Remembering PJ

That last line pay-off typified PJ’s wit. It’s the kind of quip that made his writing so entertaining.

In the days since he died, aged 74, on February 15, most obituaries have talked about his 20 books such as Holidays in Hell, Give War a Chance and Parliament of Whores, and articles for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and Esquire.

PJ made his name as a scathing political, social and economics satirist ‘taking a blowtorch to the sacred cows of both the left and right’ as one writer said.

But he was a car enthusiast too. ‘No choice in the matter,’ he said: he was born into a family of Buick dealers in Ohio. And so he wrote equally hilariously for Car and Driver and Automobile. He was gonzo journalism on wheels; the Hunter S. Thompson of the car world.

He rhapsodised in Car and Driver about driving a Ferrari 308 GTS from New York City to Los Angeles over the New Year holidays. ‘Cutting in and out of those giant travel homes [Winnebagos] at 100mph is more fun than a Marseille shore leave,’ he reckoned.

He wandered with Maria, a gorgeous blonde photographer, in a Lincoln Town Car through dodgy Mexican towns, piloting the vast Lincoln through a ‘warren of tiny streets, feeling like the captain of the QEII on a cruise through the canals of Venice’.

He rode a Harley-Davidson FXE-80 Super Glide ‘stripped to its frame and a seat, the honest-to-Nazi-helmet, nude-tattooed, sleeveless jean jacket Harley of a Harley-Davidson’ on a hell-raising trip through the Midwest.

And he hunted young Burberry-wearing MBAs in 3 Series BMWs on Connecticut freeways with a Buick Regal Grand National, America’s most powerful car in 1986. ‘There he is, four years at Princeton, two years at Harvard Business, a coming force in the world of arbitrage, and he’s just been dusted, wasted, creamed by a Buick Regal,’ PJ crowed in Automobile.

Perhaps his most famous car jest was How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink, written for National Lampoon and reprinted in his 2009 book Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending.

I was lucky enough to spend days on and off-road with him and uproarious nights in bars in various parts of the world. He was as witty in person as he was on the page or the airwaves. Out spewed a constant flow of puns, jokes, lightning-fast repartee and outrageous stories.

I first met him in the Seventies, when he was editor of National Lampoon, through our mutual pal David E. Davis, Jr. who, as editor of Car and Driver, had the nous to get PJ writing about cars.

His first commission, in 1977, was about an 11-day trip ferrying a dyspeptic 1956 Buick Special that hadn’t been driven for years from Florida to Los Angeles. In the story, titled Sgt Dynaflo’s Last Patrol to honour the Buick’s torpid Dynaflo automatic, PJ relays this scenario in northern Arizona:

Between Kayenta and the Grand Canyon we went a hundred miles without seeing any sign of human life besides each other. Then the sun went down and for the first time since we’d left Florida the temperature fell below 70 degrees. All of a sudden the Buick was a different car. It seemed to exude an aura of strength and dependability, almost as if it might run forever. I was driving, so I put my foot down and – in a Dynaflo way – we took off. If I pushed the old Buick enough past 50mph all the jitterbug and hootchie-kootchie in the front end went away. We went 65, 70, 80mph down these twisting roads, whipping along for all the world like a freshly minted Mercedes-Benz. 

We were pulling out onto Route 89 just over the Utah border when some fellow in a late 1960s Datsun Fairlady roadster buzzed by doing 85 or so, and I lit out, lumbering after him. It was wholly dark by then, and a misty night, and I wonder what the guy thought when he saw that wall of chrome well up in his mirror. He was being overtaken by the past. And the past went by at 100mph with door handles higher than his head and two inches of travel left under the accelerator. For me it was a truly exhilarating moment of rapport between man and machine. Then we got vapor lock and the engine conked out.

In 1983 I cooked up the idea for a big America-versus-the-rest four-wheel drive test in Wales. I arranged a Land Rover Defender, Range Rover, Mercedes-Benz G-wagen and Mitsubishi Shogun. David E had a Ford Bronco II, Chevrolet S-10 Blazer, Jeep Cherokee and GMC S-15 Jimmy flown over from the US. Back then Car and Driver sold more than a million copies a month so he had that kind of clout. And he brought PJ O’Rourke and Brock Yates of Cannonball Run fame. With the equally keen bon vivant and raconteur Phil Llewellin in our mob of 16 it had the makings of a trip.

First, we went west from Streatley on the 5000-year-old Ridgeway across the Berkshire Downs and into northern Wiltshire. Being serious for a moment, but evocative as ever, in his story for Car and Driver (reprinted in 2015 in Thrown Under The Omnibus) PJ wrote:

The country falls away in perfect symmetry on either side, and the view of England is too wonderful to be fact. If you were the kind of child who created imaginary worlds on your bedspread, this is what you saw from your knees.

In Wales the next morning we swung off-road again at Aberdulais onto Sarn Helen, a Roman Road that chomped north through gullies, woods and climbed hills to the Brecon Beacons, and then on to the network of sheep drover’s roads Phil Llewellin had discovered. They were a festival of mud ruts, slippery rock, shale, creeks and peat bogs. PJ kept wondering how conditions could be so challenging in a country that looked so gentle:

Sarn Helen became as bad a road as I’ve ever been down in anything except a metaphor. The track across this peaceful greenery was vicious slop, broken only by chapel-width boulders and ruts where you could lose [7ft 2in] Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The roadbed bucked and dipped like an amateur prostitute, and the bank angle tipped to the limits of a protractor’s descriptive abilities.

PJ called himself a reporter; and he was as meticulous a note taker as he was a hawk-like observer and diligent researcher. Facts and background that he wove skilfully into his stories, like this paragraph about Sarn Helen, underpinned his wit:

The Romans made a better road than anyone ever has since. For a primary road like the Sarn Helen they dug parallel ditches more than eighty feet apart and excavated the soil between them. Then they laid in a sand-and-quarry-stone foundation bound on either side by tightly fitted curbs of dressed and wedged stone blocks. On top of this foundation they built an embankment four or five feet high and fifty feet wide, constructed of layers of rammed chalk and flint and finished with a screened-gravel crown two feet thick. Even so, 1,573 years of neglect have taken their toll.

After escaping Sarn Helen’s rigours, we overnighted in Tregaron. Luckily, our landlord indulged lively guests. PJ’s account nicely captures the jollity:

At the Talbot Inn, a wedding breakfast was being held in the bar. It had been going on for ten hours. Welshmen like Mr Davis put great stock in Welsh singing, but to my Irish ears it sounds like men jumping off chairs into a bathtub full of frogs. As soon as dinner was over, Philip Llewellin decided to prove to the wedding party that, although he is only half Welsh, that half is from the throat to the liver. Of course the rest of us had to help. Our tab outran the wedding’s within an hour, and by midnight we were as drunk as any leek-wearing Taffy you could find in a day’s ride by sheepback. The landlord waxed fond with our spending abilities and slapped down two bottles of whisky, gratis, on our table. (The landlord’s wife slipped in and prudently took one bottle back.) This whisky was, I swear to you, named ‘Old Sheep Dip’ right on the label, which proves once again that Protestants will drink anything. 

Behind the wheel, PJ was smooth, skilful and fast. He pretended he didn’t know much about cars and their parts but you’d be foolish to be deceived. He loved cars and driving not just for themselves but because they represented freedom. As a steadfast libertarian he cared more about that than anything.

Notwithstanding the wars he’d covered and hellholes from Beirut to Somalia he’d survived, his scariest trip was driving across India in 1998 as part of a Land Rover Discovery II global trek. He’d been to 75 countries by then but never encountered anything as terrifying as battling the ramshackle, overloaded trucks, cars, tuk tuks, scooters, buffalo, elephants and teeming people on The Grand Trunk Road.

He’d wanted to join the expedition in Iran but discovered he was on a kidnap list – he’d frequently offended fundamentalists en masse – so he met up with the two-car team in Pakistan. After crossing into India, bound for Calcutta 1300 miles east, he and the seven other journalists, photographer and Land Rover men soon realised that being obliterated by a wayward Tata truck was their greatest threat. His report for Automobile said:

The Tatas blunder down the middle of the road, brakeless, lampless, on treadless tires, moving dog fashion with the rear wheels headed in a direction the front wheels aren’t. Tatas fall off bridges, fall into culverts, fall over embankments, and sometimes Tatas just fall – flopping on their sides without warning. But usually Tatas collide, and usually with each other. They crash not just in twos but threes and fours, leaving great smoking piles of vaguely truck-shaped wreckage. What little space is left on the road is occupied by one or two surviving drivers camping out until the next collision comes.

After yet another eye-poppingly close shave PJ wailed: ‘Imagine my headstone – PJ O’Rourke, Born Toledo, Ohio. Died on a Tata, India. I’m going to have to rewrite my chapter on third world driving hints and tips in Holidays in Hell. I didn’t know about Tatas.’

Fascinated and horrified, he started counting fatal truck crashes. On one stretch there were 25, complete with circling vultures; an average of one every 10½ miles he reckoned. After that he swore the only trip he’d make was to the shopping mall near his home at March Hare Farm, Sharon, New Hampshire.

Humour was Patrick Jake’s take on the world. So he was enormous fun to share a car with, even at deadly serious moments, and even more riotous over dinner or drinks. He was warm, generous, considerate and self-mocking. Bonhomie radiated from him, all the more so when he had a glass of malt whisky in one hand and a double-corona Havana in the other. Even when he was being rude, somehow he did it in a kind of polite way.

Photographer Martyn Goddard tells this story: ‘We were dining in a wonderful hotel in Bologna, surrounded by fine art and being served fine food by white coated waiters. The head waiter asked if we were enjoying the meal. PJ replied “In a country that produced the likes of Verdi, Puccini and Vivaldi why are you serving our food with I-fell-in-love-with-a-starship-trooper Euro pop?” We enjoyed the rest of our dinner without the musical accompaniment.’

After he married Tina Mallon in 1995, when he was 47, and Elizabeth, Olivia and Clifford arrived, his family became his focus between forays into the political and geographic badlands. His friend Peter Sagal, host of national radio quiz Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me where PJ was a panellist, said: ‘He was a deeply kind and generous man who pretended to be a curmudgeon. He devoted himself to friends and family in a way that would have totally ruined his shtick had anyone ever found out.’

In The Spectator last week Ivo Dawnay wrote: ‘His departure to the cigar bar in the sky marks the end of a great satirical era that he shared with Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Of the three, O’Rourke was both the funniest and the gentlest.’

I’m thankful that I shared with him many a good time, and burnished memories all the way back to those MGAs.