China Grove

Jody Swanson lost her virginity to Doug Fahrner in a 66 Chevy Impala. 

Jody was a month shy of her 16th birthday, when Doug, a senior football star, asked her out 

on a date. She hadn’t really said yes, but she hadn’t really said no, after they’d driven around 

town for awhile and Doug just headed out in the country. It’d been a hot, humid Friday night in mid-September and they’d parked on a gravel road and sat for awhile, kissing and listening to the radio. When he laid her down across the bucket seats with the small of her back resting on the console, casually tugged off her shorts and panties and tossed them in the backseat, it hadn’t been rape and it hadn’t been seduction, it’d been something in between, maybe a little of both. 

Feeling the vinyl car seat, slippery with sweat, against the back of her bare thighs and wincing from the scratches on her back where it had scraped across the metal console, she kept hearing that same song that’d been playing on the radio running through her head -- the Doobie Brothers’ China Grove.

The scratches were better in a few days, but that hollow feeling in her stomach lasted quite 

a bit longer. She’d never gone out with Doug again --he hadn’t asked. It’d brought a few tears, but not that many, she’d see him around school, but he didn’t speak.

In the years that followed, there’d been other boys in other cars and eventually two marriages, neither good. She’d waited tables, answered phones and drifted from job to job, until she got lucky and got hired out at the General Motors plant. It was a union scale job and even with two kids at home and no help from a pair of deadbeat ex-husbands, she and the kids actually had a little money for the first time. 

Almost five years to the day she started at GM, they called in the entire second shift and told them the plant was closing in two months and moving to Mexico. She’d sat in her car in the parking lot and cried for awhile, then turned the oldies station up real loud and headed home. Driving down East Main, she saw Doug Fahrner walking out of O’Malley’s Tavern, cut the wheel to the right and smashed the accelerator to the floor.

A kid walking home from school had watched the whole thing. He told the cops it’d been pretty awesome, just like something in a movie. When the green Pontiac with the guy plastered across the grill had crashed through the side of O’Malley’s, the car’s radio had been blaring. The kid even knew what the song was because his parents always played it real loud at home -- it was the Doobie Brothers’ China Grove ....