In the summer of 1975, I was a movie projectionist, and I’d just come off a long run of Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction on the upper east side of Manhattan. I grabbed a temp job showing Woody Allen’s Love and Death for two weeks, and a Times Square gig for a week of Rollerball. All the old guys took their vacations in the summer, and me and a union pal wanted to cut ourselves in on some of that great Jaws overtime, so one gray morning we set out to carpool together into the city, heading to the union hall for the weekly “shape up”, a cattle call where available jobs are claimed by seniority number.

My friend Jon drove a 1968 Plymouth Fury III convertible, a huge piece of iron that resembled a dark green aircraft carrier, a car that drank whole rivers-worth of Esso Extra and Super Shell. He’d owned the car since college and Fury was on its last legs.