Steve McQueen is Dead

May 14 2020

My first car

had a manual transmission.

One hand, lightly cupping the knob

that sat on top of the shifter

slipping it deftly through the gears.

Right foot on the throttle,

so an almost effortless touch

gave me total command

over 2 tonnes of machinery

and inexhaustible speed.

But what made me at one with the car

was the precise feel of the clutch.

Which was muscle memory, as much as anything;

expertly feathered

with a firm left foot,

until I felt it connect

and the engine grab

and the car surge.

Ratcheting up through the gears, smooth as silk,

listening to the wound-up sound

of barely muffled power,

from a low burbling rumble

to a high sweet whine.

While the radio

is blasting out driving songs

about fast cars

and broken hearts

and long open highways.

Now, all they sell are automatics,

smooth hydraulic systems

that seamlessly slip through the gears

sensibly hushed.

No longer are there driving gloves

and soft felt caps

and loosely knotted scarves.

Or roadsters, rag-tops, death-traps

unsafe at any speed.

Driving is utilitarian

the manliness is gone.

Steve McQueen is dead,

and we are all soulless passengers

in the back seat

of generic cars

with a chauffeur at the wheel.

Who can't drive stick.

Don't listen to songs

about heartbreak and highways

and young men heading west.

And don't take long aimless road trips,

hoping to fall in love

or find ourselves

or find our way home

again.

This makes it sound as if my first new car was a Porsche or Ferrari. In fact, it was a 1979 Honda Civic. I liked driving stick – the feeling of control and mastery, the involvement with the business of driving that it called for – but in that car I certainly never experienced either the “surge” of power or the “high sweet whine”!

I don't know what future readers will make of this poem. What will they think when the internal combustion engine has been consigned to the dustbin of history? Will our descendants shake their heads in wonder that we were actually getting around in these inefficient, polluting, flammable, noisy vehicles; dark clouds of poisonous exhaust choking out of their tailpipes? There is a romance to shifting through the gears of a gas-powered automobile. But the truth is, the performance of electrics – accelerating faster while having no need of a transmission – is far superior.

It's odd that I wrote this poem, since the last thing I am is a car guy. I can't fix a car. I rarely even pop the hood. And I'm quite content with a utilitarian vehicle. I still drive a small Japanese car: I could easily afford a luxury vehicle, but I just don't care. An attentive reader might infer this from my reference to “death-traps”; and I hope the same reader will get that I'm using the word “manliness” ironically.

(If I had used it unironically, it would have been unforgivably sexist. Because while the attributes we traditionally consider manly are still legitimate – there is still an understanding of traditional gender roles, and we all know what manliness is supposed to mean – we now recognize that they could equally belong to anyone. The exclusion of all but men is what makes the word sexist. It is trapped by its etymology.)

Or somewhat ironically. Because I have to admit to being as susceptible to the romance of fast cars and the open road as anyone. In fact, the inspiration for this poem came from just this sort of imagery. Although from an unlikely place. I've been watching Jerry Seinfeld's Netflix series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. In the last short episode I saw, he was driving an immaculate 1979 Porsche 930 (hard to believe it was the same year as my long deceased Honda), and prior to that a 1971 Ferrari. I think of Seinfeld as a kind of every-man; hardly a Steve McQueen icon of masculinity. But he is a car person and very much at home in a car. He drives with ease: navigating traffic and keeping up his half of the witty conversation while smoothly and expertly slipping through the gears like a race car driver on a closed track. Seeing him like this transformed my view of him: I saw a confident, comfortable, mature man, rather than the somewhat whiny, self-absorbed, superannuated adolescent of his famous sitcom. Without the shifting, this imagery would never have worked so well. And it made me think back to when I also drove one. In my '79 Civic, I was hardly Jerry Seinfeld, let alone Steve McQueen. But at least I could drive a stick!