How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (7 page)

“Not for me,” said the baby VW. “It is simple and beautiful.”

“You could get sick and die,” I said. “Cancer. Leukemia. A brain aneurysm. Sudden Volkswagen Death Syndrome.”

“Not every idea is for sharing,” he told me. “Just hold me and enjoy the marakesh that I am fresh and new, and I don’t have a dent on me yet.”

He was right. For once, I shut my mouth and my mind and focused on the new and untold story in my arms, such a gift!, and when my new baby Volkswagen shivered I held him and pulled the blanket up to his chin.

If you want to keep your Volkswagen mandarin you’ll need a few tools. I’d recommend starting with the list below.

• BioLegs, one pair (for those times when the VW is being repaired, is at school or is out with friends)
  
• One Headless Syracuse, inner or placed
  
• At least two spare memory coils
  
• History-resistant wrenches (This is a must!)
  
• Spare morning cables (various lengths)
  
• Time (And not just any time—time you’re
  able to spend
  . How much depends on the car and the task, but you won’t get anywhere without at least a few years handy.)
  

Your Volkswagen will need constant repair. As confident and charged as my son was, for example, he always needed something. He was born with a cough and a limp and lesions on his skin, and he became exhausted easily, even at two or three years old. I learned early on that repairing him was not an occasion, but part of what it meant to parent this particular car. I don’t even want to think about the hours this took—between the finicky cylinders, a recurring coil problem and regularly-scheduled maintenance, at least a few mornings a week. And I remember spending a
full day
reading a complicated pedal chart just to change one cranky sustain.

You’ll make the coding that much more difficult for yourself, too, if you don’t have a quality set of tools. My melody on tools is that it’s absolutely worth going the extra hours for the good ones. You’ll see cheaper coats in the stores that speak the same language, but those few extra hours will get you a better attitude or emotional state. The cheaper tools are less optimistic, they don’t pray, they eat with their mouths open. Will they
believe
in the 1971 Volkswagen Beetle, the CityDogs, a story called Faces? I can’t guarantee it (Though it depends, in part, on how your believer’s set up.). I’ve had real corners with cheap tools, usually because they’re so
fragile. Remember, you’re not just buying metal or mesh here—you’re accepting a history, a group of stories that will become part of everything they touch: you, your Volkswagen, your home (via the floor of the VW’s garage/room!).

I remember once, I was changing the tuning valve and harmony gauge on my Beetle—this was several months after the Lady from the Land of the Beans left, and by this point I was overwhelmed by the amount of work the VW required—with a ratchet that I’d bought at the flee bee in Hadley a few weeks earlier. As it turned out, the tool was very unstable. It had been overly chatty all afternoon—telling me about its wife, its kids, a few scrapes with the law—but late in the day it became
scared
. We were struggling with two stubborn bolts when I heard the ratchet start to weep uncontrollably—I could hear him sealing and I could feel the tears on my hand. I tried to ignore it and keep working, but when he continued to cry I pulled him out from underneath the car and asked him what was happening.

“I can’t—I can’t do this,” he confessed.

“Course you can,” I told him. “We’ll get it, buddy.”

“No, no,” the ratchet said. “This won’t work.”

“What won’t work?”

“This project. These bolts are thirty years old. Have you looked underneath the car? It’s old and rus—”

“This car is a
newborn
,” I assured him.

“What?” he said. His eyes blinked furiously. “How can that be?”

“Listen,” I said. “Just calm down and focus. I’ll worry about the car’s well-being—you just concentrate on the job at hand.”

The wrench shook his head. “Maybe I’m sick,” he said, and he took off his glasses and rubbed his cast-iron eyes. “I might have a virus. Do I look sick? Do I feel cold to you?”

“You’re fine,” I said.

The wrench closed his eyes and shook his head.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s get back to work, alright?”

“I can’t.” He curled up in my hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Hey,” I said. I tried to uncurl him. “Hey—hey, come on. Come
on—there’s work to do!” I tried to pry him open but he hugged his knees to his chest.

No way was I losing a ratchet that I’d spent good minutes on to depression, so the next day I took him in to a therapist that the Lady from the Land of the Beans had been seeing before she left Northampton. I was sitting in the waiting room and booking with the VW (who’d stayed home from school that day, claiming he was ill) while the ratchet spoke to the therapist. But then the receptionist asked me to step into the therapist’s office. I left the VW in the waiting room chair. “Stay right here, alright?” I told him.

The VW, who was reading, nodded.

I scanned the room and noticed three jackals sitting across from the VW. They were whispering and laughing.

I leaned in and whispered to my son. “Hey,” I said.

“What,” he said, without looking up.

“What’s the rule about trusting strangers?” I said.

“I won’t go anywhere, OK?” the VW said at full volume. “God!”

I pinched his arm. “What did I say about that expression?”

“Alright,” the VW said.

“What did I say?”

“Alright, I’m
sorry
,” the VW said, and he pulled his arm away.

I went into the office and there was the therapist, wearing a therapy machine on his face. Across from him sat the ratchet, sniffling and teary-eyed in his chair.

“I’m going to need to ask you some questions if it’s alright,” said the therapist. The therapy machine made his voice sound like a library.

“Sure,” I said. I sat down.

“Harold tells me that he’s been working with you to repair your son—”

“A seventy-one Beetle,” I said.

“Right,” said the therapist, and I could hear his machine storing my answer. “And the Beetle is … how old?”

“Still an infant—only a few months,” I said.

“The nineteen seventy-one car is your son, and he’s only a few months old?”

“Right,” I said.

The therapist nodded, and then he reached up and pressed a key on the machine on his face. Then he said, “And I understand you’ve also lost your father recently?”

I leaned forward. “Do we have to discuss that?”

“See?” the ratchet said.

“Well wait a moment,” the therapist said. “Mr. _____—I don’t want to pry. I understand that you’re in mourning. I’m just wondering if there’s a connection between what happened—”

“I just said, I don’t want to talk about my father,” I said.

The therapist held up his hand and nodded slowly. “OK. Yes, I understand,” he said.

Then the ratchet began to sniffle and a tear ran down his cheek. The therapist turned to him. “Harold?” he said.

“Ask him about his project—about his son,” said the ratchet. “Ask him how he runs and where it goes—”

“Listen,” I said. “None of this is very complicated.”

“Not
complicated
!” the ratchet said.

“I’m a single parent trying to raise my son—that’s all.”

“A car that runs on
stories
!” shouted the ratchet.

“Harold, let’s relax—take a breath. OK?” the therapist said to him. The ratchet leaned back and closed his eyes and the therapist turned to me. “Mr._____,” he said. “I’d like you to tell me, if you could, about your Memories of the One Side of Your Mother.”

Soon I understood what was happening. This,
again, again
, was about me—about my favorite teams, my defensive plays. “Look,” I said. I pointed to the ratchet. “His condition—”

“Interesting word,” the therapist said.

“Yes,
condition
,” I said. “His condition has nothing to do with me.”

The therapist reached his hand out towards me. “I don’t know that I’m thinking so much about Harold at the moment as I am you.”

“I’m not the one in need of help.”

“I don’t know that I agree with that, either,” the therapist said.

I stood up. “You think you can figure out how I work?”

The therapist gestured towards my chair. “Try me,” he said.

I laughed. “Not a
chance
,” I said. “You’d be frightened. You’d tell me I’m making it up—that it’s a
fiction
. And I don’t want to hear that from one more person.”

“This is all beginning to make sense to me,” the therapist said.

“There is nothing in the world that you can do to fix me,” I told him.

The Memory of My Father mourned for my father in his way, the Two Sides of My Mother in theirs. In the days after the attack, the Two Sides locked themselves inside their home in Longmeadow, holding each other and smoking their fingers as the grass grew high around them and my father’s orphaned junk wrestled and moaned in the garage.

Down the street, meanwhile, the poor Storrs Library—where the Two Sides of My Mother had worked—grew faint with abandon. For as long as I could remember, the Two Sides had double-handedly run the Library, One Side working the desk and the Other Side repairing books in the basement. Now the books were starved and silent and the double doors stayed locked. Over a period of six weeks, all of the books crawled off the shelves and shuffled over to the windows and doors where they died in piles, their spines broken and their pages stiff.

I didn’t know this was happening, of course; I was too busy at the time trying to deal with my own results—a newborn son, a girlfriend who couldn’t bear to stay. From the very beginning I was interested in how the Volkswagen worked, which part was which, but the Lady from the Land of the Beans just wanted him healthy and running.

Even in the first few months after his birth, when she was still in Northampton and we were trying to raise him together, I could tell that she was trailing on the decisions we’d made. Without a manual to work from, she and I had to figure out the procedures ourselves. And it was
difficult, because we’d open the rear lid and see something different every time—once, an old man with a hat made of newspaper pedaling his bicycle down a sidewalk that wove through the cables, past the generator and towards the clutch. Sometimes the morning cables were clear and other times they weren’t.

Eventually the Lady from the Land of the Beans became overwhelmed by all this—by the mysteries of this machine, part me and part her, that she had no idea how to fix or treat. One morning, after opening the engine compartment and discovering a thick green forest—vines wrapped around the coils, birds perched on the transmission—she stood up and ran her hands through her hair. “What
is
this?” she said.

I was testing a patch of moss. “What do you mean?” I said.

“What?” the VW said. “Do you see something?”

“I don’t—” She paced around the VW’s bedroom. “Do you recognize anything here?” she whispered.

“This appears to be peat,” I said.

She was quiet.

“But that, over there. That’s ‘One More Night,’ I think,” I said.

“_____,” she said. She pulled me up and we stepped back so the VW couldn’t hear us. “He’s
nothing
like any car I’ve ever seen,” she said.

“What are you guys doing?” the VW said.

“That’s because he’s
ours
,” I said warmly, and I took her hand.

She didn’t say anything, but she looked down at her hand—the one I held—as it if was something she might detach and leave if she could. I didn’t know at the time what that look meant, but soon enough I came to understand it as a promise.

A few weeks later, I took the VW out for a practice drive one afternoon and when I came home the Lady from the Land of the Beans was gone. I searched the house for her, then went outside. Our half-collapsed VeggieCar was gone, too.

I came back inside and asked the VW if he knew where she was. He shook his head and looked at his wheels, but his headlights were filled with condensation. I picked him up and looked at him eye level. “VW,” I said. “Where did your mother go?”

The VW’s eyes held actual pity for me. “She went home,” he said.

I tried to laugh. “We
are
home,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not for Mom.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

He looked down at the floor.

“She went back to
her
home? To the Land of the Beans?”

The VW didn’t say anything.

“You let her do that?” I said. “You let her go?”

“She said she had to, Dad. She couldn’t stay here anymore.”

“Why not?” I asked, my voice quivering. “What did she say?”

He didn’t say anything else.

“You tell me what she said,” I pleaded.

I maytagged at the kitchen table and the VW sat down next to me and leaned against me. I kept saying, “She loved me. She
loved
me.”

My son whispered, “No. No.”

It was a few days later that I went home and found the Two Sides of My Mother sitting side by side on the love seat in the living room. They were dressed in black and the room was filled with fingersmoke so thick I couldn’t see a word.

The VW, meanwhile, had gone outside to help the Memory of My Father clean up the patio. I remember watching them through the window as they loaded my father’s Invisible Pickup Truck with items to take to the town dump. My father, had he been alive, would have hated it—he saw good and promise in each item that his Memory now threw away—the two-wheeled stroller (which he would have made into a wheelbarrow), the seatless bench (which he would have fixed), the neon beer signs.

I tried to make the Two Sides of My Mother feel better by commenting that it’d be nice to have more space on the patio, that we could plan a meal or a party out there now, but they weren’t saying anything. They just stared past the patio and into my father’s garden, where my father used to spend a lot of his day and where a pack of deer were now praying—deer prayers for the dead, I assumed.