The Plymouth Satellite from Hertz

I liked to use rental cars the way John Le Carré's Toby Esterhase liked to use stolen mail vans. It was a way of putting someone else's car in the crumple zone (figuratively and sometimes literally) and it afforded me the opportunity to experience a car usually driven by grown-ups. A case in point is a certain Plymouth Satellite station wagon--a metallic brown vehicle that looked like it belonged to Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver or The Brady Bunch. I rented it to go to Reno, Nevada with my friend Gary Wales who needed to transport a Bentley he wanted to buy. While there, we would attend Harrah's auto swap meet and visit local places of interest.

After laying claim to the Plymouth at a Hertz agency that wasn't too close to my home, I went to a rental yard to get a trailer capable of towing the Bentley in question. All they had was a near-fit model--something normally used to tow road grading equipment or Army surplus tanks. It would carry the Bentley without a problem. The yard foreman had grave doubts, however, about hooking up his twenty-five feet of rolling cast iron to the Plymouth but I was able to brush aside his concerns with an insouciance bordering on daylight madness. Admittedly, the trailer weighed more than two Plymouth Satellites but it would certainly hug the road and, in any case, it was the only trailer they had. As I pulled away from the yard, the Plymouth gave a shudder that registered 7.2 on the Richter Scale and I was on my way.

I picked up Gary and we drove to Reno. Opening bids for the movie rights to what is left unsaid in the previous sentence would start at seven figures and have Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese fighting for the directing assignment. Half way to Reno, the Plymouth's transmission was whining like one of those old Buick Dynaflows and the smoke billowing from the back of the car was but one of several indications that the vehicle had exceeded the capabilities intended by the Chrysler engineering department. When we arrived in Reno, we thought it best to park the Plymouth and let it recover to whatever extent that it could and took a taxi out to the middle of nowhere and the world's biggest automotive swap meet. If you ever wondered if aliens from space had visited Earth, the population of that swap meet was confirmation that they had.

When we finally made it to the Bentley seller's house, which sat alone on the top of a hill, we were greeted by a middle-aged fellow wearing a plaid bathrobe with striped piping that looked like it came from a Montgomery Ward catalog dating from 1920. The only furnishings in his house were a bed and a menthol vaporizer used in sick rooms before people had any real hope of recovering from anything. It was Gothic horror show without the goth. We listened politely as he showed us his Phantom II Rolls-Royce and then loaded the Bentley that Gary stole from him onto the trailer. To add insult to injury, Gary asked the fellow to include a spare Bentley engine as part of the deal. Eager to get back to his vaporizer, the fellow agreed. There wasn't really room for the engine on the trailer, so we sat it on the tongue of the trailer a few inches behind the hitch. Long-haul truckers and anyone with any sense will recognize this for the lunatic action that it was, but we were in a hurry to be away from the place and circumstance of this man's life.

The drive back to Los Angeles was uneventful. I found the combination of elements--Plymouth, trailer, Bentley, Bentley engine--to be highly unstable at low speeds. Therefore, I maintained an average speed of 110 miles per hour finding that the momentum and inertia of the accumulated mass generated a stability entirely absent at lower speeds. It was interesting how other cars on the road were willing to make way for us as their drivers saw us approaching in their rear view mirror.

After unloading the trailer and returning it to the rental yard, I found the Plymouth to be no worse for wear except that it now drove like a horse with the staggers. As my father was fond of saying, anyone handy with a wrench could have put it right in no time.