The next evening we were back at the high school parking lot and I was back to bucking my car. This time, however, I didn’t stall it. I moved my car forward and eventually shifted into second. My father told me to stop and try it again. I did. This time the car didn’t jump at all. I’d done it. I stopped the car, did it again. Several more times I stopped and did it again and again until I was convinced I had it. Then I drove around that parking lot shifting from first to second, then back to first. I was actually driving my own freaking car. This is good, I thought to myself. I like this.
Then I remembered my father was in the car with me. “Alright, let’s take it out on the road now,” he said.
“What? The road?” I said. “I’m not ready for that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I just learned,” I said.
“So what. You know how to drive a car. Once you’re moving it’s just like any other car,” he said.
To me it felt like I’d just learned to drive for the first time. (My mother had taught me to drive.) I was scared to death to be out on the road where other drivers didn’t know to take it easy around me. I knew the way some people drove—like they didn’t give a shit about anyone. I knew because I was one of those drivers.
There was no arguing with my father. Cautiously, I made my way out onto Cedar Crest Blvd. I bucked the car a little but I made it out onto the road, shifted to second and tried to take a deep breath. My father said, “What the hell—shift into third!”
I did what I was told. I turned where he told me to turn. I slowed down when he told me to slow down. To my surprise, I drove my car—my stick shift car—all around Emmaus that night.
At a stop sign on a hill I thought I was in for it. I stepped on the clutch and the car started drifting backwards. “Get your foot on the brake!” my father said. “When you’re ready to go, jam on the gas fast so you don’t hit the car behind you.”
My heart raced. I stepped hard on the gas pedal and the engine raced. The tires spun, making a high pitched squeal like in the movies. That night I learned what burning rubber really meant. My father laughed. “Smell that?” he said. “You just took a thousand miles off your tires!” He laughed some more. While I was terrified, he was laughing. I didn’t know which was the proper reaction to the way I drove my first car.
The car I’d bought and could now drive—while scared—was a 1966 Mustang convertible with the 289, V8 engine. At that point the car had eighteen years on it and cost much more than I could afford. Only my grandparents had that kind of money to lend me. There was no reason for me to own a classic car whose only use would be to take me to the few places I went. But my father had instilled in me his love of old cars. Year after year he took me to the Auchfest, the Lehigh Valley’s premier antique car show, and he had friends who restored old cars, who spent hours talking to my father about them. Being around old cars and the people who owned them made my father happy in a way nothing much seemed to, certainly happier than I made him.
I’d spotted the Mustang in the parking lot of the local airport. Running out of ideas of how to get me out of his apartment, my father had taken me and his girlfriend to an air show. (My sister spent most of her time with her boyfriend.) When I saw the for sale sign on the Mustang and got excited by the possibility of buying it, I wasn’t thinking about the impracticality of owning an old car that would more than likely require constant maintenance, which I was totally incapable of providing; that the car might not have power steering or power brakes; that I wouldn’t like the way the wind whipped my hair from behind when the top was down; that because it was a classic car I would live in constant fear of having the doors dented every time I parked it; or that I didn’t know how to drive stick. I wasn’t thinking those things at all. I was too busy looking at my father closing his eyes and saying to himself the phone number on the for sale sign. As he memorized that number, I knew that I wanted to own the car that made my father happy.
My father already had a car and couldn’t afford another one. But I needed a car and could afford to buy one, sort of. He told me to borrow the money from my grandparents. I agreed because, as I saw it, I would have something he was interested in. Today, I see that I thought that if he would be interested in my car, he would pick up an interest in me. He had nothing else to do. He’d recently been laid off from the job he had for twenty years as a tool and die maker. The plant moved from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to get rid of the union, and the new owner gave severance packages to those who didn’t want to move to North Carolina and make less than they’d been making. His girlfriend too had been laid off.
I was the only one with a job that summer. I worked at a warehouse down the road from my father’s apartment. Before I learned how to drive my car, my father dropped me off in it and picked me up when my work ended. He came with the top down and his girlfriend in the passenger seat. I’d told the guys I worked with about my car. Instead of congratulating me or acknowledging the coolness of my purchase, they frowned and shook their heads. And when they saw me getting into the backseat at the end of our shift, they laughed and pointed. Even after I’d learned to drive stick and slowly and carefully drove by myself to work from my father’s apartment, my father would come by and take my car. The guys would say, “Hey, Kelly, someone is stealing your car.” Or, “That really is your car, isn’t it? You wouldn’t be lying to us, there, would you?” Or, “Hey, Kelly, where’d your car go? It was here a minute ago.”
I could say nothing to my father about my embarrassment. I had never talked about anything like that with him. I’d been an every-other-weekend son for seven years at that point. My father chose to have no contact with me or my sister during the time we were with our mother. Furthermore, the two weeks the judge had ordered us to spend with my father in the summer had once been filled with playing with our friends from the neighborhood my sister and I had grown up in—the one my mother had moved us from. Five years after leaving my father, my mother forced my father to sell our home and he moved to a confining one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood we were totally unfamiliar with. What happened then was that my sister and I now looked to our father in a way we hadn’t before—as someone to help us forget what we lost, to entertain us, to keep us busy, to teach us new things. My father tried in his own way. But it was a role he did not relish—“Let’s kill some time at the movies,” he’d say, or “What the hell do you want to do today?” Even when my parents were married, we barely saw him since he chose to work second shift, which meant we only saw him on the weekends during school.
As a consequence, my father never seemed to be around to teach me anything. A neighbor, Mr. Edelman, gave me my first baseball glove and taught me how to catch. My mom sent me next door to Mr. Bishop to teach me long division and fractions (he was a math teacher). His wife Mrs. Bishop had taught me how to tie my shoelaces when my mother didn’t have any luck. During the weekends, when I was a kid down in my father’s workshop, my father taught me that he didn’t want to teach me how to do things.
My sister was two years younger than me, and, starting when she was thirteen, she acquired a boyfriend and spent a good part of those weekends, when she was supposed to be with my father, at her boyfriend’s. (My father was permissive that way.) That left me with my father and his girlfriend and the TV. Before I got the job at the warehouse, I watched a lot of TV at my father’s apartment.