A Different Kind of Beetle Nostalgia Trip

Over the course of my labors as a critic of the human condition, I have meted out harsh comments on many topics--all richly merited, be assured--and I have taken my lumps for it.

But the venom I have put up with this week, since I cast myself as the only living baby boomer who hated, hated VW Beetles . . . let’s just say I’ve gotten death threats that were more polite.

It’s not just the fact that it’s back, regurgitated, water-cooled, front-wheel-drive nostalgia for a sucker market of boomers. From the hosannas greeting the new 1998 incarnation of the original 1938 car, you’d think John Lennon had come back from the dead and dumped Yoko.

But I hated it long before then.

Not because it handled like a hay-baler and sounded like a Waring blender.

Not even because the original was supposedly sketched by Adolf Hitler, who fancied himself an aesthetic genius. (And VW wondered why it only sold two of them in this country in 1949. You want to buy a car from the same people whose tanks we’d just fragged? Anyway, they looked too foreign. Remember that in 1949, foreign food was pizza and chow mein.)

As a kid, I hated them for the game of “slugbug.” From the back seat of our Chevy, where I sat reading, my little brother would scan the highway for that insectoid profile and, when he spotted one, ball up a fist and holler “Slugbug!” and pop me one in the biceps. This was in the years when there were more VWs on the road than there were stop signs. My arms hurt until I was old enough to drive myself.

But the smell! The battery was under the floor of the back seat, and my nose burned from acid fumes that evidently bothered no one else. Five miles in a VW Beetle and I was throwing up. So I did not ride in VW Beetles. I did not have anything to do with guys who drove VW Beetles, which is probably why, as a longhaired brunette who parted her hair in the middle, I did not get murdered by Ted Bundy in his notorious VW Beetle murdermobile.

So maybe my hatred is too hasty. Maybe, in a peculiar way, the VW Beetle saved my life.

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Why does this car have us in a nostalgia death grip?

It was an anti-car car. And anti-status. Our dads wanted big, throbbing engines at their wingtipped feet, and big, sharp fins at their backs. The VW was deliberately declasse, so far below status that it acquired status. It was cheap, and it was thrillingly unsafe, carrying on four wheels the arrogant invulnerability of youth. Reporters loved it, maybe for the seditious romance of driving around in a grubby little tin blister while making life hell for the Cadillac classes.

Among cars that, now more than ever, look undistinguished and undistinguishable, that profile, unmistakable as Barrymore’s, seduced us into giving them names like “Blue Dolphin,” for the blue flames blazing forth from the exhaust as the car burned too much oil.

It was a truck. (My sister-in-law hauled hay for her horse, everyone hauled bricks and boards for bookshelves, and somebody, frighteningly, set a record for cramming frat boys into a bug.)

It was a sexual aid, or at least a challenge. A colleague remembered his amorous consummation in a 1974 bug as like “making love in an igloo.” (I think it’s why so many boomers have bad backs.)

It was rumored to be indestructible, the mechanical equivalent of the Eternal Flame. (Remember Woody Allen starting one right up in “Sleeper”?) Now this I seriously doubt. The engine was tetchy; it could catch fire, or refuse to start after a mizzling rain. One colleague was driving on the Harbor Freeway when she felt the accelerator cable snap. There she sat, in the fast lane, waiting for death with Zen-like resignation before a CHP car nudged her out of harm’s way.

Another colleague’s 1961 model didn’t even have a gas gauge, just a lever below the pedals. If you thought you were about out of gas, you reached down--below the line of sight--and flipped the lever for one more gallon. The giddy terror of the sighing, dying car on the freeway, the frantic reach for the lever, then the last-minute spark and charge and you left the 18-wheelers in the dust, like going into hyperspace.

One friend swears that the reason he grew so tall is because he spent so much time on his back under the engine of his red-wheeled, deep-blue ’64 bug that gravity did not retard his growth.

These are my peers. They have covered disasters and tragedies on a scale only California and the Indian subcontinent can muster, and they were misting up over their vanished VWs. For a minute I was afraid they would link arms and start singing “Kumbaya.”

And this car is coming back. Like puka shells and black lights. I sauntered through the L.A. Auto Show to get a look at the neo-retro VW. Halogen headlights, yah, yah. Air bags, big deal. Two-tone horn, ho-hum.

And a . . . oh my. A bud vase. Oooh. Like in some great old Packard. Like something Norma Desmond would have filled with orchids. A place for a wilting flower child’s wilting flower. A $15,200 bud vase with a car wrapped around it. . . . Well. Someone’s crying, Lord, kumbaya . . .

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My car? Oh, I had to be different. I drove something with chic, with daring. White, with a red interior. My Corvair--now that was a car.