Movie Stars and Totaled Cars (Holly Schindler)

I started my driving life with a 1986 red Ford Tempo:

I inherited it from my dad. He bought it new, and I started driving it in 1993. I knocked the front of it off less than a year later, in a fender-bender. We had it fixed. About halfway through college, in 1997, I got in another wreck, and I totaled it. 

I remember spending the summer after that last wreck shopping for a new car. After Dad got off work, we'd drive to addresses listed in the Classifieds in the Springfield News-Leader (!) One night, we were stopped at a light and I happened to look at the truck idling next to us. A black thing, the front all banged up. I remember thinking how lucky the guy driving was, since whatever he'd hit hadn't messed the truck up so bad that it had been totaled. I remember wishing that I was driving around a mangled-up Tempo and not in the special hell of trying to buy a new car before the fall semester started. 

And then I looked at the driver. In August, in Missouri, he was completely covered up. Sweatshirt, ball cap, sunglasses. And wearing a full beard that I swore I'd seen a couple years ago. In a movie. Legends of the Fall.

When I got home that night, I told my brother, "I think Brad Pitt's home. I think I saw him driving--"

"--a black truck with that messed up front," he finished. "It's him. He comes by the drive-thru almost every night about eleven." (My brother was working a Burger King that summer.)

We did wind up buying a new car in time for the fall. Bought it from a dealership, spent more than we wanted. But what else is new, right? 

Before we bought it, I saw Pitt several more times. Always covered up, always driving the same truck. 

And I always wondered how many of us knew who he was, just let him go his way without any fanfare, driving that crummy old black truck, just like any other hometown boy.

~

Holly Schindler is the author of the YA A Blue So Dark