The Car God Would Drive If She Had a License
In her late twenties Lexa had patronized a women’s bar in the Village called the Betsy Ross Saloon, and a painting that hung over her favorite table had shown a winged Beetle chasing clouds above the Manhattan skyline; the painting’s title was The Car God Would Drive If She Had a License. Lexa had wanted her own Bug ever since...
— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter three
After I graduated from Cornell University in 1987, I moved to Hartford, Connecticut to live with Sue Dinan, my girlfriend at the time. By October of that year Atlantic Monthly Press had agreed to publish my first novel, Fool on the Hill, but the advance royalty check was not due until January, so to help tide us over, I got a job waiting tables at The Reader’s Feast, an alternative bookstore/cafe on Farmington Avenue. The Reader’s Feast was owned by a women’s collective, and had an interesting division of labor: lesbians ran the bookstore, while gay men cooked and served the food in the cafe. As far as I could tell I was the only straight person on staff, with the exception of the cafe shift managers—an interracial couple.
The walls of the cafe were hung with paintings and photographs by local feminist artists. One of the paintings was The Car God Would Drive If She Had a License. Though I vaguely recall it as being for sale, the asking price—around $150—was a small fortune to me at the time, so I just admired it. Then about four years later, when I was decorating the fictional Betsy Ross Saloon, I remembered The Car and decided to include it in the story.
I have no idea what became of the actual painting, or what the artist’s name was—too bad, since at this point I could afford to buy it. But The Reader’s Feast is still in business, and if you should ever find yourself in town you may want to stop in for a browse and a bite to eat. God knows (oh, how She knows), there's not much else to do in Hartford.