---

On the morning of his 40th birthday, Dick Struthers took a long look in the mirror and didn’t like what was looking back. His receding hairline had become a peninsula. The love handles had turned into a belt of shame. And the eyes staring back? They were tired. Not the kind of tired that a nap fixes—the existential kind.

So that afternoon, Dick walked into the living room of his split-level home on Cactus Bloom Drive, looked at his wife Sharon—who was sorting coupons by expiration date—and declared, “I’m just not feeling it any longer. My life is half over and I need more. I want out.”

Sharon didn’t look up. “Out of what, the marriage or mowing the yard?”

“The marriage. The whole damn thing.”

Three hours later, Dick was at the Naughty Pine Motel, room #8, staring at the flickering Coors Light sign outside the window and wondering if he’d made the worst mistake of his life.

By the following week, he had moved into the Alamo Arms Apartments. The studio smelled faintly of mildew and desperation. The furniture came from a mixture of Goodwill and the alley behind the Dairy Twin. The carpet was beige, or had been once, before life’s messes soaked in.

Then came the Dodge.

At Tumbleweed Chrysler-Dodge-Plymouth, Gary Glen Gleason spotted Dick from across the lot like a buzzard spotting a possum with a limp.

“What brings you in today, partner? New chapter? New wheels?”

Dick nodded. “I want something…different.”

“Say no more.”

Gary Glen walked him past a row of beige K-Cars until they reached the glimmering Gunmetal Blue Dodge 600 ES Turbo Convertible, its black top down, its louvers gleaming like promises.

“You ever feel wind in your hair with the top down and a cassette of REO Speedwagon easing through a graphic equalizer? This, Dick, is how you say to the world, ‘I’m back.’ College-aged chicks eat this up.”

By the time they hit the halfway mark on the test drive, Dick had already mentally composed his resignation letter for the Fort Stockton Rotary Club and envisioned a new life where he might, just maybe, wear linen.

He signed the papers that day. Traded in the family’s 1979 Plymouth Satellite wagon without a second glance. Gary Glen made sure to jot down Dick’s old address and home phone on the back of the contract, then leaned back and smiled. He gave it a week.

Seven days later, Gary Glen knocked on Sharon Struthers’ front door, a concerned salesman just checking to see how the car was performing. Dick wasn’t home. The kids were still at school. Sharon answered in a robe, her eyes puffy but her posture proud. And what happened next would eventually be dissected in hushed tones during choir practice at Second Baptist.

By the time the 3:15 school bus hissed to a stop, Gary Glen was pulling on his slacks in the master bedroom. He paused just long enough to straighten a picture of the Struthers family at the Grand Canyon. Sharon handed him a scoop of peach cobbler on a paper plate and said, “Don’t be a stranger.”

Meanwhile, Dick cruised through town with the top down, cassette stereo cranked, trying to live the dream he thought he’d ordered. But dreams bought at a dealership often come with disclaimers.

The only women who showed any real interest in his new bachelor status were Trixie from Klip-N-Dye and Shannon Hudspeth. Trixie told him flat-out she was looking for investors for a new Spa-Day addition to the back of her shop. “Mud baths, detox wraps, something for the fellas, too,” she winked.

Dick demurred. Most of his money was tied up in the Dodge and an overpriced sectional from a Rent-To-Own.

He did see Shannon Hudspeth for a spell. Long enough to require a visit to Doc Brown, then the Rex Hall Pharmacy for not one but two prescriptions. He didn’t like the way the lady behind the counter looked at him when she stapled the pharmacy information sheet to the bag.

The interior of the 600 never recovered. Shannon had a thing for fast food and body glitter. The back seat was stained with a potent cocktail of grape Slurpee, strawberry body oil, and broken promises. Dick took it to the Tiny Bubbles Car Wash. The manager there winced, waved off the detailing charge, and said, “Man, we’re just gonna do our best.”

Spring came early that year.

The hail started as pea-sized, harmless taps against the window of his apartment at the Alamo Arms. Dick was microwaving a Salisbury steak TV Dinner when he heard the dull thuds turn to gunfire. He ran to the window and watched his Dodge 600 ES Turbo Convertible get absolutely obliterated.

The top was shredded. The louvers, hood vents, and quad headlights looked like they’d been through a demolition derby. Dick didn’t even go outside. He just stood there in his boxer shorts, holding a steaming tray of processed beef and mashed potatoes, watching it all get ruined.

His insurance company refused to total it. “Too new,” they said. So he took it back to the body shop at Tumbleweed. Three weeks later, he picked it up. It looked okay at a glance, but it had that feel—like something had died and been brought back halfway.

The paint never quite matched. The passenger door stuck a little. The convertible top groaned like an old man getting off the couch. The stereo hissed.

As he waited for the paperwork at the shop, Dick looked across the showroom. There was Gary Glen, smooth as ever, writing up a new Chrysler LeBaron convertible for Don Rigby from the Proving Grounds. Dick remembered hearing something about Don leaving his wife.

And sure enough, Gary Glen was jotting down Don’s home address and phone number on a notepad next to the contract.

Dick didn’t say anything. He just turned, took the keys from the service counter, and drove off, the turbo lagging and the wind making a whistling noise through the ill-fitting top.

He thought about Sharon.

He thought about the Dodge.

He thought about how something that seemed so right—so freeing—had turned into a parade of disappointment and Bondo.

Eventually, Dick and Sharon talked about reconciliation. They met at Rex Hall Drug for a malt and sat in the booth like two strangers trying to remember what the other had once meant.

“You ever think about starting over?” he asked.

“Only every other Thursday,” she replied.

But neither one of them could quite get back to the way it was. Too much had been said, too much seen. Trust is like a windshield—once it cracks, even a good patch leaves a scar.

Dick kept the Dodge.  He was too upside down to trade it in on anything that made sense.

He drove it to and from work, kept the top up, and never blasted the cassette stereo again. He left the equalizer on flat.

Every now and then, he’d see a younger guy tooling around town in a newer model—another dreamer freshly convinced that a new convertible could turn back time.

And every time, he’d think about Gary Glen Gleason, that son of a bitch, with his too-white teeth and his legal pad.

By the time Dick turned 41, the Dodge had become less a symbol of freedom and more like a caution cone.

Moral Lessons According to Dick Struthers:

1. Just because you’re bored doesn’t mean you’re broken.
2. A new car won’t make you young again—it just makes your regrets more visible in traffic.
3. Never trust a man who uses hair product and sells extended warranties.
4. Body glitter should come with a warning label.
5. The grass isn’t greener. It’s just over-fertilized.
6. Sometimes what you need isn’t out there waiting for you. It’s back home with the coupons.
7. Convertibles are for men who believe in second chances. But roofs exist for a reason.

In the end, Dick Struthers didn’t get the life he wanted. He got the one he earned. And in Fort Stockton, Texas, in 1986, that meant keeping the top up, driving with the windows cracked, and living with your choices.

Even the turbo-charged ones.

---

---