How an '81 Chevy Monte Carlo Ended the Love of My Life, Before It Even Started

[This reminiscence and celebration of love is dedicated to Tim and Amy Driscoll and Jim and Becky Kronk, University of Dayton graduates who met their lifelong partners in love on our campus. Their love has sustained and inspired me for decades, and I am honored and blessed to call them friends for life.]

Kelly McCarthy of St. Louis, Missouri, sat up near the front in my speech class at the University of Dayton in September 1986. Quite by design every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that semester I sat three chairs behind and one row over to her right — 12 feet, 7 inches of separation, to be exact. It was for both of us our very first semester on campus. I hadn’t spoken a word to Kelly that September before I knew that I was feverishly, outlandishly, and irrevocably in love with her.

Quite tragically, I was also too shy to ever speak to Kelly that semester. Or the next. (A principal drawback of same-sex education in high school is the potential for deficient development socially with the opposite sex.) I spent the entire fall semester silently seated behind Kelly in a reverie I’d never before experienced, admiring, dreaming, and swooning. At the class ending bell I’d wait 7 or 8 seconds for her to stand up and depart the classroom, then trail her first down three flights of stairs in the Communications building and then out wherever she roamed about campus — always at a discreet distance — before ending my devotion-stalking for a path toward my next class.

This was how I expressed my devotion.

Kelly was majestically, captivatingly petite, delightfully diminutive, with a marvelous mane of long, thick, brown curls. She had blue eyes that pierced my soul, and the briefest of shared glances with her would paralyze me. Her skin seemed to absorb the summer sun in perfect doses of browning exquisiteness. If you were all about blondes you’d behold Kelly and convert.

Often Kelly was easily absorbed in and lost among the congested pedestrian traffic of campus, but her lush curls had a way of projecting the top of her form out to me amid the throngs of undergrads that especially cluttered the courtyard in the center of campus. I also like to believe that I developed Kelly Radar that first semester, a honing and tracking acumen no other suitor could possibly have had.

It was a semester of agony and ecstasy for me. Tuesdays and Thursdays without speech class were endurance trials, and if Kelly ever missed class I was of a mind to inform either the campus’ medical office or its police, or both, to initiate inquiries. I was an East Coaster living a very new life at school in the Midwest, and in my earliest hours there I’d fallen hard for a Midwest girl. I just couldn’t tell her. I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of my feelings and the unimaginably daunting endeavor of ever sharing them with her.

I went home for Christmas and instantly became irritated by the utterances my family directed at me, all of them, all holiday break long, intruding as they did on my meditations and reveries of my beloved, then some 800 miles from me. After Christmas break I returned to school for a new semester and was confronted by an academic calendar devoid of any classes with Kelly. A Catholic at a Catholic university, I began questioning my faith.

Campus, though not quite State U-sized, was large enough to make happenstance proximity encounters with Kelly a bit of a lottery winning — the more so in the dead of Ohio winter — and this only added to my vexation. Occasionally I would see her in the Student Union dining hall for meals, always surrounded and clogged out from engagement at her table by friends and dorm-mates (not that I would have had the courage to engage her anyway), and increasingly I became burdened by the worst thought any man of my heart then could harbor: As metaphysically certain as it was that 100 percent of male students on campus held Kelly in the same esteem I did, I was playing with a roulette of cruel time, of certain defeat. Absent some fit of courage without precedent, without some manner of remedy for my agony, I would lose Kelly to another guy. And soon.

Winter 1987 began transitioning to spring, and I was lodged in a purgatory of perpetual pining and inertia from fear and inexperience with love, seemingly powerless to advance my cause. I badly needed an advisor and advocate, a sympathetic soul to whom I could bare my tormented soul. And in the UD Ghetto garden apartment directly above mine I found her: Jean from Chicago, a stunning beauty herself and like me an English major.

I’d had a couple of classes with Jean that first year at UD, but our real bonding arrived from impulsive study breaks, with beers, in our respective apartments. On our final night together at the end of that first academic year, while on about beer number three, I started to tell Jean about Kelly and my hopeless, tormenting love. I remember stammering out only the peripheral basics — “Kelly, from St. Louis, luscious brown curls and entrancing blue eyes, we had speech class together last semester . . .” — before Jean halted me hard in my soul-baring.

“Oh . . . my . . . God,” the Chicagoan exclaimed, wild-eyed.

“Kelly McCarthy is pledging Alpha Phi,” the sophomore Alpha Phi sister and sorority officer exclaimed. “Kelly is my little sister sorority pledge . . .”

Some 35 years later I can in my mind’s eye still see Jean’s grand grin from that moment.

“We got this.”

Thanks to Jean I left Ohio for home and summer break a few days later a remade man, curious but comforted. I was at least of a mind to have primitive dialogue with my family that summer, perhaps even skeletal associations approaching those of ordinary teens with their parents and siblings. But Kelly was never far from thoughts.

I spent the summer working on the maintenance crew of a private golf club, earning free golf there every Monday, and the exhausting, arduous work helped me pass the torture time away from Kelly. Out in the blistering Mid-Atlantic summer sun, in total, blissful solitude, with a Walk-man and headphones and the Cure and the Fixx and A Flock of Seagulls drowning out the hum of mowing and maintenance equipment, I thought about little else but my St. Louis siren. My labor that summer was long and hot and sweaty, beginning at a godforsaken hour each day, and poorly compensated, but it afforded me an escape of solitude, riding a fairway or greens mower or four-wheeler sandtrap rake, by which to meditate about Kelly, and I loved how every week that passed brought me closer to my return to campus, to Jean’s counsel and friendship — and, God willing, her advocacy — and most especially to proximity to Kelly again.

The greatest phone call in the history of phone calls, ever

At 8:42 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, July 8, 1987, the telephone in my home rang, and my mother answered it. She was downstairs, in the kitchen, I upstairs in my bedroom, door closed, boom-boxing with headphones to Rush’s Moving Pictures. I was wearing a Moving Pictures tour t-shirt, and Geddy Lee was to be my only companion that evening. All these years later I am crystal clear on the over-arching details of the final hours of that day, and will be until the end of my days, precisely because of how Mom notified me of that phone call. She had to move from kitchen to my bedroom door and bang hard on it some while before I could hear her.

“John,” she bellowed, “it’s Kelly from St. Louis on the phone for you.”

Even some 35 years later the novelty of Mom’s declaration, and its implication, still inspires gooseflesh and shortened breathing in me. I never more loved my mother than in that moment.

Geddy Lee, the other great love of my life, was silenced. A vague numbness — especially of the brain — enveloped me. Some primitive cognition in that moment prevailed and guided me: It was Her . . . somehow . . . it had to be . . . my sister was out for the evening, her bedroom across from mine had a phone, I could take the call in there and be assured of our home’s most private setting.

One final stream of semi-lucid thought occurred to me before I answered the call: Jean had done it . . . she’d betrayed me . . . beautifully . . . to Kelly. And: What if not love — or at least some basic reciprocity of crush-affection — could have moved the only Kelly from St. Louis I know to actually, fantastically, pick up the phone in the dead of summer and ring the home (phone number also Jean’s doing) of a fellow UD student she’d never spoken to??? Also: God loved me.

From trauma and trepidation and fright and irrational exuberance (but mostly trauma) I cannot cogently, faithfully render the full substance of my life-transforming telephone call with Kelly, the love of my life, that July Wednesday evening of 1987. Instead, I can only muster nostalgia-guided stream of consciousness highlights, weaving in also core achievements, and include, lastly, those elements of elation from the conversation that have endured, decades later:

I knew from her opening phrasing it was in fact her, and not a university prankster (like Jean) — it was the very same voice I’d heard in her speeches in class, but now more personal, warm even! And I wondered: isn’t it possible, likely even, that this Flyer on the other end of the phone polished off a few courage beers before dialing?? Kelly  never mentioned Jean as we talked, but she didn’t have to (she had no other way of obtaining my telephone number but from Jean). She asked me about my summer; I asked about hers; we discussed what fun UD was in our first year, and how much we looked forward to returning. She enjoyed being home with friends, but she was eager to get back to campus . . .  (because of me???). . . I was struck by the ease with which I dialogued with one of the planet’s most attractive women (speech class may have helped) . . . ours seemed a naturally warm banter, one oblivious to the circumstances that birthed it. I’d never been to St. Louis, I reported; she’d never visited D.C., I learned. (Would our families meet next Christmas?) There was a conspicuous calmness to Kelly’s warm dialogue with me. (She’d had beers, I was pretty sure. Didn’t care.) (Liked her more for it, in fact.) Clearly, from her poise, she’d matriculated through co-ed parochial high school. But against all odds I’d risen to the moment, insomuch as I survived this July lightning bolt and adequately carried off the call on my end. And then . . . the defining moment of the call, at its end, led — appropriately — by her: “John, I was wondering if you were planning on getting back to campus a few nights before classes started, and if so, can we meet up the very first night we’re both back on campus?” 

At this moment I looked through my sister’s bedroom window out onto the dark night sky, stars brightly illuminated in the heavens, and I imagined looking up into the same sky with the same bright stars but with Ohio soil underneath my feet, and Kelly beside me, in mere weeks’ time. Suddenly, this was a distinct possibility, instead of fantasy. Unfathomable for the previous 11 months, but now, because of one miraculous telephone engagement, such a moment of existential bliss was plausibly on my horizon.

Kelly and I agreed to meet at the front of Kennedy Union in the heart of campus at 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 25. (And begin our lives together.)

Immediately ahead: The most gloriously sleepless night of my life.

She.Called.Me!!!She.Was.Thinking.About.Me. (Much of summer?) Isn’t it possible . . . likely even . . . that somehow . . . she developed an in-kind crush on me in speech class??? (But how???)

God loves me.

I owed Jean a semester of beer.

Total call duration (approximation): a perfect 14-18 minutes . . . not so hurried by nerves as to have been awkward, rote, or ruinous, but also not belabored by minutiae or pointless ramblings. It was an engagement chock full of warm, natural connectedness. And we ended it most dramatically, most romantically. As first calls go between a boy in love and his would-be girl, it ranked in the top 15 or so of all time, across all cultures. A Blue Ribbon Commission of love experts, reviewing its transcript, would I think judge it no. 1 all time for its unexpected quality and universe-reorienting outcome.

I replayed those 14-18 minutes in my mind daily the balance of that summer. Especially out on the golf course mowers. And my reveries were further enhanced by imaginings of my reunion with Kelly at 5:00 on August 25. That day couldn’t arrive fast enough.

Once upon a time, Detroit made quality, reliable automobiles

My parents were impressed enough by my first-year achievements at UD to entrust me with my grandmother’s Chevy Monte Carlo for my return to campus for year two. Gran, who lived with us, was too much troubled by heart ailments and other afflictions to drive and couldn’t use the car anyway. Additionally, my sister Marianne was embarking on her first year of college, at UD; it would be beneficial, and cost effective, to have a car with and to get the two of us back and forth in it for the holidays and breaks.

Dad and sis would drive out early to campus in one car to get her settled in, I would follow a day or so later in the Monte Carlo. For obvious reasons that I mercifully did not have to detail to family I needed a drive back to school in total and perfect isolation with my thoughts. That day of course was Monday, August 24. With Tuesday being the most important day of my life I wanted to arrive on campus a day earlier, unpack, and try and achieve a good night’s sleep.

Monday the 24th of August 1987 on the Middle East Coast was rich in blue skies and a warm sun, perfect for a reverie-heavy drive of nearly 8 hours. Dad thoughtfully had the Chevy serviced a week prior for the big drive.

At mid-morning that Monday I moved out of Maryland and into Pennsylvania. In just a couple of more hours I would reach the Keystone state border with Ohio, and then my destiny with Kelly would be truly tangible. The car windows were down so that other motorists could briefly experience, at disturbing decibels, the stereo’s playing of the mixed tape I had meticulously crafted for Kelly. I wanted as much of America as possible to know of my novel joy then. I would be writing letters to Kelly once I had her campus address, but before then, beginning on Tuesday night, August 25, I wanted her to have a cassette of music made by me just for her. No one in 1980s American university life mixed taped with the care and affection I did.

I don’t quite recall the track that was playing the moment I noticed a red engine alert warning alighted within the Monte Carlo dashboard — perhaps it was the Smiths’ ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ — but a Morrissey-like dread over love instantly consumed me. The Monte Carlo came to a swift cessation of operation, on the interstate shoulder. No number of attempts to restart it worked. The car was dead. I was safe, a half mile from a service station, but thinking then only of a Plan B for getting to Kelly in about 30 hours’ time.

Which.Did.Not.Happen. The father of my best friend back home rescued me in his car some 5 hours later. The Monte Carlo jalopy was towed for assessment. I was back home late Monday night. Tuesday afternoon we learned of Detroit’s dereliction in auto craftsmanship, no doubt the result of corner-cutting from Japan’s increasing intrusion in the American auto market: the alternator gave out.

If you read Elizabeth Puckett’s brief overview of the history of the Chevy Monte Carlo you realize that its first generation of conspicuous success gave way to a markedly less impressive succession of models:

“From the second generation onward, things could best be described as "meh" for the Chevy Monte Carlo. No longer was the car a performance-oriented luxury coupe. Instead, it appeared to be the alcoholic stepsister of the car that once held the throne at GM.”

My family’s Monte Carlo, barely more than 5 years old, was a red-headed alcoholic stepsister of a clunker. Never in the annals of American romance had so much promise been so undone so drastically by so poor a production line product. I needed merely another 200 or so miles from it to reach my Dream Destiny.

Mom and Dad made air travel arrangement for me to return to campus, but my plane didn’t depart until the following weekend. I was certain to miss out on all of the new-semester revelry in the Ghetto, including, most especially, my first date with Kelly. Worst of all, in the comparatively primitive communications universe of 1987, I had no way of conveying timely word of my plight to her who mattered most in my world. I was beyond devastated.

Love that isn’t fully realized isn’t necessarily a love unlived

Eventually, weeks after our much-anticipated but ill-fated reunion date, I caught up with Kelly at a Saturday night party in the Ghetto. It was late September. She looked beautiful that night, like me had had a few beers, and was ever being solicited by the revelers. I gained a brief audience with her in the kitchen of the Ghetto house, but it was a supreme struggle for me to properly explain not just my commuting misfortune but, far more importantly, an initial outline of the depth of my feelings for her. In fact, I couldn’t. And the congested setting had nothing to do it.

And precisely because of how my new year with school had started I desperately needed to rise to meet the moment, and most assuredly I did not.

Kelly needed from me then four or five basic sentences detailing my being the unluckiest Flyer on all of campus. (Actually, the unluckiest Flyer in school history.) But even more than that: Kelly needed what every normal woman at such a relationship precipice needs — basic, foundational wooing. Courtship. And I was a tragic figure miswired for wooing, much as my family’s Monte Carlo was miswired for reliable operation.

Instead she heard from me mangled incoherence of disjointed drama. And almost certainly it was worsened by the haze of a modest beer buzz. Because of her phone call I felt we’d already elevated to undergraduates in love. She listened and nodded and appropriately sympathized . . . but things between us were just . . . palpably altered. The magic dust that descended upon us in July had suddenly seemingly vanished that September Saturday night.

Instead of acknowledging and owning my under-developed romantic abilities I spent weeks (months) (years, actually) deflecting vital culpability. I thought about the possibility of another guy earning her interest that September (probably unlikely). I was also of a mind to think of the insidious void created by General Motors, and it instilling in Kelly some wrongly inferred belief of indifference from my heart in the new semester. But what is certain from that sad Saturday night was that I failed to meet the moment.

Culpability for our demise belonged with me, but in my immaturity and insecurity I went wondering: What if my transport back to campus that August morning had been undertaken in a Japanese auto (which you rarely ever saw stranded on roadsides) (most belatedly Mom purchased a Nissan to replace the GM criminal, by the way), or a more reliable American one? And if by the grace of God I’d been safely conveyed and if I’d carried off just a few hours of magical engagement with Kelly on the appointed reunion night, might my congenital, paralyzing shyness and awkwardness have been vanquished for good?

I absolutely loved Kelly with every fiber of my being. But that wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. What I needed most in the defining moment of my romantic youth was a new-found courage and conviction, born of due maturity, one that even Kelly’s telephone heroics of mid-summer couldn’t coerce. That miraculous phone call she made to me hadn’t much evolved my shyness and awkwardness around a beautiful woman, no matter how courageously and stupendously she’d paved a path forward for me. For us. It was a sad and tough lesson to learn, but I’m glad I learned it.

A certain amount of self-flagellation is appropriate for this story, but there’s an obvious and unassailable culpability for Detroit as well. I’ve owned and operated 7 cars over the last 35 years, not a Chevy among them. I might drive another 25 years. No Chevy for then, either.