So, I’m still in the damn hospital, and I don’t mind telling you, I’m pretty sick of it.
The graft in my shoulder was all gross and infected, so they grabbed some blood hose from my thigh and replaced the bad section by my collarbone. The issue is that I can’t leave until the slow-growing and “insolent” (as the doctors called it, excitingly) infection is definitely confirmed to be out of me, because if that mess gets to my main aorta graft, I’m, to use a medical term, boned. So, I have to stay here a bit longer, and it’s getting to me a bit.
It’s not any one thing: it’s the endless cavalcade of pokes and blood draws and IV insertions and the always surprising pain of adhesives pulling out hairs and being connected to wires and drain lines and being woken up at all hours to get blood stolen or something injected into my abdomen. It’s just so many nonstop little annoyances, a situation that always makes me think of that famous engraving of St.Anthony tormented by demons and his amazing look of just being fucking over it. And, to shoehorn cars in here, let’s talk about a car named for a Saint, the Dodge St.Regis.
I’m not Catholic, but I have always liked the Greater Catholic Cinematic Universe, populated as it is with so many exciting characters like Saints, lots of whom are depicted in really memorable ways, like St.Sebastian looking like a human pin cushion all the time, or St. John the Baptist, looking like when you order lunch without really reading the menu. This 1470 engraving of St.Anthony by Martin Schongauer always sticks with me, though:
I love the demons here, with their strange animal-derived forms and cruel claws and strange suction-cup appendages and, on at least one of them, a fierce-looking anus. But what I like best is Tony’s over-this-shit face:
He’s fucking done. He doesn’t even bother to grimace or scream out anymore. These miserable demons are just a constant annoyance to him now, and they’re not going anywhere, and while he’s not happy about it, he’s too over it to make a Big Thing about it, either. Just another day, full of more stupid demons.
I get the easy saint tie-in would be to do the car from the old British television show The Saint, which featured a lovely Volvo P1800:
I had a P1800 (well, the 1800S version) and loved it, but I decided to make it harder on myself and find a car actually named for a saint, so instead we’re going to talk a bit about the Dodge St. Regis.
And if you’re wondering what sort of saint St. Regis was, he seems like a pretty good guy. Before he got his post-mortem gig as a saint, he was Jean-François Régis, living from 1597 to 1640, and doing a lot of work for orphans and at-risk women. He’s the patron saint of lacemakers (so all of you with doily seat covers on your Toyota Crowns should know him), along with bastards (the kid kind, not the kind that snipe parking spaces from you), and medical social workers.
He’s one of only two saints to have a Dodge named for him (St.Neon being the other, of course, unless you count St.Viper, but Viper’s beatification has been held up in red tape at the Vatican for centuries).
My friend Jeremy’s dad had a St.Regis, and referred to it as the “flagship of the Chrysler fleet.” He loved that car, and one morning woke up to it resting diagonally across the street, smashed and battered by another car, the absent driver of which just left a woefully inadequate note saying “Sorry, fell asleep.”
He was devastated.
My friend’s dad’s ardor aside, the St.Regis was kind of a half-assed car, only lasting from 1979 to 1981 and being a sort of rushed full-sized fill-in after Chrysler discontinued their previous huge full-sized cars. The St.Regis was an R-Body car, which was really just the old 1962 B-body with more modern body bits grafted on. Man, I can’t escape grafts!
Marketing for the St.Regis seemed to really embrace early ’80s yuppiedom, with the mentions of “soft Saxony and Whittier cloth,” whatever the hell that is, and the “Feelings” headline there next to the nuzzling yuppies, all in front of the former World Trade Center.
The best part about the St.Regis were these transparent headlight covers. I remember them always having condensation inside them, but they were still strangely cool, a novel way to dress up boring old square sealed beams.
These came with slant-sixes by default, but you could get a fairly disappointing 318 or 360 V8, too, the 440s sacrificed on the altar of fuel economy. A big chunk of St.Regises were earmarked for police and other fleet uses, and they all got pretty well used up, making a St.Regis an incredibly rare car to encounter today.
I just got another IV shoved into me. I’m so sick of this. Oh well. Soon, I’ll be free, like a St.Regis on the open highway, with my 85 hp slant-six shoving me relentlessly into the unknown!
Can Jewish taillight aficionados be sainted? The correct answer is “we hope to never find out.”
Hopefully you will feel as good as your writing is, and soon.
I don’t know, but I went to a Catholic high school that had an entire wing named after a prominent Jewish businessman who was golfing buddies with the Archbishop, I mean, that’s something, right?
Some folks just want to hedge their bets?
I owned a 1980 St. Regis. I bought it while I was in college in the early 90s. The only reason I bought it was because a dealership was selling it for $100.00.
I definitely overpaid for that piece of junk.
The St. Regis police cars supposedly had trouble maintaining speed up steep hills, the anemic smog choked V8s weren’t up for hauling around the extra weight of all that police equipment, departments that bought them (and there weren’t a lot of them) didn’t tend to keep them very long, Chrysler’s gift to GM. Basically guaranteed the Caprice’s domination of that market for the next 18 years, whereas Dodge had previously been the stronger player
By “extra weight of all that police equipment”, you mean doughnuts, right?
That would’ve been the only doughnuts a St. Regis could do.
The last time I saw a Dodge St. Regis “in the wild” was around 1988 at St. Anne’s Shrine in Isle LaMotte, VT. It was mint green with a matching vinyl top and had Quebec plates, which caused me as a pre-internet 14-year-old to think maybe it was a Canada-only model.
Get well soon, Torch.
Ok now I’m confused. I had just wikied Dodge St Regis to know if it was ever sold up here, as I had never seen one or even heard the name. (Such as the Eagle Premier Dodge Monaco, I had only heard of the old school Monacos and indeed only the Eagle ‘edition’ was sold in its country of manufacture. )
The wiki page for the St Regis doesn’t mention markets, so I assumed US market only. For curiosity’s sake, can someone confirm?
At the same time, I wouldn’t be that surprised. Born in the summer of 85 (can’t get more mid 80s), most cars of the early decade didn’t make it to my age of car consciousness (1991-ish), but I had at least heard of them…
I truly believe the hospital experience is scientifically designed to motivate sick people to get better, discourage hypochondriacs, and of course, maximize the billable line items. Hang in there Anthony of Autopia. I would like to delay your canonization as long as possible.
My grandpa was a doctor and he always said hospitals are terrible places for sick people.
All the best Torch. Get better.
Yeah this was such as half-assed car. After GM redesigned the full-sizers for 1977, they sold like gangbusters. Ford took two more years before unveiling the similarly-downsized Panthers.
But Chysler was behind the 8 ball. They had introduced the new-for-’74 full-sized tanks just before the oil embargo, so they sold very poorly. Chrysler was never able to recover the investment on those cars, leading to the near-bankruptcy and federal loan.
With no money to design a new, efficiently-downsized full-size platform, they did the only thing they could. They put a bloated full-size body on an inefficient mid-size platform that dated back to the Kennedy administration. Compared to the GMs and the Panthers, these were cramped, slow, and got lousy MPG.
Meanwhile, what money there was was dedicated to the K, which like it or not, saved Chrysler’s ass. At least for a while.
Being stuck in the hospital and a late 70’s Dodge product go hand and hand. There’s just so much… malaise.
Out of frame from that rendering of St. Regis, is a Dodge St. Regis. He’s thinking to himself, “Look at what I have to deal with, and they named this thing after me?”
Well, the St Regis is certainly better than the Dodge St Ratus
And here I’ve been calling those the Dodge Stregis all this time, how embarrassing!
Maybe they should change the name of today’s parent company to St. Ellantis. After all, Chrysler products always looked holier than other makes, especially after one or two Midwest winters.
How silly, this was clearly the precursor to the Dodge St. Ratus (Patron saint of middle managers).
It’d be nice to think that while the staff there is sticking you with all those needles and inserting drains, somewhere, one of your enemies is feeling all of the pain and discomfort. Hurry back, so you can do that voodoo that you do so well.
“St.Viper, but Viper’s beatification has been held up in red tape at the Vatican for centuries”
You can thank the Irish branch of the St Frances fan club for that.
The St Regis only became possible after a major last minute restyling job. It had previously been called the St Drogo.
A Dodge St Regis blinking out a non-denominational agnostic prayer for you https://gifrun.blob.core.windows.net/temp/93f5420827fc4818b5e705ff22761828.gif
That was incredibly sacrilegious, and I snorted so hard, my wife asked “What was that?” from the other room.
My adolescent self also thought those translucent headlight covers were soooo cool. Some of the police editions didn’t have them, including in my town, which was disappointing.
Who could forget the Mitsubishi St. Arion?
Boo! But clever…
Dodge alo sold the St. Ealth, patron saint of captive imports.
And let‘s not forget the most relevant: the Dodge St. Ratus.
Ah yes, the patron saint of forgetabilty. I forgot about it!
Personally, I think driving a St. Regis is a lot like St. Bartholomew. Being filleted alive.
Best wishes and keep in mind that if the St. Regis breaks down, there’s always St. Guinefort:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50000711402_918608dbd8_c.jpg
Most mere mortals would take their sick days(daze) and let their adoring fans suffer; not here at The Autopian!
You want pain and drug fueled entertainment the likes of which we’ve not seen since Gonzo himself? You’ve come to the write (sic) place!!
As for the late 70s – where good music and good drinks went hand in hand – funny, I happened to stumble over this gem just yesterday. Funny how the universe spins, eh?
“Noah had given up his career as a zoo architect in order to pursue his lifelong dream of making wine and during his first delivery to a campground’s 1970s-themed nightclub, was introduced with “Noah’s the vintner of our disco tent.”
Amy Torchinsky, Chapel Hill, NC”
May your healing go smoothly. Please take care of yourself, lest the insolence win.
:scott from durhamtown:
That’s my sister! She loves her puns.
I always preferred the styling of the Plymouth Kathie Lee over the St. Regis.
Haaa!!!
Wasn’t that the GTA version of the Escalade? When I was playing those games in high school and college I just assumed it was a made up word just to sound like Escalade.
Anyway… sorry your still stuck in the hospital, but so glad you are well enough to make this kind of post that we all love.
LoL’d at ‘plush Oxford vinyl’. Good luck and godspeed.
A step below ‘rich Corinthian leather’. Maybe the Autopian should go classy and rename our membership levels.
Thank you for taking time to entertain us all. I appreciate it, and I always appreciate your humor.
Dang, good luck Torch! My grandmother-in-law is also currentlu in the hospital for a very similar situation, though her doctors used boring words like “concerning” to describe her infection – “insolent” is much better.
As for the St. Regis, I remember when these were new, but I didn’t realize those silly headlight covers were not aftermarket. A family friend had a St. Regis, and it was a lot of car. The interior was pretty comfortable, but even with the 318 it was really, really slow.
I think they probably said “indolent”, which in its non-medical meaning is basically “lazy”. Still amusing.
I’m a bit hazy on the deity thing, and the selection of saints seems rather…political, so I’ll just wish you bogspeed in the healing process
Sorry to hear this, Torch. I know exactly what you’re going through and it sucks. The worst part is never really getting much sleep because you’re constantly being woken up at all hours to get another pin stick or whatever. And then when you actually need a nurse for something, they’re too damn busy somewhere else to help you out (not their fault for being overworked, though). Hang in there, man. We’re all with you and will attempt to keep you entertained during your ordeal with witty and possibly some slightly disturbing comments…