CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

In which I start off on both wrong feet in the adult world

 

The funny thing about my ‘61 Rambler station wagon was the period of intense shimmying that the front end of the car would go through every time it reached 45 mph, getting worse until it got up to about 52 mph; then the shimmy would disappear completely.  Since nobody ever drives between 45 and 52 mph anyway, I thought this shimmy was no reason to disappoint Mikey by not buying his car; he had wanted to sell it so badly.  And besides, I knew the car was OK because Mikey had driven us to that pivot system job in it every day for weeks, and he’d never had a problem getting it to go over 52 mph.  As an expert mechanic, he knew what was going on, and I saw no reason to doubt his explanation of the nature of the mysterious vibration:  “It’s nothing.  Did I tell you about the tape recorder I have for sale?”

Nevertheless, my Daddy was the worrying kind, and he had provided me with a list of phone numbers where he could be reached while I was en route to Sioux City.  This was a busy time for him, and his presence was in demand in several wheat fields and corn fields that week.  If anything went wrong with my Rambler, I was to call him immediately, and he would find a way to get me and my stuff the rest of the way to Sioux City.

I shimmied north through the wheat fields of Kansas on the same two-lane highway that went past the pivot system we’d installed, and kept shuddering and shaking through the corn fields of northern Kansas and on into Nebraska, where I stopped to buy gas in a little town called Hebron.  It had always irked me to spend money on gasoline, especially since it had gone up so much in price since I first got my driver’s license.  It had been down as low as 26 cents a gallon back during the price wars of 1971; that’s when somebody who knew better said, Enough is enough, we gotta hit these baby boomer ingrates with a cut in their allowance before they get old enough to know what’s going on.  So the “energy crisis” was invented, and the American public swallowed it so completely that the “meat crisis” and “sugar crisis” soon followed to cash in on our entrancement with the feeling of melodrama tinged with self-sacrifice that we got from standing in long lines to pay twice what everything had cost the week before, as our pseudo war effort to help out the poor little oil companies who were just barely squeaking through these hard times that they had worked so hard to create for the toughening of our hides.

So I filled the tank of my ‘61 Rambler station wagon with my Mama and Daddy’s money, and headed north through the prairies and corn fields of Nebraska.  I was finally starting to feel like a living person now that Kansas was somewhere behind me and nobody was breathing down my neck.  Ah!  Free at last!

...taptaptaptaptap...

It’s such a small sound, it can’t be anything important.  The engine was running fine, purring like a kitten with those new spark plugs.  Funny how new anti-freeze seems to make the whole car run better.  I hit 45 mph and the shimmy barrier, and pushed down on the gas pedal extra hard like Mikey had showed me, to get past the shudder zone as quickly as possible.  For some reason, the car seemed stuck at 51 mph, and it was quaking and jerking so hard it was difficult to keep it headed in a straight line as I pushed harder and harder on the gas pedal.

Finally, I got it up to 52 mph and the shuddering stopped like I knew it would.

...taptaptaptaptap...

What a funny little sound coming out of the engine, so regular and insistent.

A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead.

...taptaptaptaptap...

Such an innocent little sound.  It can’t mean anything.

...taptaptaptaptap...

Shit.  The temperature gauge is rising a little.  Halfway up to the “H.”  How did that happen?  It’ll probably make it to Sioux City.  Only 200 miles to go.

If that little tapping sound was still there, I could no longer hear it over the grinding, gnashing, crashing sounds coming out of the engine.  I figured I better pull over pretty soon and see why steam was pouring out of the engine compartment.

“Pretty soon” got there real quick.  I kept pushing on the gas pedal, from where I sat on the grassy shoulder, hoping to bring the engine back to life.  Maybe it just had the hiccups.  Eventually I realized that the engine would cool faster if I turned it off, so I got out and stood there in the hot sun, looking at all my stuff so carefully crammed into the back of the station wagon, filling every inch of space.  There was my whole life in that car.  My guitar, my Cat Stevens records, my books, the paintings I’d done in high school art class.

After ten minutes I could wait no longer, and started the engine again.  It had cooled off considerably, since the boiling water had all run out of it, and I started back onto the highway.  It ran great for about ten seconds, except for the grinding, gnashing sounds, which were a little distracting, but then the temperature gauge shot right up past the “H” and the engine acted like it wanted to die on me.

At that moment I made the first independent decision of my adult life:  to drive back to that gas station and call my Daddy to come get me.

The nice man at the gas station was surprised to see me back so soon, since he’d just filled my tank, and when I told him my engine was making a funny noise and overheating, he asked me to turn it on so he could listen.  As soon as I did, he grimaced and told me to shut it off quick.  He explained that the engine had “thrown a rod,” which meant that it was broken for good and couldn’t be fixed, but he knew a nice man who owned the junkyard just up the hill who would give me $25 for the car.  I  walked up the hill.  When I got back from the junkyard after having made the burial arrangements, the man at the gas station let me unload all my stuff into the back of his garage, and then he let me use his telephone to call the farmhouse where my Daddy was working that day.  The lady who answered the phone had to run out into the wheat field to find my Daddy and tell him to call me back.

While I sat on my pile of stuff in that nice man’s garage, I had a nagging thought that kept buzzing around my head like a mosquito.

Here I am a free man, and I’m sitting on a pile of yesterday’s garbage waiting for yesterday’s Daddy to come rescue me and dump me into his idea of what tomorrow is to be.  Why don’t I take matters into my own hands, and disappear with my suitcase and my guitar, right into that Westbound freight train, and be gone from this stifling little world, and never come back?  I could send Judas a postcard from California, and he could join me there as soon as he turns 18, and we could forget that Kansas and parents and teachers and brothers and sisters ever existed.

I stood up and picked up my suitcase in one hand, my guitar case in the other.  I tested their weight.  I imagined myself jumping out of some freight train or some stranger’s pickup truck, somewhere in California, my clothes tattered and torn, my skin burnt to a bronze luster, streaks of proud mud across my forehead, my beard to my knees.

The phone rang; it was my Daddy.  I threw the suitcase back on the pile of my earthly holdings, and set my guitar gently on the concrete floor.

He was panting from having run all the way through the field in the hot sun to get to the phone.  From the quaver in his voice, you’d think I was lying dead in the middle of the road with buzzards pecking my eyeballs.  He told me to get a motel room and he’d be up there to take me the rest of the way as soon as he could cancel what he was doing and get back to Hazing to trade in his government car for the family car.

I saw that last westbound freight train disappear on the horizon.  He wanted to rescue me so badly.  How could I disappoint him?

Our first stop in Sioux City was at the home of Mrs. Edith Dunker, a poor little old widow who the school had informed us would rent me a room in her house for $11 a week.  She showed us the room, which was her favorite room because it was the one her husband had died in, and my Daddy forked over the cash.  She explained that I would have full kitchen privileges, and I could use the phone in the upstairs hallway to call my Mama and Daddy back home, and that there would be no visitors in the room, especially no girls.  My Daddy assured her that I was a good boy and everything would be just fine, and she showed me how the front door locks worked.

While my Daddy helped me haul all my stuff upstairs to my room, he reviewed the priceless information he’d been drilling me with the whole way up there, not to mention the several previous days prior to that.  How to make a long distance phone call.  Remember to give Mrs. Dunker her $11 each week without being asked.  And on and on.  How many times did he assure me that everything would be just fine?  Who was he trying to convince?

Finally, he ran out of things to say, so he repeated everything he’d already said 20 times and spent another 25 minutes saying good-bye, and then it was off into the sunset with him.  My empty shell droned with the echo of the lack of confidence that had saturated his every word.  I could not have been more thrilled to be living out his fantasies for him.  Hooray.  He couldn’t be blamed for waiting this long to start telling me about the world.  How much training does it take to prepare someone for living out a fantasy?  It’s not his fault that his experience in life amounted to trying to avoid criticism and to gain the approval of those whose needs and feelings and opinions mattered:  everyone but him.

I sat in my room and looked at the stuff I’d collected through the years.  I looked out the window.  I longed for some kind of emotion or interesting thought or curiosity or enthusiasm to engulf me in my first moments of freedom.

My fingers found the silk edge of a blanket.  I remembered the old habit of soffing that I’d somehow lost, sometime between the age of 6 and 10, after getting my hand slapped for the first time in my life, for sticking my hand in my shirt during church.  I tried it again.  It felt so good.  Why had I ever stopped?

...soffsoffsoffsoffsoff...

My tongue started up its old automatic sucking motions.  It all came back to me.

...soffsoffsoffsoffsoff...

...soffsoffsoffsoffsoff...

...soffsoffsoffsoffsoff...

At last I was an adult.