EMPTY CAR
At the back of the lot, behind the flashy cars with bombastic adjectives stuck on their windshields, sits the sore thumb that I want to buy. In the back row stands a car just like the one Mom had when I was young, a big, heavy Detroit beauty. I like the illusion of mass, a street level locomotive with sweeping chrome and the gaping mouth with chrome incisors for a grill. Out of place, older than the rest, it still has some value, at least to me. To own it, I would own my past. To control it, I could reshape my memories, transforming them….
My ten year old mind, stuck in an older place like a fading billboard on the outskirts of town, feels my ten year old legs ache in the shins from walking so much in a day. The soles of my tennies were thin and hard on the Saturday evening sidewalks. It took me three hours to make the five mile walk up the downtown boulevard from the YMCA towards my grandparent’s house, where I will find refuge.
The all-day field trip really took it out of me, leaving for the mountains at dawn, laughing in the flatbed truck, racing through the summer pines, twenty or thirty of us bouncing around against the stakes, screaming, loving the wind. The youth counselors yell at us to behave, yelling themselves hoarse, so do we.
Well past four on that summer afternoon, the sun cooks the steps of the YMCA while I wait for Mom to pick me up. The smell of freshly painted wooden door and window trim mixes with the smell of all those little blobs of gum stuck to the steps like limpets on a shoreline rock. I count the stains on each step, starting from the street. Five hundred and forty-three until I lose track. I squirm and fidget for another hour or so, then leave. Across the street, new cars sit in showrooms, a showroom on each corner and halfway down the long city block, another dealership showcases different brands. Many times, when stuck at the “Y” all day, while Mom was God knows where, I spend the lunch break in those showrooms, dreamily walking around the chrome and enamel beauties, luxuriating in the smell of the interiors, the tires, the smell of the enamel paint on the engine block and, maybe most importantly, the smell of the lushly printed brochures on the tables by the sales offices.
That’s part of the reason I always got so excited when Dad came to town. He almost always had a new car. As I grow older, I’m disappointed the times when his car is the same as last time or just a “business car.” Maybe the greatest thrill was the Mercury Montclair, a red and white beauty, with chrome, chrome and more chrome. The sleek roof gently slops to the trunk lid. Chrome this. Chrome that. Chrome seemingly everywhere. One time he takes me and my best friend, Jay, to Disneyland in it. The Mercury has an automatic lubricating system that activates with a push of the button, turning green when the joints have been greased. Jay and I push it to the point where Dad gets annoyed and tells us to stop. We sneak lube sessions when he’s not paying attention. In between, we lean out the window, our faces blasted by the wind, yelling at passing cars. My dad loses his patience with this, too, eventually reprimanding us for being so careless with our lives. Look back, I think I had one of the first Disneyland Dads. He takes me there the day it opens and many times after that, twenty-six by the time I’m fourteen. I keep careful count.
On some visits, Dad brings money. He skips the legally mandated child support payments but Mom never goes to court. She gets depressed, drinks and starves us instead. On the occasions when she blows up an engine through neglect of one thing or another, oil, water, whatever… Dad buys her another car, always used from some low-rent used car salesman that he knows. My grandfather disapproves. One junker after another is my grandfather’s attitude. One night in a theater, Dad shows me the inside of his wallet, with a line-up of hundred dollar bills sleeved between the leather folds. Impressive. Dad negotiates the price. Mom drives the cars out the lot until they break down, once before she turned the first corner. She never takes care of the cars. They smell. They’re never locked, the windows never rolled up. Tar from cigarette smoke cakes the dashboard and seats. She keeps her empty whiskey bottles in the trunk, until there’s too many of them. Then she keeps them under a smelly blanket behind the front seat, letting them pile up until they reach window level. I once ride with her to the dump at midnight, where she turns off the head lights and coasts through the unguarded, ungated, entrance. I sit numb while she empties the empties as quietly as she can.
Still walking up the boulevard, my empty belly cramps up and I have to stop for a moment. My sack lunch missing during the day, I used my meager spending money to buy something to eat at the mountain snack bar, leaving no money for bus fare, only enough to call. No answer.
I wander up the boulevard that afternoon, making up stories to tell my friends about what the day was like. I check the six lane boulevard every other step. At each new block, at each new dealership, new cars line up behind huge slanted overhangs of plate glass. Facets of light sparkle off the waxed enamel paint and chrome trim, reflecting the passing traffic. Outside the showrooms, pastel coupes sit in diagonal rows behind posts and chains. I love the fun house image of my face in the bumpers and hubcaps.
A kid at school, his dad owns one of these dealerships. Every morning, I watch him drop off his son at school, a new car every other month. How lucky. At each lot, I wonder if Dad has just bought one of these or maybe one of these. I try to guess which one he would pick. Which one would I pick for him if he let me? What do they smell like? What does the brochure look like? The best brochures are the ones with multiple pages and beautiful photos of beautiful families, smiling and happy, playing alongside their new Impala, parked by the ocean, the glowing sun and the shiny sea merging into a scene of Southern California paradise or maybe a smiling family cruising down a narrow country lane during the fall in a Ford Fairlane, gliding silently through the orange forest.
After the first hour of walking, the dealerships begin to close as the afternoon fades into evening. By then, I have a small stack of brochures. At some of the dealer showrooms, a slickly dressed salesman teases me about what car I’m shopping for. In my grimy shirt, holey pants and scuffed shoes, I don’t want to be teased. I’m embarrassed by my poverty amidst the fear that my life is this way because I deserve it.
Each time I get back to the sidewalk, I look again for Mom’s car. I call again. No answer.
Halfway home, there’s only a couple of new car dealers left. The rest of the way is mostly used car lots, all seemingly closed. Plastic flags wave in long regiments, strung up against the evening sky. I look for flaws in the used cars. They all have them. Chips of chrome peeling off their bumpers or runs in their soggy paint, with worn seats, cracked steering wheels… …they depress me with their deceitfulness, looking new and shiny, with their imminent failure lurking beneath the cheap new paint.
I give up calling and go into a liquor store. It smells of bubble gum, whiskey and cigarette. I like the bubble gum. Mom likes the rest. Near the big furniture store, with windows tinted so you can barely see inside, is the last car lot.
It’s now dark. A few bright lights sparkle overhead. This is the last lot. It’s brightly lit and closed. I see what I want and I’m not ten anymore.
In the back, I see it there, the car—the signpost of memory that never really fades. The paint looks good from a distance. I think about having it, about owning it, about it changing my life. I want to bring something back that’s gone and, at the same time, I don’t want anything to do with any of it. I don’t really understand what I want to bring back. The old green car looks like the one I sat in as a boy, in front of my grandparent’s house, on a hot summer day, while Mom and Dad go inside and visit, drinking lemonade and laughing, before the arguments and the bitterness.
I know I shouldn’t go onto the lot, that someone might see me and call the police but no one’s around, other than the transfixed faces in the cars that speed on the boulevard. I duck under the chain and weave through the first row, where the best cars are, to the second row, where they keep the trucks and “businessman specials,” to the back. I stop and behold the memory. From ten feet away, I see rust on the bumper. The tires are cracked. A large weed grows through the frame and into a gap between the hood and the fender. I approach slowly, afraid to let the fantasy go. Pushing my face up against the door window, I see the dust covered interior, the stains on the headliner and notice the fractured glass on the dashboard clock. It’s a relic that no one has bothered to get rid of, it’s cracked glass marking a moment in time, gone and still here, forever.