I've always had an iffy relationship with cars. I can remember when I was around three my sister Lauren came home from the hospital wrapped like a mummy in bloody gauze and bruised beyond recognition. She had been run off the road by a group of local boys in a truck while biking home from school on our rural road. I was horrified by her injuries and I can still clearly hear her tearfully recounting what happened... "they pushed me right into the ditch and drove off laughing, they didn't care if they killed me, ma! It was like a game to them."
Our family station wagon had its own frightening and contradictory set of connotations. My father would pile all six of us kids in for a trip to the beach or into town, and it would always start out in the spirit of a rambunctiously goodnatured jaunt. We lived on an isolated rain-forest clad mountain top, up a dirt road from the idyllic, orchard spotted Henderson Valley, and as every child in a large family knows, each journey was huge effort to get together. By the end of the day nerves were frayed and the pressure cooker of that sealed and steaming torture chamber tearing through the night was the stuff of nightmares. My father had temper issues, and when challenged in this situation, he knew he was in control and it would bring out the worst in him... "Do you want to see us all die?", he'd scream. "I swear woman, I'll drive us all off the cliff if you don't shut up!" To prove his point he would lurch the car at high speed towards the precipice of our gravelly road, only pulling back at the last second. We never knew if someday he might just take us all over, and the arguments ended quickly, but the helpless and silent terror of those evenings lingered far beyond childhood.
When I looked at my father since in moments of true anger I always wondered who that man was that could contemplate offing his whole family and himself over a disagreement... Who was that demon that possessed him and what made him stop before the edge? ... Was he a cruel and bluffing bully ... or was he just crazy and really meant it?
Regardless of his psychology, I still clench when someone gets upset while driving. Sometimes I just blame the car and the feeling of power that comes with being a driver, and what makes me shiver when I think about it now is how easily his trick could have gone horribly wrong. The gravel on the road was loose and produced a hydroplaning effect on any car going over 20 miles per hour. His threats could have easily been realized by mistake, but he must have known that and got off on it.
On the other hand I maintain that I'm a great driver -even when angry!- and I have many warm memories of my Dad setting me on his lap and teaching me to shift the gears and steer up and down that same windy gravel road as he worked the pedals.
I just never developed the love of cars that many boys my age did. I was incurious about how they were put together and was actually pretty unsteady about most things on wheels. My best friend Phillip Coppins and his older brother Michael lived about a mile down the road, and when I tried to fit in with them by collecting hotwheels toy cars or wobbling down their driveway on a banana-board, they would laugh and laugh. "It's a skateboard, not an airplane, stupid!" Philip howled, arms outstretched ridiculously, mocking my awkward attempts at balance.
They knew I would rather be building tree forts or weirdly talking to my stuffed animals, and that set me apart from the world they were born into and were forming their identities in.
My parents were good parents and they set us on the path of independent thinking and healthy bodies by not having tv or sweets at home, but they were also dedicated academics and were always working at the university. Some traditionally important things were never passed on. There is a heartbreaking story from my dad's collection of memories where I ask him at age six to go throw the ball out back with me. "I'm sorry son, I can't," he writes wistfully, "because my father never taught me." Supposedly at this point I offer to teach him how, but I have no memory of it. I suspect the story has been romanticized in it's re-telling over the years because we never got around to tossing that ball, and I can remember a strange gap in father-son relations from my early childhood. Later on we bonded over Joe Montana and the 49ers but this was borne from exhaustion over our constant conflicts . To this day I credit the healing salve of our mutual hatred for the Dallas Cowboys for keeping us from killing each other during my teenage years.
When the Korean War draft was instated my dad was eligible, but as a Quaker he made a conscientious objection, breaking his own father's heart. He was assigned as an orderly at a military hospital stateside and his drill sergeant father scoffed, calling him a 'wet-nurse' and a 'sissy'. Nevertheless, I believe it was a positive stage in his life where he learned many useful disciplines that he tried in vain to pass on to his children. He could make a bed that you could bounce a quarter off of in ten seconds, and he gleefully trained us in the joy of cleaning the toilet bowl without gloves, but I never once saw axle grease on his hands.
My image of the Coppins' dad is that he would generally be parked under the hood of his jalopy in the driveway, tweaking this or that and causing mysterious and caustic trickles of dark liquid to chase us down the hill. The boys always kept a careful distance until their father called them over to inspect some accomplishment or fetch him a tool. They'd rush over with reverent heads bowed, yet brightly alert, eagerly waiting for the latest gem of knowledge to drop from the secret world of men and their cars. I recall feeling distinctly uninvited.
Bill Zurich's panel-beating workshop would have been like an adult playground to those boys, but to me it was a baffling array of shit I knew nothing about. On prominent display in the office was a toy model of a '56 Chevy, and Bill would point out the subtleties of the paneling and paint job like an art lover describing how Monet renders light. "Look at that chrome work!", he enthused. "It's like classy jewelry on a beautiful woman with a smokin' figure. I'll tell ya Ricky, It's all about the detailing." I was more focused on the details of the naked ladies caressing power tools adorning the walls, but clearly there was some common ground to work with.
One of the things we shared was a love of marijuana, and while coffee was the officially sanctioned drug during work hours, once the day was done the blinds would be shut and the bong pulled out.
It was on one particularly grueling day that Bill and I were finishing up with one such hard-earned smoke after several hours of overtime. We had busted our asses to get these projects done and a special sense of fellowship permeated the office along with a thick weed haze. In those days repainting a car involved sanding an entire panel down to the metal and then doweling in fiberglass filler called 'bog' to fill the dents. On this day we had moved several of the cars outside to sand in the sunshine, but New Zealand weather is changeable, and as any chemist knows when it rains on bare metal, rust envelops the surface like an instantaneous skin cancer.
Like all good stoners we were reactionary not precautionary and we had failed to bring the cars in before our session, so when the rain came suddenly down we panicked at the sight of the giant dollops of wasted man-hours pummeling our precious panels. Rushing outside to a red Honda hatchback I couldn't tell you whether I put my right hand on the broken headlight to push, or right above it and slipped, but either way in one instant a half of my wrist was gone. The next few minutes were like watching a horror film, frame by frame.
I raised my arm and a perfect arc of thick red blood burst from my artery and flew four feet through the air splashing across Bill's face and chest. His eyes grew stark white behind a red mask and he ran into the office grabbing a dirty towel and instructed me to bind the pulsing wound tightly. We walked quickly-not running-to his car in the parking lot, along the way realizing that all the other shops in the cul-de-sac were closed and we were the only souls there.
As we got into his sporty Mazda I noted how clean the interior was compared to our office and I laughed to myself ruefully about how that was all gonna get fucked up. My boss turned to me in shock, looking like a blood-streaked zombie.. turning the ignition on, he said almost to himself, "It's gonna be ok, yer gonna be ok..."
And then he fainted.
At that moment I had to laugh. Here I was with my boss out cold, bleeding to death with no hope of rescue. Remember kids, this was way before cellphones, and for some reason I thought it was too late to run back to the office and try and call someone. I couldn't even remember what number 9-1-1 was in New Zealand. Figuring I was a goner, I sat there with my gushing wrist in the air for a few seconds, and what came to me was the memory of a fumbling and embarrassingly brief encounter with a girl on her period a couple of years before.
As a thin smile stretched across my bloodless face I blissfully resigned myself to the one thought in my seventeen year old boy's mind that made it okay for me to die at that moment...
"At least I'm not a virgin."
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