of each car she tested, to see if we were comfortable napping. It was sort of like trying on new pants to see if they fit, but doing it with the backseats of Detroit’s finest. Oddly enough, as I remember it, all of these car dealers were selling the same cars. You see, she had a Valiant and liked that, so we visited different Plymouth dealers throughout the county, rather than actually looking at other brands.

She was very brand loyal. Our washing machine always had a box of Tide, a box of Cold Power and a bottle of Downy atop it. In the bathroom, we had a bar of Ivory Snow and a tube of Colgate with MFP. Our kitchen always had Brillo Pads, never SOS, Ajax, never Comet, and Palmolive Dishwasher Detergent, never Cascade. My mom had a Valiant and even though it was dying, it was a brand she knew… so we only looked at Plymouths, and most of them were Valiants.

Finally, she dragged us to a dealer who decided what my mom needed was a Barracuda. He walked us over to a gold fastback. It was the most beautiful car I had ever seen, a real Hot Wheel. Under the huge glass fastback there was a carpeted flat area that looked an awful lot like a bed to the salesman and my mom.

This was what my mom had been looking for all along, a car with a place for my brother and me to nap while she drove. She had us climb into the back and lie down. She tested the area between the rear wall of the car and my shoe like she tested new shoes for me, pushing a thumb against the front toe. I fit perfectly in the Barracuda.

My mom told the salesman she wanted to take the Barracuda for a test drive. He said, “Great, put your kids in their seats and we’ll go. My mom said, “I need to make sure they’re comfortable lying in the back while I drive.” The salesman said this was a bad idea. My mom insisted it was a good idea. Finally, he told her he didn’t want to come along if my brother and I weren’t in our seats. My mom took the car for a test drive without him.

As we pulled off the lot, I felt good, lying in the sun that was penetrating through the huge rear window. The sky was blue and the car smelled new. There were little lights at the end of each fender that flashed with the blinkers to let you know that they were working. I was in Heaven, until we hit first bump. My mom called back to see if we felt it. Then she had to stop quickly in order not to run a red light. My brother and I flew forward. Our heads smacked into the back of the back seat. Our bodies accordioned. We both began to cry. My mom took the Barracuda back to the Plymouth dealer and told him it wasn’t a very good car.

Frustrated, she dragged us back home, ready to give up, and told my dad this. He took us to another Plymouth dealer, Castle Motors, but they were closed when we got there. My mom looked in the fence at the 1968 cars all lined up. She squealed in delight, “Charley, that’s it, that’s it. That’s the car I want.” She pointed at a blue 1968 Plymouth Valiant 100. “Isn’t it cute?” After test driving a dozen cars and measuring the back seats of a dozen more using my brother and me as her yardsticks, she picked the Valiant out instantaneously through a chain-link fence. We went back the next day and bought it for $2,683.15.

Over the days, months and years that followed, my brother and I spent hours and hours napping and sleeping in the backseat, watching as the light and shadows from streetlamps swept across the rear window like a black and white kaleidoscope. Brand loyalty turned out to be a good thing, as history actually proved the Slant Six Valiant to be one of the most reliable cars to come out of the late 1960s. And as the years passed, eventually I went from napping in the Valiant to driving it.

Near the end of the twelve years that we owned it, I nursed it over to Parwood Sunoco one day, keeping the windows cracked open because the muffler was leaking carbon monoxide into the cabin. When Mark, the mechanic, opened the hood he looked at me and said, “You know what this car needs?”

“What,” I asked?

“A replacement car….”

My clearest memory of it the Valiant though isn’t about how old and enfeebled it became. In fact, my clearest memory is about napping… being six-years-old at my grandmother’s apartment. I was in my pajamas and my dad carried me down the long staircase and out into the crystal cold night. He put me on the hard vinyl of the Valiant’s back seat. He put my brother on a pillow on the floor. We drove home in that steady staccato of the streetlamps kaleidoscope washing across us and then fading into shadows.

As unbelievably dangerous as it probably was to let us nap in that car, when I did, I knew I was in the safest place in the world. And because of that, I understand why the handyman’s friend was so delighted to buy the car. I truly understand.