So, something fun came up the other day that really got me thinking. Someone on Instagram reached out and asked about that fabled Crown Vic I’ve mentioned a few times in my songs. He had recently purchased a Crown Vic (perhaps a little influenced by Let’s Go Out Tonight’s reference to that particular automobile) and wanted to know about mine. I hadn’t thought about that car in a number of years but just the mention of it brought back a stream of memories. I wondered if I had any old photos of it since I owned that car in the before-we-had-camera-phones-to-document-our-every-waking-moment times. You know, the old BWHCPTDOEWM times. Good times… We could do dumb shit and not get caught since there was no recorded evidence. Like break into the school and copy the teacher’s answer key for the next test. Or get drunk and go swing on the swings at the elementary school; which might sound weird but is way more fun than you think. Or get drunk and…wait, a lot of these stories seem to start that way. Maybe they should stay in the ol’ brainbox…
But, turns out I did have exactly one photo of “that old Crown Vic.” Here it is:
Ain’t she a beauty. Look at me getting ready to pretend to do something to the car like I know anything about what’s under that hood…
Yep, that’s me awkwardly leaning into the car while someone took this, my one and only photo of my Crown Vic. Nowadays we check lighting, our hair, our pose and take like 10 pics just in case. Back then, one and done; who gives a shit. This is what you get for the rest of your life to look at to remember that car. Also, that photo somehow looks like it’s from fucking 1980 or some shit and I’m not exactly sure why. That was taken in the mid 2000’s. Yes, I’m starting to get old… I don’t like it.
Anyways, that was my very first car. I had spent countless hours working at a local factory that made Harley Davidson parts to save up for her. It wasn’t a Harley factory per se, but we made chrome accessories pretty much exclusively for Harley motorcycles. It was a pretty good job. It paid $8/hr and eventually I got to $9/hr., which, for a 15-17 year old was pretty fucking good money. Most of my friends flipped burgers for like $6/hr. and worked until like 10pm each night and had to work most weekends. I got to leave school each day after lunch and got home by 5:30 or 6 and only occasionally would work a Saturday morning but had the rest of the weekend free. My best buddy got me the job and his brother was our boss. The job mostly consisted of making boxes for all the Harley parts, sweeping floors and cleaning the machines and bathrooms. One of the other perks was that they let us work as much as we wanted and paid us cash for any hours over 20, which was the state limit for high school students. At one point, they bought a second building which was a dump and it needed to be completely repainted. So, for two weeks or so all we did was get high and paint everything white until either the paint fumes got you or the weed did. All in all, it was a pretty good deal.
Finally, after a few months (lots of my paychecks went to fast food, beer money for parties, etc.) I had saved up enough to buy my very first piece of shit car, as Adam Sandler once so elegantly put it. My stepdad knew a guy who fixed up old cars and sold ‘em for cheap. He told me he had this Crown Vic if I wanted to come see it. I didn’t know what a Crown Vic was but my first question was “How much?” “$800, cash.” I was sold. We took it for a test drive and that V8 took it over the top for me. When we got back, I pretended to inspect the car so as to seem like I knew anything about it and handed him the $800. I officially owned my first car.
The car was definitely a hit with my friends. Those bench seats could hold 7 people before anyone had to start sitting on laps, which, depending on the group might not be a bad thing (read: if we were lucky enough to have some girls hang out with our dumb asses). I quickly became the late night chauffeur, running trips to and from the Taco Bell in the next town over. And that car was indestructible. I once crashed it through a baseball fence when my buddy and I were racing on a backroad near the high school baseball field after a fresh snow (great idea, I know…). Apart from a couple little scratches on that big ol’ bumper (and a large chunk of fence that had been ripped out of the ground), you couldn’t even tell. But, that was the only downside to that car: it was hard as fuck to drive a rear-wheel drive car with a V8 in the wintertime. Some days, after a big snowfall, I couldn’t even make it up the big hill between my house and the high school so I’d have to drive halfway around town to get in the back way. But, apart from that, she was great. For a while, at least…
After I graduated high school, she started to just feel off. The power wasn’t quite there when I pushed the pedal down. It didn’t sound quite the same when I turned on the engine. Over time the problem got worse. I tapped a buddy who actually did know something about cars to take a look at it (who could afford mechanics? At this time I was living in Madison, WI in the upper half of a house with 3 other dudes so we could maybe make rent. We were all so broke we would take turns going over the landlord’s house to beg for an extension on the rent. At one point, we were literally so poor that we had to start stealing food just to eat. Good times…except I kinda mean this one. It was fun to plan/be part of a heist every couple weeks. Just not that being so poor you can’t afford food part. But, it was a house full of musicians trying to “get famous” while working our part-time jobs for somewhere around minimum wage, what did we expect?). He said there was definitely something wrong with the car but he couldn’t see anything that was causing it. His best guess was that it was something with exhaust but without taking it apart he couldn’t know for sure. He said he would call around to some junk yards and see if they had some parts that would work. He was gonna help me replace what he thought might be causing the issue if he found something. He never got the chance…
A few weeks later, I was heading back home for a few days. The town I grew up in was a little under an hour from where I lived in Madison. So, like most kids in the late teens, I would head back occasionally to do laundry, grab some food to take back, etc. I remember It was a very cold fall day. The car seemed particularly angry that day. It just did not want to get going and was sounding awful. I was gonna ask my mom to borrow some money to fix it when I saw her. I didn’t get the chance…
About halfway home, I started to smell something burning. I couldn’t tell if it was the car or one of the farms around there burning a field or the fumes from one of the factories in the area but it smelling really bad. It also started making me really nervous. Here I am, going 70mph down the highway and something just doesn’t feel right. I don’t like this at all. As I was approaching a bridge/overpass, I hear a loud, metallic pop and then something that sounded like a sound effect from Terminator, like metal being violently twisted and torn apart. Then…the explosion.
Yup, that’s right. As I was bombing down the highway at 70mph and approaching an overpass, my car exploded. Fire shot out from under the car and up from under the hood, which was blown open and was now completely blocking my windshield and vision. Now, I couldn’t even see how I was going to die when I plunged off that bridge into the oncoming traffic on the highway below; which is was what I was certain was going to happen. You see, all my life I’ve had recurring nightmares about driving my car off something and plunging to my death. Sometimes it was off a cliff. Sometimes it was a bridge that had collapsed or a mudslide plunging me into the ocean below. But I have always dreamt I will die falling to my death behind the steering wheel of a car.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. I came to peace with it for a split second. Then, I thought “fuck this. Just keep the car going straight (or what I thought was straight since the explosion kind of redirected the car’s path).” I looked out the side window and it seemed like I was still mostly parallel to the median, so that was good. Soon after, I hit a bump, which I thought, well, hoped, was the threshold of the bridge. The bump made the hood flop down enough for me to see out the windshield again. I was, indeed, on the bridge and I went for the brakes. The pedal was so soft so I jammed it to the floor. I guided the car to the side of the bridge/highway and eventually got it to slow down and stop. I immediately jumped out as the car filled up with smoke. Outside, I could still see flames coming from underneath the car and from under the hood. I popped the hood back open and flames shot upwards. I don’t know why I did that but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I turned and ran a little ways up the road convinced this car would explode like I was in a fucking Bad Boys movie. As I ran up the side of the highway, I saw the many chunks of exhaust and transmission that used to be, you know, an integral part of my car. I made the mistake of trying to move a couple pieces between cars that passed. Even with my winter gloves on, I burned my hand. Duh, explosion and fire plus metal equals very hot.
Finally, the fire burned itself out and I headed back towards the car. It was still filled with smoke so I rolled the windows down to let that out (remember non-electric windows?). I was hoping I could get back in the car at some point since it was like 30 degrees outside. I called my mom who found a tow truck that would haul it to the nearest junkyard, which would cost me almost $175 since I was sort of in the middle of nowhere and the nearest junkyard was like 40 miles away. Also, he couldn’t be there for another hour or two. Great… I’ll just stand out in the cold for a couple hours while I wait. My mom said she would come get me and I was relieved. In a half hour or so I would be back in a warm car. I can do a half hour after nearly exploding to death. About twenty minutes passed and my adrenaline was starting to where off, which meant I was not really starting to feel the cold. I wasn’t prepared to be outside for an extended period of time since, you know, I didn’t expect my car to explode on the highway. I just had on a hoodie and a light jacket that I found on the back seat. A police officer started coming towards me and I started to get really nervous. Is it illegal to explode a car on a public highway? Was I gonna get a ticket for the chunks of transmission and exhaust scattered over the last quarter mile? Or maybe, just maybe, will he let me sit in his nice warm car until my ride gets here?
Well, I was right to be nervous. “What the hell is going on up here?” he barked.
“My car just exploded,” I said very matter-of-factly, with a hint of that youthful angst you get when you realize the car you couldn’t even afford to fix is now dead and now you can’t even get to the job to earn the money you need to buy the new car so basically you’re just fucked. You know, that angst. Apparently, I was either too matter-of-fact or too angsty, or both. He unclipped the latch on his gun holster and put his hand on his gun. His demeanor took a hard turn.
“Hands out of your pockets.” Shaking, I pulled my hands out of the pockets of my hoodie. “And pull that hood down. Why are you so nervous? What are you trying to hide?”
“I’m just cold.”
“Is that so? Turn around and put your hands on the car. You have any weapons I should know about?”
“No, sir.”
He patted me down and pulled out the only thing left in my pockets, my wallet. “Alright, is your license in this wallet?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you go nowhere.” He took my wallet and headed back to his car. After a few minutes, he came back out and handed me back my license and wallet. I shoved them in my pants pocket. “Keep those hands out of those pockets.”
“Sorry.”
“You got someone coming to get this?”
“Yeah, my mom called a tow truck.”
“Good. In the meantime, you can start getting this shit off the road.”
“Yes, sir.”
And that was that. He turned around, re-clipped his gun holster closed, got in the car and drove off. A short while later, my mom picked me up. I took one last look at that old Crown Vic as we drove away. It was a sad end to my first car. She just sat there dead on the side of the road, her entrails strewn about on the freeway. I assume the tow truck showed up and took her away at some point but I never saw her again.
I hadn’t thought much about that car until someone brought it up. But it was fun to go back in time for a bit and write this. Oh, and for anyone wondering about why the car exploded, apparently chunks of the exhaust on the inside, hence why my buddy couldn’t see anything on the outside, were breaking off and lodging themselves into the catalytic converter and welding themselves together, causing it to overheat and eventually building up so much heat and pressure that it exploded and took out the transmission with it. At least that was the story I was told. Again, I don’t know shit about cars but that sounded right to me.
All this talk of cars got me thinking about the songs in which I talked about the old Crown Vic. In a couple tunes, I name check her directly.
Maybe we’ll find it again, find it again someday
But for now I’ve got that old Crown Vic outside and I want to take you away
In Dance with Me Darlin’, I not only talk about the Vic but also the very highway she died on:
Every day after work we’d kiss in the back of my old Crown Vic
We would drive around town looking for some kicks
There’s still some lights out on the old highway tonight
Just some folks driving home, up from the city
I will take 151 North to get back home
In MIdwest Winters, the line:
As you park the car, you can see that morning sun
But it will already be gone by the time your work is done
is about working at that not-Harley Harley parts factory and driving there in the wee hours of a winter’s morning in my Crown Vic.
In Drive All Night, I’m writing about this car but it sounded a little better when I said “Buick” rather than “Crown Vic” so I changed it to that, but I’m really talking about this car in that song, as well. I also again reference that not-Harley Harley parts factory which actually closed down not longer after I left due to the recession.
The hard times have finally come around here
They’re laying off down at the Factory
Last week it was Terry, this week it’s me
But I got this old Buick and a little bit of money
So, there you have it. My old Crown Vic and the songs she inspired. You asked and I answered. If there’s anything you ever want to know about ol’ Bradley Wik or my music, just ask. I’m pretty much a damn open book. Comment below if you have something you’d like to know or I do occasionally check my Instagram (@bradleywikmusic) so feel free to reach out on there as well. Until next time…keep a good head and always carry a light bulb… Also, here’s a playlist with the songs about my old Crown Vic.