Beaters
January 20, 2026
by William P. Meyers

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His mother had dropped out of high school but would not admit to that fact for another decade or two. She had beaten him constantly while he was a child, with all the combined fury of the religions of her own two parents, one Southern Baptist, the other Methodist. Whenever he failed at something, usually due to anxiety, he blamed the beatings. Despite that, or partly because of it, the previous spring, he had graduated from Brown University with a degree in Political Philosophy.

He had avoided driving until then, but was feeling inadequate because of it, so he took the driving test and received his license. His plan was to buy a beater, drive to Ohio to pick up Patti, his girlfriend, and then drive her to Providence, where she had two years of college to complete. Then he would look for a job, a mysteriously hard to find object in 1976, in the midst of the Great Stagflation. With the beater he could drive to wherever he might like.

He had first heard the term "beater" while hitchhiking north on Interstate 5, heading from a failed love tryst back to Providence for his senior year. He liked the romance of hitch-hiking, but it could be a nerve-racking business. Twice he had been assaulted. Several times he had slept beside the highway overnight, unable to flag a ride. Somewhere in Maryland an old car, maybe a mid-1960s Ford sedan, pulled over. A fat man, black, probably older than him by a few years, was driving. This font of wisdom advised him to buy a beater, an old cheap car. You could buy one for as little as $50.00, he said. If you got a few hundred miles out of it, it was worth it, he said. And sometimes you could get thousands of miles out of one, if you were lucky.

He began to notice beaters, parked or on the roads. He seldom had $50 to spend, but he had worked long hours at minimum wage his senior year so that he could both get enough to eat and have a bit of money when he graduated. Upon graduation, he hitchhiked to West Virginia where he worked construction at a non-profit for food and a bed in a bunk house. Then he hitched back to his hometown, Jacksonville, Florida, got his driver's license, and looked for a good beater. He found an old Ford Falcon, 1965, blue, looking pretty good, and paid $150 cash for it.

His mother had already given his brother two cars, over the years, and so he thought she might reimburse him the $150 dollars. But she did not. Perhaps if she had been buying yet another new car for herself she might have given him the old car. The rule, growing up, was that she got a new car about every two years. His father would then take her former car. His brother would get the father's car. His brother was now the clear family favorite, joining the family business, the Marine Corps.

He drove the Ford Falcon back to West Virginia. There he had trouble getting it started again. He determined that there was a short circuit because the exhaust pipe had worked its way, rubbing away insulation, to come into contact with an electrical grounding point. The only easy way he could see to fix it was to put some new insulator between the pipe and the point. Two buddies were there talking nearby when he crawled under the car. It was on a slight slope, and he had not blocked the tires. But he had engaged the parking brake. Under the car, after he put in the insulation, as he started to worm his way out, he accidentally hit the parking brake cable. That disengaged the brake. The car started to roll. His friends saw this and panicked. He looked at the clearance and just let the car roll over him. When he saw how freaked out his friends were he could not help but laugh.

In Cleveland he picked up his girlfriend, then headed east on I-90. In the middle of New York he hit his brakes to slow down to exit and get gas, only to find no resistance to his foot, until the brake pedal was against the floor. He panicked a bit but left his foot off the gas and glided stop, using the emergency brake. He did not have roadside service; this was long before cellphones. He had heard that sometimes brake pressure could be restored by backing up and then hitting the brake pedal. He tried that. To his surprise, it worked. He thought of going to a repair shop, thought of how little money he had left on him, and kept going. But he worried the whole way to Providence. He was happy to park the Falcon and move Patti into her dorm. He meant to have the brakes looked at, but he never did. He did pay for a new battery.

He moved into a group house far enough from the U to be in a run-down, working class neighborhood. His friends were either still at college and living in dorms, or had returned to their hometowns, except a couple who were also just hanging around. An enterprising Brown student whose parents owned two run-down rental houses put Jack together with three other roommates, two senior students and an ex-student who had dropped out, but intended to go back, maybe. Only one of them had a car, also a beater, an old Chevy. Strangely the owner was from a rich family. Turned out Aaron had a gambling habit and had lost the nice Beamer his family had given him. A year later, after he graduated, his father bought him a seat on the Chicago Commodities Exchange, but for a year they had the beaters in common.

Jack kept applying for jobs he thought he had earned by getting a college degree, and even had interviews a few times, but he might as well have been reliving the Great Depression for all he could tell. He applied for many minimum wage jobs too and got one working at a convenience store on Thayer Avenue just about the time he was down to his last dollar.

He read books and he tried to write stories, with no success. His girlfriend was beginning to suspect she had hooked up with the wrong guy. Some friends heard there were a lot of jobs in Wyoming. Four of them took off in a beater. They found work in Gillette building a railroad line. They crowed to him they were getting two times minimum wage, yet there was a shortage of workers. He invited himself to join them. There was a sale on bus tickets; he did not take the Falcon. He did not trust it for a long journey and was again low on cash. He left the keys so his apartment mates could use it.

The railroad gang was extremely hard labor. After the first day he was hardly able to move. He lay in their tent at the KOA campground on the second day. On his third day in Gillette he went to the unemployment office and got half a day of work helping load a household's goods into a moving van. On the fourth day he went back to the railroad. By the seventh day he was handling it reasonably well. But as soon as his friends had enough cash they wanted to move on. They had all read On the Road and tales of hip lifestyles. Without his friends' car he had no way to get to the job site. So he went with them, heading to San Francisco, though he already knew the beat and hippy days were long gone.

In Reno when he called Patti to tell her what was going on she said he had been offered a job. A year earlier he had taken the federal civil service test but had heard a job was unlikely. She read him the offer, he called and accepted the job. It would be in Washington D.C. He said goodbye to his friends and boarded yet another bus, back to Providence. As luck would have it his sister, Juliet, was living in a group house, off-campus, while studying at Georgetown. She said he could sleep on the couch, for a couple of days at least, while he looked for an apartment. Back in Providence, picking up his scant possessions, he decided the beater would be more trouble than it was worth. He had already learned that parking is the bane of urban existence, unless you have a garage or driveway. Eventually it was towed and auctioned for scrap.

Later Jack did have one more beater. Despite the pay, the nice feeling of having money for food, rent, clothing, and the occasional luxury, he could not stand the bureaucratic life. He had a good idea, he thought (not knowing what publishers wanted) for a novel. He believed he would never be able to write it if he stayed at his job at Biometric Statistics, Inc. Provided he could find a cheap enough room to rent, he figured he could work on the novel for a year. Then he could get another job while he tried to find a publisher.

He wanted to live in San Francisco, which still had the aura of a city of artists back in1979. He wanted to do some camping first, so he bought another beater. This one was a 1967 Dodge Dart with a white rust-stained exterior and yet another problem he did not know about when he bought it for $300. The problem was it leaked or burned oil at a prodigious rate. He first saw the red low-oil light go on about 200 miles out of D.C. After that he got used to buying several quarts of oil and putting one in after about each two hours of driving. Other than that it ran fine. He stopped in Chicago for one last visit with Patti, who was going to graduate school. That did not go well. But he was on the road, like his Beatnik writer-heroes, feeling generous when he picked up hitchhikers. He camped out along the way, then spent two weeks hiking around a national forest in Montana.

Eventually he arrived in Seattle. Despite his vast wealth he slept in his car for a few days until he found a room to rent for a month, super cheap because it was summer and near the University of Washington. Sublets used to be cheap, back then, near colleges during summer recesses. He made friends with his new roommates, explored Seattle, but made little progress on the novel. He was tempted, partly by a female house mate, to stay in Seattle, but when the month was over headed down I-5 towards San Franciso. One hitchhiker went the whole way with him, sleeping with him in the parks they stayed at overnight.

On the way south the Dodge developed two separate problems. Somewhere in Oregon the engine made unmistakable sounds of misfiring on one cylinder. More of a gap in the normal song, plus trouble accelerating. They pulled into a rest area. While lacking in automobile mechanic expertise, Jack did know that the firing of each cylinder depended on just a few factors, including getting gas and air into the cylinder, plus the electric spark. The spark was generated by a spark plug, which in turn was charged by the alternator and generator or battery. Jack opened the hood, looking first for an obvious loose connection. Then he started unscrewing the spark plugs one by one. He had heard sometimes you could give new life to a sparkplug by resetting the gap, or even just be cleaning it if it got fouled up. If that did not work, he would have to find an automobile parts store and buy a new one.

An old man (in Jack's young view) pulled up in an old camper truck and, after a while, asked Jack what the problem was. When Jack found the obviously defective spark plug the man said he just might have a replacement. He went back to his camper and emerged with an old coffee can. In it were quite a few spark plugs. The old man, bald and in jeans and a white t-shirt, matched one plug to the one from the Dart. Jack screwed it in, reattached the electrical cable, and tested the ignition. The sound of all six cylinders firing brought joy to Jack. He had hardly said thanks to his benefactor before the man said he had to get on his way, walked to his camper, and started off. Jack would sometimes remember that act of kindness and help out someone in distress.

The second problem came when they were in northern California. He had noticed the gas seemed to be dropping faster than it should. He pulled into a roadside park with overnight camping. Almost as soon as he got out of the car he smelled gasoline. He looked under the car. A tiny but continuous stream of gas was coming out of the tank and starting to form a puddle on the ground. He moved his hitchhiker away from the car and stopped the leak with a finger. After some thought he decided to try using the small tube of cement in his toolkit. Applying some to a small square of metal from an aluminum can (which he had cut out and flattened), he held the patch against the tank. Looking at his Timex watch, he waited 20 minutes, then risked taking the pressure off. The patch held. He checked it frequently before bedding down with the girl. The next morning he worried the vibrations from driving might break it off, but whenever he checked it was okay. He knew he should buy a new gas tank, or at least put on a better patch, but he never did.

The hitchhiker was visiting a friend in Berkeley, so he stayed with her there overnight. He heard the rents were much higher in San Francsico than in Oakland, so he searched the bulletin boards (old-fashioned walls with paper notices stapled or taped to them) for a cheap place to stay. He found one in Emeryville, between Oakland and Berkeley. But the old roommate had not moved out yet, he would need to wait until the first of the month. He looked at the rates at the local Single Room Occupancy hotels, was surprised at the high rates, and decided he had better maximize his writing period instead. So he slept in the beater. One night he slept in the hills near the U. Berkeley campus, but there were a lot of homeless people up there, one angry one yelled at him, so he gave up on that idea.

The people in the house were friendly and mostly in post-hippy mode. They tried to eat natural foods, they listened to rock music, and they had enough prior experience with bad roommates to consider him a good one. His room was barely big enough for a single bed and a tiny table. The house had been abandoned, then bought from the city for $600 on the promise of making it habitable. The owner, a construction guy, lived there with his girlfriend and one of his crew, the crew member's wife, and two young single women.

It took Jack a while to realize that they were all meth heads. The guys worked but the women were all on SSI, for mental disabilities. It was a scam he had already heard of. Go to a doctor, act a bit crazy, get on SSI, no more having to go to work. Apparently, back then, the rents were so low that SSI covered the rent and a modest amount of crystal meth. Jack focused on his book. He knew crystal meth had a bad reputation. Life expectancy after getting a habit was six months to a year. But there were also long-term meth users, who somehow kept their habits under control. Like Barry, the owner, who mainly used meth to work long hours. All his housemates were moderate users, by meth head standards.

The neighborhood was run down and semi-industrial. The good thing was there was street parking for the beater. After closer examination he found that a plug had been removed, or fallen out, off the engine, which was why it leaked so much oil. He did not drive it much, except to buy groceries for the household.

The writing went better. He focused his life around it until he finished a first draft. He learned one of his college friends was living in New York City and would soon be looking for a new roommate. He could not see driving the Dart across the nation given that its motor was now running rough and he was afraid of the cost of repair. When the NYC room became available he flew to there, to another room about the size of a large closet, in the Lower East Side. He kept in touch with his meth head friends for a while. They told him other meth heads, not them of course, had sold his Dodge Dart for parts. They offered to mail him some meth, in compensation.

Copyright 2026 by William P. Meyers