When I came up with the phrase, “in my daddy’s rented Cadillac” — I knew the Caddy would have to come to a violent end, hopefully along with the presumably rich and spoiled young protagonist.
Without doubt, the more interesting part of this story — who this young wastrel is/was, what he did to warrant (what increasingly seemed like it would have to be) a fiery demise, who he’d be thinking about in those final moments, who he’d leave behind — all of that got left out of this song.
All that’s left is a kind of man and the road saga of a compulsive drive on a spooky night culminating in… the end of the song.
When I left the high school dance
in my daddy’s rented Cadillac
I didn’t know what trouble was
I didn’t know there was no way back
The moon was a hole in the night sky
heaven knows who was looking in
The night was a hole in my life
and I didn’t know I was falling in
I made it past dead man’s curve
and the cliff at the top of the hill
I glided deftly through the hairpin turns
past the old graveyard that’s not quite full
I drove up that twisted mountain road
straight up into the night
Now I was totally all alone
drving through a hole in my life
My heart was pounding but my hands were dry
The engine was throbbing and the gears whined
My mind was racing at the speed of light
and my knuckles on the wheels glowed ghostly white
My life was the road and the road was my life
as it twisted and turned into the night
The road was the world and the world was night
as I rounded the bend and drove straight into the light
My eyes were shadows in the back of my brain
My mind was unravelling and my soul was in flames
The car was gone I was cut loose in space
Dogs from heaven laughed in my face
I was spinning I was falling I was going down
fallilng through a world without light or sound
I was watching from a hill from far away
when the Caddy hit the gas truck —
great balls of flame!
A couple weeks into the new semester and he found himself not in his Comp Civ 300 class but floating lazily in a creaky-oared rowboat on the tiny pond of a WPA-built park, tucked away in the foothills, a pretty, green-eyed sophomore facing him as he put up the oars.
130 year old oaks reached out from the edges of the rowing pond and an old Spanish American War cannon poked proudly from a cement nook. When he was a kid, the ornamental wall around the cannon wasn’t there. And there were a few other cannons, as well, strewn haphazardly along the banks. Like toys a once-proud owner couldn’t bear to throw out, he thought once, walking through the deserted park long after closing.
There’d been an older man rowing aimlessly around the pond when they got there but his time ran out or he got bored soon enough and they were left alone on the water. A radio buzzed faintly from the boathouse and a handful of little kids played on the cannon. It was a weekday and quiet enough that he could hear the nearly still water lapping gently against the boat.
He had the oars up and now sprawled out his legs and leaned back, gazing at her.
A trio of crows flew in loose formation across the half-sky that opened between the trees over the pond. Faint, rippled clouds floated high in a preternaturally blue sky. A pair of ducks quacked in undecipherable sequence from the other side of the pont, 50 yards away. In the boathouse, somebody changed the radio from one rock station to another. So faint he almost couldn’t make it out: Sam Cook’s “You Send Me.”
She was wearing a white, linen dress… the kind where the neckline is low and the shoulders are apparently designed to keep falling down the arm . Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders, a half smile played on her unrouged lips and her green eyes held his gaze. Her long, tanned leg reached out so her sandal-less foot could momentarily touch the side of his thigh. In the moment of the gesture he found a world of dreams and fears, swirling like a cosmos in formation then disappearing back into whatever dimension holds our deepest and most secret longings.
