By Extension

            There are lots of memorable scenes in the 1986 James Cameron movie Aliens, but the one I most enjoy is where Sigourney Weaver dons that mechanized “human forklift” suit and fights the alien.  Suddenly, our vulnerable, 130-pound, flesh-and-blood heroine transforms into a menacing ton or so of steel, hydraulics and pincers that allows her exterior, at long last, to match the kick-butt attitude she’s had all along.

            What’s engaging about that scene, I think, is that it so wonderfully gratifies the inner superhero in all of us—the part that watches a gliding hawk as it banks and swoops and thinks I want to do that, or that sees a cheetah on a nature show, legs all a-blur as it rockets over the savannah, and yearns to experience that kind of personal speed.  When Weaver’s in that suit, you’re like, OH yeah—THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!

Does that happen a lot to you?  It surely does to me.  On some level, in fact, it’s almost like I believe that I really ought to be able to do these kinds of things; that, in fact, there’s something gone awry somewhere, because the longing is so potent that it’s as though I once upon a time had these abilities, only they’ve somehow been misplaced. 

And I want them back.

It’s a sensation I suspect Mr. Cameron understands, as he followed up that Aliens scene years later with an entire movie—Avatar—devoted to the fantasy of inhabiting a bigger, stronger, faster body that can do things your own body just can’t—that’s you, only more.

When people ask why I like cars so much, I sometimes try to explain this whole car-as-an-extension-of-self thing—typically with limited success.  And I get that.  It’s easier to stuff me into the tried-and-true “speed freak” or “poseur” pigeonholes than to really think about it.  And unfortunately for people like me, there’s a stigmatizing element out there—an element with more money than either sense or taste—that buys the kinds of cars I love in a vain quest to appropriate for themselves qualities they will never, ever personally possess.  Those folks make it tough for true believers.

To a believer, a car’s beauty is something you enjoy during a Saturday morning wash and wax, not when you hop out curbside at a swank, crowded restaurant and toss the keys to a valet.  To a believer, a well-executed heel-and-toe downshift as you turn left from one empty, pre-sunrise boulevard onto another is better than a hundred showy burnouts.  It’s about the communion you feel with the machine; how the two of you, together, do and feel and accomplish more than either of you could alone.   As you wait for the car, the car waits for you.

As my 13-year-old packs on pounds and inches and muscle seemingly overnight, gaining heretofore unimagined sway over the physical world, I can tell he’s already looking at my car and wondering, what would it be like to have . . . even more?  When I was washing my car the other day, in fact, Jake stood to the side begging repeatedly, “Dad, let me pull the car into the garage.  Just into the garaaaaage.  C’mon, pleeeeaze?”  Naturally, I refused.  The last such venture—in my wife’s car, an automatic—resulted in one rocking jolt forward and another rocking jolt backward.  I took the keys and ended that excursion before my wife’s SUV became our new coffee table.

My son’s day will come.  But as we all learned from Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.  The way I figure it, Jake’s busy enough right now figuring out what to do with hands, feet and shoulders that he’s still growing into.  The forklift suit can wait.  But once he gets it, it’ll be a high-performance driving school for both of us.  I’d like him to become a believer.