Pipes

This is about youth and testosterone and age and not as much testosterone and the manufacture, which I’ll get to in a moment, of sounds that enhance all the above.  I am speaking here, naturally, of the noise, preferably loud and at the low end of the audio spectrum, that emerges from the ends of automobile exhaust pipes.  I use the word noise because the sound is, in most cases anyway, exactly the sort of aural effect sought by males in the process of displaying their plumage in such a way that it will be unavoidable to anyone in the vicinity:  unnecessary and annoying and disruptive and unmistakably theirs.

My first memory of getting a thrill from the sound of exhaust pipes was in Oberammergau, Germany, in the mid-50’s, when my Uncle James and his wingman – they were both F-100 pilots in the Air Force – would announce their entrance into a narrow valley formed by the alps by racing the engines of their sports cars, a Porsche Speedster and an Austin Healy 3000. The sound was unmistakable, a mix of the Porsche’s throaty roar and the Austin Healy’s higher-pitched scream, each blipping at different frequencies as they shifted down to make the turn into the Army post where we lived.

My Uncle and his wingman flew patrols along the Czech border out of an Air Force base in Landshut, a small Bavarian town just east of Munich.  The purpose of their patrols was to warn the Soviet jets flying similar patrols on the eastern side of the border that we, as in the United States of America, were there, protecting the freedom enjoyed by citizens on this side of the Iron Curtain.  They were in their early 20’s, not long out of flight school, and the level of testosterone generated by flying those jet aircraft and driving those low-slung sports cars so elevated my own puberty-approaching body’s output of that male hormone that I am able to conjure the memory of those days, and those sounds, that happened 65 years ago at will.

That time was followed soon after by my passage into my teenage years, at which point my interest in all things automotive skyrocketed.  I used to hang out on the gravel drive of a trailer park waiting for the head of a local “tough” – yes, that’s what guys like him were called – named Shorty Thompson to emerge from beneath his ’49 Ford that had a hopped-up flathead V-8 with dual carburetors, and ask me to hand him a wrench so he could tighten or loosen the bolt holding something he was working on.  After he finished – this was sometimes hours later – Shorty would give me a ride back to where I lived across the post at Fort Leavenworth.  I can still hear the sound that flathead made through its dual exhaust on which he had affixed what were called Cherry Bomb glass-pack mufflers in order to achieve a proper rumble even at low RPM’s.