When I moved to Portland, I bought my first car: a perfect green Rambler Rogue. I paid $1000 for a car that ran almost perfectly for years and worried that I likely overpaid.

I spoiled her faded, matronly body, by plunging it into a small yellow truck in a residential intersection. My only defense was exhaustion; I had just finished my first year in law school. The humans were just fine, but the Rogue gushed blue all over the intersection. My heartbreak.

My boyfriend loved cars and had monkeyed around with them since boyhood. This was more complex body work than he had done before but his devotion let to months of rehab. Love me—love my Rogue. She re-emerged as the lemon-lime Rogue. She had a shiny yellow hood and fenders, fresh from the junk yard, on her straightened steel frame.

In search of my next human romance I came to discover the Rogue’s special secrets. The front seats flattened back into a double mattress—they even took a fitted sheet if one was to be so delicate. She was the auto-equivalent of the diaphragm: up-front and functional. Together we navigated the public lands of Oregon in those wondrous days before “sex” was modified by the word “safe.”

I didn’t think she’d make it cross-country so I let her keep her cushy job, trucking law students to school, for a few more years. Eventually I replaced her with a brand new little red Chevette. I sometimes regretted leaving the Rogue behind. She didn’t need red, shiny, brand new. She was a classic, beyond all that. Her light yellow and faded green body was like Sophia Loren however thick the glasses. She was permanently hot.

Bogie, you rugged hunk of man—once object of my lust. Oh, you’re not exactly handsome but someone we want. Your upper lip never moves—too cool by half. I understand it was a war wound; it became a trademark. And you always have the best lines, cracking them across our ears like sharp grasses. They were crisp for Kate, softer—a little more gin soaked—for Lauren. For Ingrid they filled with longing and probably even love. Your voice as smooth as gravel binding with tar and hitting the pavement like Archer’s crumpled body. The acrid smell of corruption and strained situations leads right to a seedy bar.

You play against the funny bad men and look, well, only a little bad, still able to laugh at the greed that runs the world and catches you up into one more fruitless episode. The little guys beyond help? You keep your distance. “Help me Rick….Help me…” Who could have resisted Ugarte’s sweaty little whine? No, never muss a hair on your head.

You melt in the eyes of a beauty, but you stay so cool on the outside—the M&M of love. It’s just your judgment that loses it’s cool, face to face with that pretty, witty but slightly needy dame, isn’t it? You treat a lady a little rough but then your ladies have some rough business going on. Man, I fell for you.

Of course it would take a firehose to clean the taste of those cigarettes out of your mouth. You’d never have noticed me, or any of the other ‘70s college girls. None of the movie stars we fell for would have. We were silly, selfish, passionately anti-everything, not exactly for anything. We purposely uglified our difficult-to-ruin youth. We shlepped around in shapeless dresses and jeans, earth shoes, sacks on our shoulders and unwashed un-styled hair. We wore our shoulder pads first for laughs, then for power, but never for fabulous line and class.

No you’d never be tempted by such uncivilized whiners. Still we found you so romantic. We’d just have to love you from afar, Bogie: a few decades away. No flesh and blood guy would ever have such good lines on his lips.

We knew it wasn’t real, didn’t we? We didn’t have cocktails. It was Chardonnay and well-rolled joints, exams and grad school. Meanwhile you slowed and dulled a bit in Black and White with impossible amounts of smoke and booze. You played out unplanned lives caught up in the crossfire: tempest-tossed lives where only the moment really mattered. It was a hopeless romance from the start Bogie. But at least we’ll always have Paris.