Thirty-seven years ago, I was driving east through the mountains of Pennsylvania along Interstate 80. It was winter but I’d caught a break in the weather: it was smooth sailing, as I like to say. Certainly no reason to think something bad would happen.
My car was a 1978 Ford LTD Coupe. It was huge, heavy, and baby-piss yellow. The suspensions on those gas-guzzling monsters made it more like driving a boat. Lane changes felt like being rocked by a wave.
I was a sucker for CB radios back then. Although the fad ended in the 70s, I didn’t want to give up on it, and installed a radio under the dash, all by myself. I didn’t really know much about the electrical system in cars, but it wasn’t that hard to find the fuse box and jam the wires in there. I mean, why pay a professional to plug in a couple of wires?
Image by Frank Schwichtenberg
licensed via Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
“Wait,” you might be asking. “Why would anyone want a CB radio a decade after they were cool?”
Let me answer that with a Q&A session:
QUESTION: Were CB radios ever really cool?
ANSWER: Define “cool.”
QUESTION: Cool, as in, did a CB radio ever get someone laid, like the way playing a guitar well can get someone laid?
ANSWER: Does using a CB radio to schedule an appointment with a sex worker at a truck stop count as getting laid?
QUESTION: No, dude. Not cool.
To be clear (for all you pervs out there), I certainly never got laid—in any fashion—because of a CB radio. Quite the opposite.
I admit a CB radio in 1988 was extra-nerdy. I told myself that I was going to find out about speed traps and traffic slow downs. The truth is that I thought it was cool the way eight-year-olds enjoy using walkie-talkies, and I never had anyone to share a walkie-talkie with when I was eight.
CB radio was my walkie-talkie!
So there I was on Interstate 80, headed east along the mountains of Pennsylvania in winter. As night fell, the traffic grew sparse, and for mountain after mountain, I was alone on the road. Soon my headlights were the only light, and it was especially eerie climbing up a mountain and racing down the other side with only fifty feet of pavement in my field of view.
As I twisted along the highway with only my headlights to guide me, feeling bored, and maybe a little lonely, I turned on my CB radio to see if anyone was out there.
Something must have been wrong with the electrical wiring because my headlights cut out, plunging me into darkness as the highway twisted around the side of the mountain.
The wiring was not my first thought, of course. I was too busy panicking, bracing myself for a plunge into the darkness and down into the abyss.
I thought of that terrible moment last week when I repeated the journey, driving east on I-80. I was in a much more stable car, with plenty of modern safety features. I don’t do any of my own electrical work now, but none of that can protect me from a lunatic.
As traffic moved along, slowing down as we climbed up a mountain, and speeding up coming down the other side, a guy in Camry came racing up doing 90 mph at least. I saw him in the mirror swerving around trucks, shooting into gaps between cars.
He flew past and was quickly out of view. I relaxed, thinking I would only see him again if he crashed.
But just a couple miles later he was tailgating a truck, doing less than fifty as they ascended a mountain. What was the hurry for that?
I had a chance to look at him: non-descript white guy in his thirties. His head was resting on his right shoulder. I think there was something wrong with him, like medically wrong.
Sure enough, a few miles later, he came racing past again, taking the shoulder to pass some cars, and squeezing between a pickup and a semi, splitting the lanes.
Whatever was causing his reckless driving, be it drunkenness, a stroke, or good old stupidity, I could only think of my stupid moment decades ago when my CB radio installation that saved me a few bucks nearly cost me my life.
Back on that mountain, clutching the wheel as I struggled on the highway, hoping my eyes would hurry up and adjust to the darkness, I managed to find my way to the shoulder and bring the car to a stop.
I flipped the light switch on and off to no avail. Finally suspecting my wiring job, I reached under the dash and jiggled the power wire for the CB radio. The lights came back on.
Thinking I’d solved the problem, I continued my journey through the mountains.
As you might suspect, the headlights went out again. Despite being terrified of going off the road and plunging down the side of the mountain, I deftly reached under the dash and jiggled the wires until the headlights came back on.
For the next four hours, that’s how I made my way through the mountains: jiggling the CB radio wire whenever the headlights turned off.
If you think that’s the dumbest thing I did back in the 1980s, track down my friends. They probably can tell you a dozen or so things I did that were dumber.
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
Ashley Undone, a crime story and family drama, is available for pre-order. Set in Ann Arbor, it’s a Cinderella story pitting love of family against the evil of greed.
Reviews and early sales help a book more than anything. If you enjoy my stories here, you’ll love Ashley Undone.
For those of you here on the Picayune, if you let me know you bought the pre-order of Ashley Undone, I’ll send you a collection of Mickey Picayunes covering 2019-2024.
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https://storyoriginapp.com/to/gvgZ7CG
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All the best,
Mickey
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