Me and Tim Ford stole a car once in San Bernardino. One of those early Austin Healeys with red leather tuck and roll and wire wheels. It was just sitting there with the keys in it behind an A and W Root Beer Stand.
At first we were just going to drive it around for a while then leave it on the other side of town but we ended up heading for Mexico instead. Tim had this idea that we needed to get some false I.D. so we could drink in bars and buy beer in liquor stores without getting hassled. He said he knew about this guy in Tijuana who forged the date of birth on your driver's license and that there was no way of telling it from the real thing. He said it was cheap too.
I can't remember a car that was as much fun to drive as that Austin Healey. It growled. It responded like an animal to every cue. It flashed through down-shifts, double-clutching, speed-shifts--anything you could throw at it. It cornered like a Panther. There was no way you could turn it over.
The two of us began taking on the personalities of Austin Healey owners. We opened our shirts and let the wind beat our chests. We traded off using the pair of dark glasses we found in the glove compartment. (They were red-rimmed with little green rhinestones on the corners.) We slip-streamed women on the highway and pulled up close enough to grab their door handles and hear them scream. When we stopped at a restaurant we'd get a booth by the window so we could stare out at the car. The cat-mouth grill work. We dreamed of racing it across Europe and started using jargon like "Pit Stop" and "Team Rally" for those within earshot. We loved that Healey like we were its true owners.
We spent all day in Tijuana waiting for the guy to develop the pictures he took of us for the phony I.D. He was a silent, sullen little man in a stained grey sweater. We kept wandering around town and returning to his office every half hour. He would crack his door open and wave us away with quick flicks of his hands, like we were beggars or something. I had the feeling that false I.D. was the least of his illegal operations. It turned out to be worth the wait though. The new licenses were impeccable and passed the test at the border when the cops asked us to take them out of our wallets.
We drank up a storm in San Diego, flaunting our new cards at every bartender in town. We bought four bottles of Ripple Wine for the trip back home. We didn't even stop to get sick, we just puked into the wind and turned the radio up.
--Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles