Southerners invented NASCAR to give the boys who transported bootleg ‘shine something to do with their hopped-up hotrods in their downtime. “Granddaddy ran whiskey in a big-block Dodge,” sings Steve Earle in the hillbilly anthem “Copperhead Road.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc86_Weoye0
The last of my blood kin to have made and marketed moonshine (that I know of) is my maternal great grandfather. I’ve never needed eight cylinders.
Want? That’s another story. I lust after cars, specifically big American gas guzzlers of the muscle-car and land-yacht genres.
That scene from “Thunder Road,” where Robert Mitchum flicks a lit cigarette into the car of the T-man trying to run Mitchum’s shine-wagon off the road. That scene makes my heart flutter. (Click post title).
Today I drive a Subaru Outback. It’s fun, safe and appropriate. The closest I ever got to those 3 qualities in a daily driver was a 1999 2WD Chevy pickup with a small-block V-8. It got 20-plus MPG, and I “squalled tires,” as they say back home, aplenty in that puppy.
A redneck heart still races in my chest. And will until they haul me to the graveyard in an American-brand V-8 hearse. Cremate me if all they can get for the job is a Volvo or some such shit as that.
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