“Why not just say car?”
Car seems so casual. Vehicle has a formality and manliness to it, the assumption that the person behind the vehicle knows the power and perils of said vehicle, knows how to fix it with his own tools if need be, understands the meaning of torque, the piss-your-pants sensation of blasting through the desert in a high-horsepower sports vehicle, taking hairpin turns up the mountain at fifty miles per hour, feeling death’s breath on your neck as you dance at perilous heights and speeds along California 1.
On a bookshelf in my office is a simple wooden car my father and I made when I was three years old and we lived in Ohio. Making the car with my father is one of my first memories; the other is of a fierce lightning storm that took out the big oak tree in our front yard the same summer. I’m unsure which came first, the car or the lightning.
The car is made of simple scrap wood, two one-by-fours nailed together; one is one-third the length of the other and represents the roof of the vehicle. The wheels are made from one-and-a-half-and two-inch dowels, the two-inchers in the rear so that the car has an aggressive stance, as though it’s always revving RPMs at the start line, ready for the go.
My father and I sat in the backyard and we used my red wagon as a workspace. My father put my fist on the handle of the saw and covered my fist with his own, and together we sawed the one-by-four, two cuts against the soft pine grain. It would have been the first time I took a tool in my hand. I can feel now the reverberation of energy along the spine of the saw, up through the handle, into my tiny fist. From an early age my father taught me to respect tools, to respect their power and to know the consequences of abusing the power of the tool. Using the wrong tool was, for my father, tantamount to praying to the wrong god, or not praying at all.
My father cut the wheels from the dowels and he spray-painted the body pieces red and the wheels black.
While the paint dried he would have gone back to whatever father chore monopolized his time that day—building a fence, fixing a basement door, mowing the lawn. I involved myself in the intricacies of my mini swing set and the balance required to careen on my belly down the slide.
He called me back when the paint dried and I watched as he hammered the roof to the body with three nails. He handed me the car, my first and only homemade toy.
As a boy I logged hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing with that car in my room or outside on the sidewalk or in the dirt, making car noises, running the vehicle through its paces—sprints, jumps, laps, smash-up derby. Six cheap simple pieces of painted wood made a boy so happy.
I occasionally take the car down from the shelf and place it in front of me on my desk. And as I roll it back and forth on my desk the feeling is the same—power, movement, escape.
I flip the car upside down. At some point, with a nail, I scratched axles, a drivetrain, and a transmission into the wooden undercarriage.
I doubt my father remembers this cheap toy. Sometimes I wonder why I have held on to it for so long. So many times I might have tossed it in the garbage like any other piece of the past, another junked vehicle.
THE CONTROVERSY OVER my extended use of my father’s car might never die. We disagree on every element of the exchange. You’ve heard his story, here is mine:
In August 2003 I moved to Oakland, from Portland, in order to start a tenure-track teaching job at a Bay Area college. Back in Portland I never drove, the city being a bastion of public transportation, walking, and biking. I needed a vehicle for my commute from Oakland to Moraga. I told my father that I planned to do car shopping over a few weeks but that in the interim my friend Douglas had agreed to let me borrow one of his cars. My father told me that that was ridiculous, that he had four cars in his driveway and there was no reason for me not to drive one of them. He rarely drove the SUV and so offered it to me.
My father is very particular about his vehicles and his tools. They are always in perfect condition and any time a person tarnishes a vehicle or a tool he knows instantly. He knows if the mirror is a centimeter out of place, if the driver’s seat or steering wheel has been shifted and not returned to its original position, if the head of the hammer has been chipped. I knew this about my father, and I knew that I should decline his offer, even lie—tell him that Douglas was on his way down from Sacramento as we spoke, delivering a car to me.
But I accepted his offer. The car wasn’t really my style—it screamed soccer dad—but it would do the trick for a few weeks while I found my own car. He gave me the keys and we agreed that I’d return the car by the fifteenth of September, a little less than a month away. There was no discussion of money, car payments, or insurance.
My first day of teaching I rushed out of my apartment, running late as usual, and jumped in the SUV. I turned the key. Nothing, nothing but a cosmic joke. My first full-time teaching job, the first day of classes, which commenced in ninety minutes, and the car my father loaned me is a lemon. Speeding through the Oakland hills one can make it to campus in thirty-two minutes. I call a taxi driver I know, Singh, and luckily he’s free. He’s in Alameda but can be to me in ten minutes, he says. Singh is the only cab driver in the history of civilization, from donkey cart jockeys in the desert to Hummer limo cruisers in the city, to arrive in ten minutes when he says ten minutes.
After a few flights in and out of Oakland, Singh and I have built up a bit of a professional friendship. I know his kids’ names; I know his wife wants to open a restaurant in Alameda; I know his brother is also a cabbie and that they grew up in Mumbai. He knows I’m a writer and that this is my first day of class at a new job.
He pulls up, the screech of his tires announcing his arrival to the neighborhood.
“Brother!” he yells at me. “Let’s go. You gonna be late.”
I’m sitting on my stoop. It’s about eighty degrees outside and I’m wearing a wool suit and tie. Books and papers are splayed at my feet. I have the feeling that moving to Oakland and taking this job was a big mistake, and that my father’s lemon car is only the first indication.
I jump in the back of Singh’s cab.
He says, “Brother, your first class is at noon, right? Shit, we better move.”
“Forty dollars on top if we make it in time.”
“You da man,” Singh screams, and he guns it down Fairbanks Avenue and into the Oakland hills.
I made it on time and my classes went well. A colleague gave me a ride home. I called my father and told him about the trial of my day and we shared a laugh about it and decided it meant nothing. He gave me his AAA card number so that I could get the vehicle towed and inspected.
I hung up and called Marin County, who lived now in Berkeley. She arrived a few minutes later and we ordered in and had sex a few times and I felt better. She asked me if I’d missed her body and I said yes, because I had. She asked me to do things to her she’d never asked for before, and I did. I hadn’t slept with her in four years and I wondered what else she’d learned in the interim. In college we’d usually had sex in my truck, parked in front of her father’s house in San Rafael, or in the bathroom in the house she shared with nine people in Davis. Everything about the sex felt new, though it also felt old and stultifying and I wondered again why I continually returned to old lovers. Comfort? Ease? Dread over the future?
The chill Oakland night sneaked into the room and we slept comfortably. In the morning I made eggs and bacon and we spent most of the morning in bed reading and fucking and talking about nothing of importance.
When she left I thought about my ex-wife, and I tried to remember why I’d left her. And then I remembered the dead car and I called AAA.
I’LL ADMIT THAT I am terrible at paying parking tickets and other fines. This is part laziness, part the scofflaw in me. Like my father, I seek adversity. Adversity gives me a story, a narrative to write against. So I didn’t pay a few parking tickets. But I swear I never told my dad I would pay his car payments and insurance.
Our setup seemed pretty good to me as well—my
father, who owned a surfeit of cars, would allow me to borrow one of them until I bought my own. If he’d asked me to pay for the use of the vehicle I would have asked my friend Douglas for the use of one of his, which would have been free of charge. And it didn’t seem far-fetched that a father would allow his only living son to borrow a car for a month, maybe six weeks at the outside, free of charge. Isn’t that what fathers do for their children?
I’ll admit that I took a bit longer than I originally intended to buy my own car. In the end I settled on a seven-year-old Mercedes 320, an old man’s car if ever there was one: silver on silver, four doors, straight six with a bit of torque but nothing for the long run. I didn’t want speeding tickets. I wanted transportation that wouldn’t break down, with a low insurance premium.
Before I could get my father’s car back to him, I had to run out of town for a weekend reading in the Midwest. I called my dad from Chicago O’Hare and told him that I was traveling again but that I’d have his car back to him Monday—I’d already enlisted a friend to help me in the handoff, and I’d be to his place by noon; he could check out my new ride and we’d run over to Suisun City for those great carnitas at Puerto Vallarta.
I heard the sigh, the Swofford Sigh, as I’ve come to call it. It’s not always an indication of anger; sometimes it’s mild irritation, or bemusement, but in this instance, listening from concourse whatever at O’Hare, I knew the Swofford Sigh meant anger.
“You promised me the vehicle back sooner than this, Tone.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’ve had a hectic schedule, teaching, traveling every weekend. It took me longer to buy a car than I thought it would. I found one in Sacramento with help from Douglas and Cliff. They saved me from buying a clunker.”
“You don’t know how to shop for your own car?”
“It was more fun playing around with the salesmen with Cliff and Douglas. They know about buying cars.”
“I know about cars. I could have found you a car in a weekend. What did you boys do? Play grab-ass, chase girls, drink beer when you were supposed to be looking for cars?”
“It took a few weeks. Isn’t that normal?”
“Normal is sticking to your word. What did you buy?”
“A seven-year-old Mercedes. A sedan. An old man’s car.”
“Getting fancy, Tone.”
“It’s not fancy. It’s German. It won’t break down. It cost less than any one of your cars did brand-new.”
“That might be. But listen. You’re returning my vehicle so late I’m gonna have to charge you something.”
“What? You wouldn’t have even used it.”
“But it belongs to me and you betrayed my trust. I’m gonna need the cost of the payment, and insurance, and wear and tear at industry standard, which is about twenty-two cents a mile, if I recall.”
“Industry standard? What are you talking about?”
“That’s what a company pays an employee for wear and tear on a private vehicle.”
“My flight is boarding. I’ve got to go.”
“See you Monday, Tone.”
My flight wasn’t scheduled to depart for two hours. I went to the Bennigan’s and ordered a double vodka.
MY FATHER LEFT town for a few days and informed me that I should leave the vehicle in his driveway, locked, with the keys in the glove compartment. He told me that he’d put an invoice in the mail.
I FORGOT ABOUT the invoice. The semester had bogged me down, teaching full-time filled up my schedule. I was trying to get in shape, riding my mountain bike through the Oakland hills every day I could. The casual, regular sex with Marin County was a bonus that I hadn’t counted on when I moved to Oakland, and the sex kept me sane. I had no time to waste on dating.
And everything I did—cook, write, eat, teach, read, screw—was an attempt to banish my ex-wife from the currents of my daily life.
Then one day the handwritten invoice arrived. All totaled, my father wanted about seven hundred dollars. I fumed. I couldn’t believe the old bastard had actually gone through with it. My own father wanted to charge me for the use of his vehicle. I went for a bike ride. I shot some hoops alone in my driveway. I called a friend. He agreed my father was a jerk. I called another friend. He agreed my father was a jerk. I called another friend. He told me that my father and I were both jerks. I told him he was a jerk and that that was the last time I’d ever ask for his opinion.
A few days later my father called and told me he was going to be near Oakland, and that he hoped to swing by my place to pick up the check I owed him because he didn’t know whether or not a guy like me even used the post office.
He stopped by late, around ten, when Marin County was already in my bed. She wanted to say hello to my father, but I asked her to stay in my room.
I let my father in and he glanced around my apartment.
“Nice place, Tone,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Where do you write those masterpieces?”
“The large bedroom in back is my office. I sleep in the smaller room.”
My father, an amorous man, always in tune to the presence of a woman, glanced at the couch and Marin County’s purse and sweater, draped over an arm. He smiled.
“Girl in the back?”
“Marin County.”
“Oh, sure. Pretty girl. You’re never gonna give that one up, are you? She’s too shy to say hi to your old man?”
“She’s asleep.”
“I gotta hit the road, Tone. You got that check?”
I handed it to him and he put on his glasses in order to read. “Looks about right,” he said. “All righty, then. I’d say let’s get a drink but I bet you got business to ’tend to. Catch you on down the road.”
He clipped my shoulder with his open palm, an attempt to bring me in for a hug, but I stood as still as a flagpole.
“Give your old man a hug,” he said with obvious glee.
He knew the matter of the check was burning me up inside, that I considered him a complete bastard for charging me to use his vehicle, and that I would say nothing about it because I was a coward and I never challenged my father.
We hugged and he departed.
I returned to bed and the only thing that might offer solace.
We have never discussed the voicemail you left shortly after events mentioned in the last paragraph. I felt we should have discussed it, but you said you were ok—which I took to mean you weren’t interested in talking about it. The preposterous accusation that I stuck your face in dog shit; is untrue and makes me wonder what other atrocious memories of me you hold. I turned your head down toward the ground for you to see but never stuck your face in shit. How did this not make it into your book? It may seem real to you and you may go to your grave believing I did but it simply did not happen.
This episode has never appeared in any of my writing, but I can’t let it go. I had tried to write the scene into my first book but it was more painful than any of the wartime scenes I wrote. I gave up. I’m not sure if my father believes it appeared in the book and I misrepresented the event or if he is asking me why I didn’t put the scene in the book.
Either way, one Saturday in 1977, in Vacaville, California, I woke up at the usual kid hour and watched cartoons from the prone position, a few feet back from the television, my porcelain-white chin resting in my hands, bowl-cut ink-black hair hanging in my eyes, diaphanous curtains. Let’s say Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Speedy Gonzales, Elmer Fudd. I wore pajamas, a superhero of some sort emblazoned on the front. Aquaman.
The Saturdays of my boyhood were as regimented as the process for docking a nuclear sub: watch cartoons and do not disturb late-sleeping parents; eat the breakfast mother prepares; dress in yard clothes; perform yard duties; stand by for father’s inspection; if inspection is passed, go play with friends until dinner; if inspection is failed, redo yard chores until perfection is achieved.
My sisters followed a similar routine, though they helped my mother with the indoor chores.
My older brother had some leeway. He’d leave the house early and ride his bike with his buddies, shoot hoops down at the school, cause chaos in the neighborhood—later in the afternoon he’d help my father tune up and wash and wax the cars, or assist in major reconstruction works: mending a fence, patching the roof, planting or tending our mother’s flower or vegetable garden.
As a child, I never understood why my parents refused to wake up with me and join in my world, but obviously they were catching up on sleep and romance.
When my cartoons finished, my mother emerged from the back of the house and made pancakes and eggs for my sisters and me. My older sister, Tami, helped my mother with the boxed batter, beating hard with a wooden spoon in order to remove the lumps. My younger sister, Kim, and I sat and talked about the things a seven-and four-year-old talk about—our bikes, her dolls, school, coloring books. We shared the Saturday newspaper comics.
The big breakfast—eggs, bacon, pancakes, orange juice—sated us all.
I went to my room and changed into my yard clothes—a worn pair of plaid Toughskins, a faded Tokyo Giants T-shirt that read TOKYO GUTS on the back, and a football jersey from my time as a linebacker with the Tachikawa Steelers, way back in ’75.
I gathered the week’s newspapers from their haphazard pile in the garage and placed them in a paper shopping bag and placed the bag in the backseat of my mother’s car. Later, when she and my sisters shopped for groceries on base, they’d drop the papers off at a recycling bin.
At the time we owned two dogs, French poodles, a mother/daughter super-duo of black curly hypoallergenicness. I loved the two dogs, Gini and Fifi, but they were not a boy’s dogs.
G & F did not play catch like my friend’s lab; G & F did not run the grassy amber hills behind our house with me and the neighborhood kids, the way another boy’s German shepherd did; G & F had assumed a snooty French pose and for the most part looked at us as the French look at most Americans—as uncivilized brutes. They never rushed to the door upon our return; their tails knew not the excited wag of canine recognition for dear owner. Never once did either dog lick my face ecstatically, bestowing on me the slobbery dog kisses called love.