Fast Lads

Today I was in a meeting with Olive and these two young men going over a bid for a fairly significant project that our two companies are attempting to collaborate upon. These fellows are in their early thirties and late twenties, about the age of my own children if I had some. Like all meetings the talk soon turned to music and fast cars(and some things about women). Keith is married, while neither Walt or Olive are.Keith was in the meeting to more or less supervise, but kept fiddling with his I phone and downloading songs. What brought music up was that walt's phone rang and had some song I didn't recognize. It went completely down hill from there as Olive told them I was ADD and couldn't listen to a song more than a few seconds, a completely true fact , I might add . The conversation turned to cars and they mentioned that the company owner had just acquired a new out of the factory Challenger, complete with a huge Hemi and roaring dual exhausts. It seems it was in the basement with a whole stable of Corvettes. It didn't take long for the entourage to sneak down stairs to check out the wheels. THe Challenger was sitting there wearing hot orange paint like General Lee and begging to be abused by these young speed freaks. I soon learned that Keith's true passion was an early 70's Vette with a 454 engine with nearly 600 horsepower. He produces a set of keys and cranks up the beast. I thought for a minute that I was at Indy for this weekend's Brickyard 400. Sitting behind this monster car was a beaming lad wearing a Tommy Bahama camp shirt with palm trees who wasn't even born when the Vette came off the assembly line . He sat there letting the 454 idle, its super cam thudding out an evil,evil oath of eating up whatever came in its path. He coerced Olive into the cockpit of this landlocked spacecraft and backed out of the garage, glasspacks and headers chunking out evil oaths. Poor Olive, she never had an idea of what was about to befall her. Now Olive drives one of those girly Lexus crossovers that needs a tach that lets you know whether the thing is running. She had never ridden shotgun in a killer Vette with Keith driving. We heard him hit the narrow street down the little commercial drive , and heard 600 horses connect with propeller shafts to the blacktop. The doors to hell opened as he built up respectable quarter mile speeds on an eighth of a mile street.I Thought every cop in Lexington has to have heard that. About that time Young Walt came strolling down with the keys to the Challenger and said," Let's go beat him!" Boy, has Chrysler created a masterpiece!As I looked around at the interior I was impressed that such a high tech, civilized car could have come from Chrysler. THe old time Challengers and Cudas would run, but by and large most Mopar muscle was junk in the late 60s and 70s. This baby had computer screens and all the leather and ammenities of modern upper end automobiles, something you might expect in a car selling probably for $70000 in a market that only is producing 6500 or so this year. As Walt pushed a button to start the thing, yes, a push button, the Hemi ignited and Houston we had liftoff. By the time we got out of the gate onto the narrow street, Keith and Olive were just re-entering the earth's atmosphere. Olive's eyes were as big as dinner plates and her carefully coifed red hair was somewhat disheveled as one might expect from 3 Gs of force throwing you into the narrow leather bucket seats. The two lads pulled up side by side without preamble and the drag race was on. The Vette got cross ways in between first and second about the time a turbo kicked in on the hemi . Computerized traction control kept the Challenger in an impossibly straight line, nearly passing the Vette which came up from eating the huge radials to surge ahead. I know that the Challenger would eat the Vette up in a mile on the Interstate but it wasn't about to happen today on a busy commercial street in industrial Lexington. Just as the lads rushed the cars through the company gates and into the basement garage the metro police appeared upon the scene. Small wonder; you could probably have heard them in Frankfort,30 miles away. As Keith and Walt went back to their desks to work, Olive and I went out to our sedate little cars and headed to our next meetings. The last time I had been so fast as in the Challenger was in a US Air commuter jet.As I pulled out onto the street, I couldn't help but notice the policeman sitting in his white patrol car, plotting his next move. He had followed wide black tire tracks to the stable. He may still be sitting there. Burning radials and 100 mph makes for an interesting Friday morning.What a drag this afternoon turned out to be.