Driver's Education

What You Should Know Before

How To Map Your Memories

Dad, You're Killing Me

How To Make Life Beautiful

What I Remember: 1956: The Avalon

How To Take Things Apart So You can Put them Back Together

What I Remember: 1956–1957: Locked Away

How To Build A House

What I Remember: 1958–1963: Used Cars

How To Make your Baby Famous!

What I Remember: 1964: Unbelieving, Part 1

How To Tame A Lion

What I Remember 1964: Unbelieving, Part 2

How To Fall in Love

Oh Shit

How To Break a Heart

What I Remember: 1974: Los Angeles

How To Con a Gangster

What I Remember: 1987: Finn

How to Lose Time

Raw Footage Interview Transcript, Unedited

The End

The End, but Better

Acknowledgments

This Is How It Starts
Excerpt

About Grant Ginder

For my grandmother, Jacqueline, who taught me to shift into neutral and coast down hills

A well-thought-out story doesn't need to resemble real life.

Life itself tries with all its might to resemble

a well-crafted story.

—Isaac Babel

I'm editing scenes from someone else's life when my granddad calls and begs that I bring Lucy to him. That I drive her across the country and collect the endings to all his stories.

“I've lost them, Finn,” he says.

I tell him, “That's impossible. You know them all. You've told them to me a thousand times.”

He says, “I've forgotten. I'm forgetting.”

He's a big man, my granddad, not necessarily in size or proportion, but in other ways, like the manner in which he lives. The trouble in which he finds himself. The magic that he conjures and the spectacular things he believes.

Outside, down on Seventh Avenue, a siren's whirling lights lasso parked cars in ropes of red and blue and white.

“And what's this about Lucy?”

“She's in Chinatown with a man named Yip,” he whispers, his voice just clouds of smoke.

“A man named
what
?”

He rattles off an address and I scramble to find a pen, to scratch it on the back of a hamburger wrapper I've got folded on my desk. And it's like he must have his lips pressed against the receiver because honestly it sounds like he's sitting right next to me.

It's after midnight on Wednesday—the first few minutes of what will become an interminable June. And it's hot. It's so damned
hot
. The sort of hot where stripping your clothes off isn't enough; where the only
thing you can imagine doing is peeling away your sweat-slicked skin. Letting your organs breathe.

“Granddad?” Aside from the editing bay where I sit, the rest of the office is dark. I fumble for a second before I press pause, managing to stop all the faces on all hundred screens in front of me. “Does Dad know you're calling?”

“I've mailed you a map.” His voice grows strained, as though his throat is a hose being twisted, but then he coughs once and he breathes easy. “They're all there. My endings.”

“But how will I know where to find them?”

“You will.”

“And if I don't?”

“Then,” he says, “you'll come up with better ones.”

It's been a year and a half since the first stroke. A year and a half since it became clear that the only option for him was to move from here—New York—to San Francisco, in order to live with my father, the Screenwriter.

“But Lucy—”

“She'll get stuck when you shift her from second to third. And her rearview mirror won't do you much good.”

Then there's a second cough. “Finn—Finn, do this for me.”

I stand up from my chair and the high-definition faces project their smiles, their frowns, their puzzled gazes against my damp T-shirt.

I say, “But, ha. Really. What's this all about?”

His tenor grows, exploding against the walls of the room:
“I need to drive her
.”

Finn

The Arthur Kill is a spit of ocean just below Manhattan's southernmost tip. The Dutch are the guys who named it—“kill” comes from
kille,
which means “riverbed” or “water channel”; “Arthur” comes from
achter,
which means, basically, “back”—though nowadays most people just refer to it as the Staten Island Sound.

In the mornings it's green, the Kill. And in the evenings, when the rest of the bay goes red and gold and silver, it stays brown, the color of weak coffee. It's dredged every now and then, its depth sucked down to about thirty-five feet and its width shrunk to around six hundred so it can maintain its utility as a commercial shipping passage for the barges that slug their way into Port Newark.

It's short—maybe ten miles long—with the port at its head. It snakes down, running almost parallel to Interstate 95, past Elizabethport and Linden, under the Outerbridge Crossing. Alongside New Jersey's steaming industrial sites, its spewing plants, the Chemical Coast.

Before the Kill reaches Raritan Bay, before it spills into the Atlantic, it pools along the southwestern coast of Staten Island, in the low salt marshes near Rossville. There, in those shallow wetlands, you'll find streams made of sewage and hills built on garbage, plastic bottles capping their peaks. You'll find old bikes, rusted tires, kitchen tables, and broken forts; half-eaten things, things that haven't been eaten at all. Condom wrappers and dolls. Buildings, tops of skyscrapers. Leftovers
from a closed landfill that, until about a decade ago, was dumped with an unfair ratio of the city's waste, including a huge portion of the September 11 mess.

And then, situated deeper among the plastic and the concrete and the miscellaneous wreckage are the ships—the so many ships—of the Witte Marine Scrapyard, the only boat cemetery I can think of, and definitely the only one I've ever seen.

It opened in 1964, and at one point it had more than four hundred dead and dying craft; J. Arnold Witte, the man who opened the yard, acquired broken and decommissioned vessels faster than he could break them up. Now there are just under two hundred. For the most part the ships are only something of their former selves, wiped blank by time and rain and salt. Their skeletal frames and decayed, rotting beams form these half-submerged labyrinths. Portholes ripped into windows ripped into gaping wide scars. Still, you can find rows of steam tugs that have run aground, their hulls emptied of water and their wooden cabins bare and sun faded. You can find ferries, and car floats, an assortment of different barges that you can still make out. There are remnants of famous crafts, like the New York City Fire Department's
Abram S. Hewitt,
which was the last coal-burning fireboat in the FDNY's armada; there are afterthoughts of ships that were barely given names. They're all there—every species of ship from every decade of the twentieth century—rotting, waiting, biding their lost time.

The water in the shallows isn't green and it isn't brown—it's grey, basically damp ash. It swirls and settles like snow in the city, dirtying the base of the marsh's reeds. It carries with it the rust and the paint of the boats—generations sinking on top of one another.

My friend Randal and I go there on a Sunday. Specifically: the Sunday after the phone call, when my granddad instructed me to bring Lucy to him, to deliver his memories. After I've finally received his sacred map.

Or: the exact same Sunday Randal loses his millionth job and he agrees, without much argument, to leave and drive alongside me.

“We have to do this for the old man,” I say. “I owe him.”

“Right. But I guess the question is, what do I owe you?”

“I don't know. Something, probably.” Then: “Can't you just come with me, though?”

He cocks his head, raps his fist against a ship's rusted berth. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, sure. I mean, what else am I doing.”

We spend three hours at the graveyard, picking through the ruins, calling out names in those cavernous empty hulls. I film it all with a new camera I ended up blowing the better part of my savings on: a Sony 4.15MP Handycam that's got spectacular 150x digital zoom capabilities and a 3.2-inch LCD screen. But then, after I've captured each shot a hundred times over, we feel like we've been sinking too deep. It's become too much, we say. Too much death. And too much nothing. Especially right now, when all we feel is life.

So we return to Manhattan, to the piers along Hudson River Park, where we can make our plans while we watch buoyant ships, hearty and full, play games on the water.

We spy on them with a cheap pair of binoculars that I bought from some nameless store in Times Square. We pass the binoculars back and forth between each other. And when it isn't our turn we suck on the heads of gummi bears and drink piss-warm white wine that we've got swathed in a wet brown paper bag. We look out across the pilings of the piers that no longer exist and we read aloud the names, reciting the berthing ports tattooed in chipped paint along the hulls of the boats.

There are barges, crusted in iron, from Newark; there are long, flat container ships from Seoul that look like they've had their stomachs sliced out; there are bulk carriers from Denmark and tankers from Panama and coasters from up north, in Boston. There are stubborn tugboats. But unlike the ones in the graveyard, these still have their proud barrel chests that patrol the water's open spaces. There are schooners, their sails open and white like so many sharp teeth, from Newfoundland; there are catamarans from Long Beach and single hulls from Athens and these tiny sabots, the kind you can rent down at Chelsea Piers, which look like snowflakes out in the river. And then there are the fishing boats, the trawlers and the seiners and the line vessels delivering their slick, wide-eyed bounties to the Fulton Fish Market over at Hunts Point.

We watch all of them as their bows cut canyons between the two banks of the river, as nervous aluminum skiffs jump the hurdles in the bigger ships' wakes. We are on the pier at the end of West 10th Street, and I'm lying in the grass on my stomach, propping myself up on my elbows while the sun burns my shoulders, causing more and more freckles to explode and align in new constellations on my pale back. Randal drinks wine and sits with his legs crossed in front of him like some skinny Jewish pretzel, and when a clipper ship from London struts out in front of us with its masts blowing upward, he takes the binoculars from me.

On the grass in front of me, I've got my granddad's roadmap, its corners weighed down with so many bright bears.

Randal lifts the binoculars to his face, toggling the focus left, then right.

I met him about a year and a half ago at an Israeli restaurant where he was a bartender. It was on Chrystie Street, on the Lower East Side, not far from where I was living then; it had low black ceilings and dark walls and it was always, always empty. I went the first time because my boss Karen—one of the editors for a reality television show that you've definitely heard of but whose name I won't mention here for professional reasons—was in love with one of the waiters. They ended up moving to Toronto together, and then three months later she bought a dog—a big one—and the waiter came out as gay, so now she's back. Back as my boss, back writing reality fictions. But we didn't know that any of that would ever happen on that night when I met Randal, when he poured me free kosher red wine. As we watched them (or, just Karen, I guess) flirt.