In last week’s piece where I described taking a deposit on my 20-year-owned 1999 M Coupe, I said that “road trips are the crucible in which relationships with cars are formed,” and since I never had one with the M Coupe, I said (or strongly implied) that this was why I never developed the deep bond with it that I have with other cars.
Shame on me. I apparently had a brain fart about what I wrote in the July 2010 Roundel:
The M Coupe Goes to the Movies
My eldest son Ethan (a.k.a. Firebird Boy) is majoring in film. This year, like last, he signed up for the 48 Hour Film Project—a wild sleepless weekend in which teams are randomly assigned topics and have 48 hours to write, shoot, edit, credit, submit, and score a short film. The teams are handed topics at 7:30pm on a Friday, and have to physically submit a QuickTime file on a thumbdrive by 7:30pm the following Sunday. Ethan’s team drew “heist film” as their topic. A dozen kids descended on our house. They roughed out a script centered on a botched robbery of a coke dealer. Several ran out to Walmart to buy a safe. Others took the cardboard building blocks that our boys used to play with when they were little, painted them white, and wrapped them in baggies to make them look like bricks of cocaine. A pretty convincing looking coke lab was set up in the basement of my mother’s house. It was the glorious controlled anarchy that is the currency in which youth traffics.
Ethan asked if one of “the cool cars” could make an appearance in the film. We settled on having the coke dealer drive my 1999 M Coupe. To save on insurance costs, Ethan is excluded from coverage on this car, and I was hesitant to simply hand the keys to the actor playing the dealer and say “return it when you’re done,” so I accompanied them to my mother’s house where the scene was being shot. Ethan said to the actor “you exit the house, walk down the stairs, and get into the car. Then we’ll cut. Dad, then you get into the car, we’ll start filming again, and you drive it off.” I asked if the only reason for this was so no one other than me was driving the car. Ethan nodded. I said “I have no objection if he just pulls it away from the curb.” Ethan was grateful for the simplification.
So I stood off to the side, out of the camera shot, as they yelled “action.” The actor came down the stairs, headed for the M Coupe. I noticed a car coming down the street. No problem, I thought, someone will stop filming. But no one did. The car came closer. The actor started the M Coupe. Ok, I thought, don’t be a nervous Nelly; there are at least four sets of eyes other than yours. Then, he began to pull out – directly in front of the approaching car. “STOP!” I screamed. The car’s bumper was about six inches from the M Coupe’s fender.
The actor was very embarrassed. He backed up, rolled down the window, and asked sheepishly “Do you just want to drive it?” I said “I have no objection if you pull my car away from the curb, but you have to look, just like you would with any other car!”
They spent Saturday filming, and Saturday night and Sunday editing. Some of the crew members were literally up all night. The finished product needed to be handed in, on a thumbdrive, at a bar in downtown Boston, by 7:30pm. Google Maps put the bar at a highly optimistic 12 minutes from my house. It’s said that work expands to fill the time allotted, but the reverse is rarely true, so Ethan planned that, at 6:55pm, they’d export whatever they had. At 6pm, they did a test export and found that their 4gb thumbdrive wouldn’t hold the movie. I volunteered to find a bigger drive. I headed for a nearby Staples but was surprised to find that they close at 6pm on Sundays. Fortunately I found a Walgreens that had one 8gb drive left.
I arrived home with the thumbdrive at 6:45pm. Ten minutes later they started to export the movie, and were greeted with the slowest moving progress bar in history. 7:00 passed. 7:05. 7:10. 7:15. They were staring at the unthinkable—not getting the movie submitted in time. Finally, at 7:20, the export was done. They double-clicked on the file to make sure it would play (not that there was any time to do anything if it didn’t), then Ethan and I took the thumbdrive, ran out the door, hopped in the M Coupe, and burned rubber. These days I’m usually pretty tame at the wheel, but if ever there was a time to stand on it, this was it. I hit the entrance ramp and redlined it through three gears, topping out just short of triple digits. I flew past cars. Where necessary, I passed people on the right. In short, I drove like some asshole in a BMW. As the clock ticked past 7:25, I turned to Ethan and said “We’re not going to make it.” He sighed, and said, with a good deal of resignation, “I know, dad.”
Maybe I was driving fast enough that we were experiencing time dilation, but as we approached the Copley exit, the clock read 7:29. Holy crap, I said, we might actually make this thing. After doing this mini version of that M Coupe Ghostrider video on YouTube, we got off the Mass Pike, made three quick rights, then Ethan said “That’s the bar! Stop the car!” He jumped out and dashed across the street. I looked at my cell phone. It said 7:33. I was prepared to console a dejected child.
But then Ethan appeared with a Cheshire Cat grin and proudly announced “I walked in, to huge applause, with 10 seconds left.” We laughed and high-fived. Ethan said that the maniac drive may have been his favorite part of the weekend. That night he posted on Facebook “No one drives like my dad.” It may have been my proudest moment as a parent.
The next day Ethan called me to tell me that the film had been disqualified because the file on the thumbdrive didn’t play. Something went wrong in the export. And because everything has to be done in 48 hours, “Oh, sorry, I’ll send you the right file” is not an option.
Unfortunately, life is sometimes like that. But for 13 impossible minutes, in a silver M Coupe, father and son nearly slipped the surly bonds of Earth. It was glorious.
If that’s not a binding experience with a family member and a car, I don’t know what is.
Winding the tape back a few years earlier, when Ethan was completing his senior year in high school, I’d owned the M Coupe for about a year, and he asked me if he could take it to his senior prom. For the same insurance reason listed above, I told him no, which surprised him, as I said yes to most things. But one of the common decision metrics in my life is not to take unnecessary risks unless there’s a good supporting reason to do so, and the excluded-driver-taking-the-bullet-fast-car-on-prom-night decision wasn’t even close. (Of course, in the risk / reward parlance, I viewed that there was no “reward,” but I’m sure he viewed it very differently :^). However, before Ethan moved out to Los Angeles in 2012, although he was still excluded on the car’s policy, I did let him pilot the car one exit up and back on I-95 with me planted in the passenger seat, and explicitly gave the the Kirk / Sulu “You may indulge yourself” green light on one long entrance ramp.
Returning to the present, when Ethan learned that I was selling the M Coupe, he asked if he could drive it one final time. I thought about recreating our trip into downtown Boston albeit without being two assholes in a BMW, but I settled instead for handing him the keys on a flawless late August Saturday morning with the unmistakable crack of September in the air and asking him to stay on lightly-populated roads. He returned an hour later with a smile similar to the one he had when his thumbdrive had been accepted.
As I write this, I’m off to Truro (the north end of Cape Cod) with my darling wife Maire Anne for a few days to celebrate our 42nd anniversary. I thought about taking the M Coupe to let the two of us at long last have something resembling a road trip in it, but the specter of back pain and the risk of damage to a car that a buyer has given a deposit on (plus the fact that half the trip is just sitting in traffic on Rt 6) made me think better of it. Besides, the suitcases, beach chairs, guitar, and cooler will be a much easier fit into the E39.
Plus, I’m of two minds about giving a sold car a memorable final drive. On the one hand, as I say in an old song of mine, endings should be sharp and clear; you should remember the last time you drove a beloved vehicle before you sold it. But on the other hand, since I’ve sold these four cars precisely because they’ve been sitting in storage without my really using them, maybe it’s best just to let them slip away in the night.
Hey, maybe I should just shoot a movie about whatever I decide to do. After all, considering the car’s two unintended bits of drama in Ethan’s film plus the video the car and I did with Magnus Walker, that seems to be the M Coupe’s go-to move for creating memorable moments.
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newly-expanded book The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies (including the new Best Of) from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com/books.
