P.J. O'Rourke: Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending
Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending, by P.J. O’Rourke, Atlantic Monthly Press, $24
Humorist and occasional C/D contributor P.J. O’Rourke, the son and grandson of car dealers in Ohio, has released this anthology of stories, collected principally from Car and Driver and Automobile.
Several are set in Baja, including C/D’s ill-advised 1983 comparison test, in which every car was wrecked or drowned. “We decided that driving at night was dangerous,” O’Rourke recalls. “Unfortunately, it was night when we decided this. Csaba Csere promptly hit a cow. It did a flip, leaving two pointy horn dents in the roof of a Dodge 600ES. Also, the radiator was crushed. We pushed the Dodge 60 miles to Cabo with an Audi 5000S. Then we all got sick.”
Driving across India in a Land Rover, O’Rourke recalls tallying the daily Tata wrecks. “Probable loss of life was needed to make the list,” he insisted. At the end of one particularly gruesome day, he shouted to his companions, “That’s 25 fatals! I had the over! I win today’s truck-wreck pool!” He added that Calcutta “appeared to be an educational diorama: the History of Mess.”
O’Rourke goes on to describe how to drive a 1956 Buick cross-country (it broke down every day), how to ride a Harley with David E. Davis Jr., and how to intimidate male drivers in L.A while piloting a ’67 Mustang obtained from Rent-a-Wreck. His tactic was to fill up their rearview mirrors with “a full nine yards of ruptured Mustang grille with one headlight pointed at Voyager 2 and the other searching for nightcrawlers.”
Driving Like Crazy is funny, all of it, aside from some gratuitous shots at Barack Obama, whose goal, O’Rourke reckons, is to relieve all Americans of their car keys.
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