I'd like to tell a Christmas story. I'm calling this a Christmas story because it happened around Christmas time and it has a happy ending.

A few years ago it came to pass that I was finding my way to and from work in a trusty Mercury Capri. I had acquired this car from my landlord for a mere $500. The car I had been driving was purchased for $250 and had lasted several years with the usual maintenance. And even though it had got to the point where the compression was so bad that if it stalled, one was unable to restart the engine until it cooled off - I was still driving it every day. And when it died suddenly my landlord and I were able to make a deal on this Mercury Capri that he had taken in lieu of rent from another of his tenants. I knew I wanted this Mercury as soon as I saw it. It was black, a stick shift, with fancy wheels and wide tires and what is known as the "big inch" engine. I didn't find out until later that all four of the fancy tires had large plugs in the sidewall due to an argument between the previous owner and his ice pick wielding spouse.

It also happens that I acquired this nifty little Mercury Capri during the period when I was, shall we say, at somewhat of a disadvantage in terms of the proper paperwork from the state of Illinois. I was not an possession of a driver's license. But that is another story.

The fact of the matter is that I had been driving for nearly two years, very carefully, and it was almost time for me to become officially Street Legal once again.

I was at a pleasant period in my time of life. I had gotten over my divorce a few years prior and was living alone with a green headed parrot for company. I had a swell ex-girlfriend and an interesting new girlfriend. And I drove 45 minutes each way on the Dan Ryan Expressway to and from work.

It was a chilly cloudy snowy December 20th as I piled myself into the Merc. It fired right up and was loping over smoothly as I waited for the oil pressure to stabilize. The muffler was not quite shot yet and gave off a confident somewhat mellow rumbling as I eased it into first and headed for the Dan Ryan.

As was often the case when driving into downtown Chicago the weather changed appreciably the closer I got. It went from snowy to sunny. It went from cloudy to balmy blue. And there was no hint of snow as I turned off the Dan Ryan and headed into Chinatown on my way to the 14th Street coach yard. Now, I should mention at this juncture that for the past two years my entire driving philosophy might best be described as ultra low profile. I never ran stop signs. I never went more than five miles an hour over the speed limit. I never so much as squeaked the tires. I signaled every turn, and never did anything that would draw the slightest amount of attention to myself. So what happened to me as I turned into Chinatown was really the last thing I expected or needed or wanted.

I've always felt that Chrysler's were designed by frustrated rocket scientists that flunked out of NASA. Who else would design a car that had the shifter sticking out of the dashboard? (The famous 'pig sticker' shifter found on '56 Dodge automobiles.) Well, let me suggest that some of these lads must have slipped over to the Mercury division of Ford Motor Co. And once there they designed the carburetor on my Mercury Capri. The fact that they made the carburetor in two pieces wasn't a bad idea. The top piece mixed air and gasoline and shot that mixture into the bottom piece which sat on top of the intake manifold. The quirky thing they did was to fasten these two pieces together with four small bolts that threaded up from the bottom piece into the top piece. This way you see, gravity and vibration would cause the bolts as they gradually loosened to fall completely off the carburetor, bounce off the intake manifold and disappear to who knows where. Oh those quirky frustrated mad scientists!

And on the morning in question, unbeknownst to me as I headed into Chinatown, the crucial third bolt was about to fall out of the carburetor.

I had no sooner rounded the corner than to my dismay I noticed a plethora of local police, state police and other constabulary. They had apparently been drawn to Chinatown by the huge funeral entourage that was marching down the street complete with heavily draped automobiles and groups of musicians playing dirges. It was almost like a huge parade except without all the commotion and loud noise. Apparently Chicago's finest had lost one of their own and the men in blue had turned out in force to pay their respects. One lane was kept open for traffic in each direction and I was creeping along in mine when the last bolt fell out of the carburetor.

The first thing that happened as the now mostly useless carburetor rotated on the remaining bolt was that my motor started to sputter and die. This was the last thing I wanted - to become a traffic obstacle. So I punched in the clutch and began to frantically flutter the gas pedal. The action of the accelerator linkage obediently swiveled the top of the carburetor back over the bottom half and I felt the pedal suddenly go to the floor. An appropriate amount of gas flooded into the motor and the Rpm’s rose accordingly up to, and then past the red line. My small black Capri suddenly sounded like a Lear jet preparing to take off. Heads began to turn my way.

I obeyed my first instinct which was to turn the motor off, and just as quickly as it began to die out I overrode that instinct and turned it back on again while struggling to lift the gas pedal off the floor with my fingers. The motor caught, the pedal slipped, and things returned to roaring, now accompanied by no small amount of smoke. Fearing the worst I decided to try and control the runaway gas by letting out the clutch a bit, hoping to slow down the motor by keeping my toe on the brake and using my heel to try and dig the gas pedal out of the carpet. I gave the audience a pretty good show as my somewhat worn clutch finally engaged and the Merc gave a fairly good impression of a drag strip burnout at the Christmas tree starting lights. Lotsa’ smoke and noise. This was more than the plug in the left rear tire could handle so that tire lost all its air.

The police were actually TRYING to ignore me, God bless them.

Some degree of carburetor wobbling popped the gas pedal back into a normal position. The front-end came back down out of the air and I was again confronted with a vehicle that seemed about to stall out. Unable to think of any other option or reasonable alternative I gave it the gas. And it became obvious finally that the car now had only two operating modes, namely flat out screaming or starving for gas. And I was once again in mode No. 1, flat out and screaming. Fearing jail at the least and who knows what other untold punishments for disrupting a solemn police funeral while driving without a license I tried once again to gently let the clutch out and bring the R. P. M.'s back down to something near normal. This was not to be. The clutch grabbed and the tires squawked, but not as loudly since I immediately punched the clutch in part way and immediately let it out again and in again and out again. . . And in this herky jerky alternately jumping and near stalling fashion managed to turn off at the first side street, tuck under a viaduct and shut the damn thing off.

I sat there for some time thinking about how I was ever going to explain this and how I would not be able to produce a driver's license and how I would spend Christmas as a guest of the state of Illinois. And it was sometime before I realized that no one was going to come. As terrible a scene as I had made out there it was apparently not worth any of the officers leaving the funeral entourage.

There are no words that would describe my sense of relief. I popped the hood, fastened the carburetor halves back together with electricians tie wraps from my trunk, changed the tire and drove into work singing over and over again, "it's going to be a wonderful Christmas".