Revenge of the Paste Eaters (21 page)
None of this will prevent her from leaving, of course: late in the evening, when she is miles away from him and trying to enjoy the company of whatever unimaginable force that has taken her away, she will frown slightly to herself and murmur, “I wonder if he’s sick . . .”
One works with the tools one has.
everything i know about
cars I learned from my dad. In my late teens and early twenties my dad went from being that surly stranger out in the garage to being one of the most important people in my life. He had to be: he was the only mechanic I knew who would work for free.
I got my first car when I was eighteen. I didn’t have to go far to get it—it was parked out in the driveway. It was a 1960 Ford Galaxie station wagon, powder blue. It had been my mother’s car but it had frozen in second and third gears simultaneously—something she insisted happened and my father maintained was physically impossible—and for the sake of their marriage they gave the car to me and bought her another one. At eighteen the last vehicle I wanted to be seen driving around town was a seven-year-old powder blue station wagon, but it was still worlds better than not being seen driving around town at all. The Ford was an instant lesson in the virtues and pitfalls of car ownership. It cost me, on average, $14 a week in repairs. Gasoline was 35 cents a gallon, but brake pads and fuel lines were nowhere near as forgiving on my budget. Like most older cars it had quirks. The flooring in the rear passenger side seat had rusted out so when I took friends with me I had to remember to warn them before they put their feet completely through my floor mat. It was an unpleasant drop that had a tendency to make them surly. The station wagon could be a little tricky about starting, and as time went by, the heater became less and less dependable.
My father and I did not communicate particularly well. Most of our conversations started with, “Hey Dad—you know that noise my car’s started making . . .” This would be followed by a complex discussion of part names and practical functions and a lot of hand gestures where things sat over other things and even more things went through or over or around them, and eventually we would settle down to a discussion of price. The last conversation we had of this nature about the station wagon had to do with cams and rods and the joy of having a constant supply of oil in your crankcase. The wagon, for some reason, had run out of oil and now all of the cams had slid around in the wrong place and were unusually difficult to get back where they belonged. In fact, in the end, it never happened.
My father and I discussed oil and its amazing cooling properties any number of times over the next few years, but it took me a while to get the point.
It did not occur to me that changing the oil was a maintenance task on a vehicle. I’d never been responsible for a motor before; perhaps I just assumed they came with whatever oil they needed. My father changed the oil on the family car quite regularly—usually just minutes before we left on a trip—but my mother seemed to think this was excessive and badly timed and I assumed it was just part of their complex conversations about whether or not our father was going with us whenever we left the yard.
Are you going with us or not? Because I really don’t care whether you go or you stay home, I just need to know if you’re going . . .
(The sound of another oil can popping open.)
Once it became clear that the station wagon was going to spend the rest of eternity up on blocks in the back yard because my father
couldn’t
fix it, I was forced to buy a new car. I paid $175 for a 1957 Chevy. Yes: I once drove a ’57 Chevy. The cool ’57 Chevy was, I believe, an Impala and mine was a Bel Air, but the models were almost identical. Mine was blue and white. It was twelve years old, but it was cool. It had a metal dashboard, and it came with a plastic coin holder that stayed on the dashboard by virtue of a magnet. It had no radio. The windshield wipers were not entirely reliable and the windshield had a tendency to steam up, but if I cranked the front vents open they would blow air on the windshield and hold back the steam. I loved my ’57 Chevy.
Parts for the Chevy were a little hard to come by and it needed its fair share of them, but I had become accustomed by now to spending Sunday afternoons out in the garage with my dad, bored out of my mind and half-frozen, but diligently keeping him company while he fixed whatever was wrong.
From time to time I would mention to my dad the fact that the car shook. Vibrated. The body rattled so badly that I could no longer keep any change in the plastic magnetic change holder because it would bounce out. He would listen to me and then start drawing interlocking circles and pictures of parts and pieces fitting together again.
“Do you think it’s serious?” I would check.
He would shrug. “I donno,” he’d say.
My mother called square dances for years. It was a good job for her. It paid her a small income, it put her center stage among her friends where she enjoyed being, it catered to her love of music and dance. My father loves music, in his own way. Almost all of the musical artists he likes look something like Lorrie Morgan or Shania Twain. He is tone-deaf, rhythm is a foreign language for him, and he is happiest in the back of the room, possibly even with a pail over his head. Furthermore, there is not all that much for the husband of the caller to do at a square dance. He can either come up and help her demonstrate dances (see attention, rhythm, pail over head) or he can sit on the sidelines and watch everyone else dance.
My mother would warn him days in advance that a dance was coming up, and as the actual time to get cleaned up, put on a square dance outfit, and get into the car drew near, visions of our father would become vaguer and vaguer in our memories. Sometimes he would show up at the very last minute. Sometimes she would send us out to the back barns to fetch him. Sometimes he just . . . wasn’t . . . anywhere. Sometimes they had huge fights over this, and sometimes she just spun gravel down the driveway and drove off without him.
We all learned to keep a low profile. Our house could be remarkably quiet around square dance time, given the fact that two adults and five children lived there.
One such storm had blown over and we children had all relaxed, assuming the adults had worked it out at least for that night, when my father appeared not far from me and murmured something about needing a ride. Could I take him out to where Mom was with her square dance club?
I had no idea where that was, but fortunately he did, and I loaded him up and drove him there. He sat scrunched down in the seat (it took him a full ten years to convince himself that something he had sired was actually capable of driving a vehicle) and said hardly a word to me for twelve miles. I parked in the parking lot, waiting for him to get out.
He said, “How long has it been doing this?”
I said, “Doing what?”
He said, “It shakes.”
I said, “Oh, I told you about that—I used to keep quarters in the change tray on the dashboard. Now I can’t keep the change tray on the dashboard and the quarters hop all over the car.”
He pursed his lips. He nodded. He said, “You might think about selling it.”
“You think it’s serious, then,” I surmised.
And—being my dad—he said, “I donno.”
A few days after that my mother said to me, “Your father says you’re selling your car . . .”
So I put my beloved ’57 Chevy up for sale. I sold it for fifty dollars to a kid just out of high school. He was thrilled to get it. A week later the engine caught fire in the parking lot where he worked and the resulting damage totaled the car.
In 1969 or so I bought a 1964 Ford Fairlane. Fairlanes were economy cars for Ford, but they varied significantly in size and style from one year to the next. Some Fairlanes were land sharks: the ’64 was about a four-person car, small, all-metal. When I bought it the back springs had gone bad and whoever owned it had welded his own makeshift suspension on the back, which consisted of two metal posts that semi-supported the springs. Whenever I drove the car over a slight rise, like backing out of a driveway, for instance, the back posts dragged.
I liked the Fairlane, but it taught me almost everything I know about car disorders. The fuel pump went bad. On the way through the back roads to visit a friend (I never seemed to go anywhere during normal daylight hours), for a while I was driving 60 mph and then I was driving 40 with the gas pedal floored, and by the time I got to her house I was driving 10.
The second or third time I ever drove it I decided to wind it out and see exactly what it would do. I topped out at 85 miles an hour. And then I flipped on my blinkers and decided to take the exit, stepped on the brakes, and . . . I had no brakes. Apparently I should not have been so nonchalant about the slight mushyness the brakes had had the last time I stepped on them. I drove that car down the exit, out onto the next road, almost a mile down that road, into a roadside park, and within six feet of coming back out on the road again before it finally coasted to a stop. So I learned to respect brake lines.
I also learned about chokes because the automatic choke on this car wasn’t automatic. It stalled on hills (it was a standard transmission) it stalled at lights, it stalled almost anytime I changed driving speeds. For a while I had my roommates all trained to jump out of the car and push it off to the side of the road whenever I gave the word. For an assignment in a speech class (
describe how something works to group
) I borrowed an old carburetor from my dad and demonstrated the butterfly valve and what it did, explaining to my class essentially what I did in every intersection in Battle Creek for months.
When I was in high school almost anyone could buy a book on automobile repair—you could buy a book for your specific make and model—and take the car apart and put it back together again in their own garage. I have no aptitude with tools and no interest in getting my hands dirty or my knuckles scraped up, both of which my dad did on a regular basis, but cars back then were the sum of their parts. There was no mass of cables and hoses and rebreathers for emission controls. There were no computers. In fact when I was in high school the only computers any of us ever saw were in science-fiction movies and they took up entire rooms of buildings to do less than your average desktop will do now.
As I grow older there are some transitions I make without even thinking about it very much, and some transitions I will apparently never make. Most of today’s cars all look alike to me. They are small and boxy and while they may have keyless remote entries and CD players and lights that come on automatically—a host of bells and whistles that the cars of my high school days never dreamed of—they are not
cars.
Cars were a lifestyle. Cars were who you were and what you could afford and how much of what you could afford you were willing to put into your ride. A Camry will get you where you want to go, but it’s hard to feel that emotional bond with a little beige four-banger.
Sometime during the mid-seventies my Baby Brother bought himself a 1964 GTO—we called them “goats.” This (1964) was the same year Ford came out with the first Mustang. The Mustang was a little car; the GTO was a midsized car. They were big, metal cars with metal dashboards and vinyl bench seats (buckets may have been an option—my brother’s car didn’t have bucket seats) and the four of us—our Baby Brother, the Wee One, the UnWee, and I—all went out to a bar to listen to a local band. On the way home we hit a deer. The deer flew up over the corner of the hood and disappeared, the GTO spun around twice on the highway, and we all walked away without a scratch. (The deer limped away.) I think about that adventure every now and then, not because it was all that spectacular, but because (a) there was not a mark on that car where the deer hit, (b) there were no seat belts in the car, (c) there would have been enough room in that car to comfortably seat two more people, and none of the people in my family are petite, and (d) by today’s standards that car was huge and weighed probably half again what a current-model car that size would weigh.
When I was in high school cars were built to withstand damage in a crash. Cars today are built to take the damage and allow the people inside them to withstand the crash. They are smaller, lighter, and considerably more collapsible. Fifty percent of the bulk of a modern engine is devoted to emission controls to protect the environment. When something goes wrong with a modern car, the owner has to take it to a garage and hook it up to a giant diagnostic computer, not unlike one of the Borg.
I need to buy a new car soon—or at least a newer one. My stalwart truck, Hoppy, began throwing off parts in his tenth year faster than I could afford to put them back on and I gave him away to an eager young owner who could, if he had to, walk much farther than I can. For the time being I am driving the Landshark, a 1992 Chevy Caprice, which runs (sucking gasoline like a goldfish), but winter is coming on and who knows what another year may bring?
So I’ve been thinking about cars a great deal here lately. What car I bought. When I bought it. How old it was when I bought it, how long it ran, how much it cost me to run it. Buying a new car is like looking for a new partner, including that long search-and-court period . . . Personally, I’m still in mourning for the old one.
First the wipers became manic,
giving up all lesser speeds
to fling themselves in cleansing frenzies
across the glass: then they redefined
“intermittent,” stopping mid-wipe
for minutes, sometimes miles,
to burst back into sudden action
back and forth, back and forth,
until the right wiper finally died,
lying at the bottom of the glass, heaving
like a dying swan
while its companion still grimly
rocked the cab back and forth,
back and forth.
i went to a
country school from kindergarten through second grade. Bidwell School. It was an old-fashioned schoolhouse, brick, where twenty-five students and one teacher labored over grades K-6. When I was entering third grade they closed my school and integrated us into town school, but until then I was bused every morning to a school less than half a mile from my house.