Fleetwood Brougham D'Elegance, 1980-2005, Requiescat in Pace

Some of you may be preoccupied with the death of Pope John Paul II, but another baroquely elegant fellow has also recently given up the ghost. The Cadillac my grandmother lent to us went down in a blaze (literally) of glory (not so literally) last Wednesday. I had just left an interview in Northwest Austin and was prowling along Braker Lane at about 11:15 looking for an onramp for I-35 when the air-conditioning in the Fleetwood wheezed and then stopped. A block or so later I smelled a faintly sweet smell, like a Wint-O-Green Life Saver burning. After driving another block, a noxious black smoke began to seep out of the cracks between the hood and body of the car, and then through the air-conditioning vents. Soon the smoke began to pour out of the vents with gusto, and I noticed flames melting the plastic under the steering column and dripping liquid plastic onto my shoes and the floormats.

I pulled into the Enterprise car rental parking lot (there was also a tattoo parlor and an Asian grocery store there) and hurriedly began to remove all of our belongings from the car before the whole thing caught on fire. Some people driving by in an SUV told me that they'd called 911, but before the firefighters arrived, a young man in a truck pulled up next to the car and put out the fire with a halon fire extinguisher, a product he happened to be a salesman of. (If anybody would like a referral to a fire extinguisher salesman and good samaritan, let me know. I have his card.) The firefighters arrived a few minutes later and blasted some sort of freezing powder (one of the firefighters showed me how it worked on some unfortunate fire ants that were crawling near the car) into the vents and scanned the hood with a thermal imaging device to make sure the fire was truly out.

It was an exciting day. The Cadillac was taken to a junkyard, as the repair costs would have exceeded the value of the car. Now, thanks to some help from my father, we drive a 1996 Honda Accord. It's a much more reliable car, of course, but I don't think it would take the Nudie Cohen treatment as well as the Cadillac would have.