No Relation (17 page)

I tried a few writing exercises where you’re prompted by a phrase. I tried, I did. I even completed a few, but my words, my sentences, sounded like someone else’s. I wanted them to
sound like mine again. I liked my sentences. I wanted them back. I resaved my manuscript and shut down my laptop, again, as I had the previous six days. The only words I seemed to save on a daily basis were “Chapter 12.”

Thursday dawned rainy, although “rainy” seems wholly inadequate to describe what was going on outside. It was the kind of precipitation that made boat-builders feel superior. The rain came down in sheets, switched to buckets for a while, then back to sheets. It was not a good day to be driving. It was an even worse day to be teaching someone to drive. But why stop there? If you were teaching someone who had already failed his driver’s test four times, it was the absolute worst of days to be driving. So why not postpone it? Well, even driving underwater was preferable to staring at my blank laptop screen. You see, in a moment of weakness, when my faculties were dulled by beer and the kumbaya camaraderie of the NameFame baseball and karaoke night, I’d offered to help Mario practise for a record fifth attempt at his driver’s test. The look of gratitude on his face was worth it. At least until he slipped behind the wheel of my Infiniti G35. I loved that car.

“Okay, Mario. You’ve got your seat belt buckled, you’ve set your mirrors, and you’re no longer hyperventilating. So let’s turn the wipers up to full speed so we can actually see,” I suggested. “Um, no, that’s the cruise control. Nope, that’s the radio. Sorry, Mario, you just turned on the rear window defroster.”

I stopped him when he reached for the sunroof control.

“I give up.” Mario sighed.

“It’s right there on the end of the turn signal arm,” I pointed as I said it. “Good. Now we can see. Sort of.”

I’d driven us out of town a ways to the burbs. We were in a large, freshly paved parking lot that would be packed with cars just as soon as the several big box stores still under construction opened their doors. But on this particular Thursday afternoon, in the midst of a monsoon, there were no other cars in the lot. Given the deluge, a canoe would not have looked out of place.

“You seem to be stretching a bit for the steering wheel,” I observed. “Are your feet anywhere near the pedals?”

“Well …” Mario started.

I reached over top of him and nudged the control button on the side of his seat. Mario smiled while the electric motor inched him forward.

“Cool,” he said. “Nothing on my Pacer is automatic.”

“Okay, say ‘when,’ ” I said and waited while Mario and his seat continued their slide toward the dashboard.

“Okay, I can feel the pedals now!”

“Excellent. That should make it easier for you to control the car. Always a good thing.”

Mario nodded, gripping the wheel.

“Okay, let’s give it a little gas and drive down to the end of the lot, then you can turn and loop back around to here.”

“All right. Here goes,” he replied.

Mario pressed down on the accelerator and the engine responded. The rain was coming down hard and loud, so it was
tough to see very much. He gripped the steering wheel, making minute adjustments supposedly to keep the car rolling in a straight line.

“Um, Mario?”

“Gee, it’s a big parking lot,” he noted, looking intently through the windshield.

“Mario, you’re still in Park. We’re not actually moving yet.”

Over the course of the next hour, Mario drove laps of the parking lot, and “drove” is a very generous characterization, while I strained my right quadriceps pushing the imaginary brake pedal on the passenger-side floorboards. If the G35 had a handbrake and not the driver’s side foot-activated type, I’d have pulled it at least four times. Mario seemed to have a problem with his perception of speed. And when he realized he was going just a little too fast, usually when my voice moved into a different register, his reaction was to step on the gas rather than lift his foot from it. Eventually, after nearly jumping the parking barriers a few times, he became more comfortable with the concept of moving his foot from the accelerator to the brake, you know, the pedal that makes the car stop.

I’m exaggerating. Okay, no, I’m really not. At one point, I was ready to suggest we practise a bit on one of Mario’s Xbox racing games before returning to the parking lot. Collisions don’t cost as much on the Xbox. After Mario had been driving for nearly forty minutes, I had him park in an isolated corner of the parking lot so we could go through some of the rules of the road, like
no right turns on red lights in New York City, how to position your wheels when parking on a hill, and the importance of driving on the right side of the road. I didn’t see the police car approach through the sheets of rain until it pulled up next to us and lowered his window a crack. I lowered mine an inch or two.

“Lower your window so I can see the both of you, please,” the older, somewhat puffy, officer asked with a slight edge.

I hit the button and the window sank farther while the rain swept in.

“You boys unable to find a quiet and private place indoors somewhere?” he asked. “You feel the need to cruise empty parking lots? I guess it’s cheaper than a room, huh?”

“Officer, I can assure you I was just helping my friend practise for his road test. That’s all.”

“Well, you been stopped over here in the far corner for the last twenty minutes with your windows fogging up. So I just assumed that your friend was, you know, pulling on your handbrake. Whaddam I s’posed to think?”

“Officer, with great respect, you’re supposed to consider other options that are far more likely than two guys making out in broad daylight in a parking lot during a typhoon. Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I said.

“And anyway, there is no handbrake in this car,” added Mario helpfully.

Officer No More Mr. Nice Guy was not impressed.

“I need the driver’s learner’s permit.”

“Uh boy, here we go.” Mario sighed as he passed it to me so I could hand it over to the officer.

The cop burst out laughing as he looked at it, which I think was better than some of the other reactions he might have had.

“No, this cannot be true. You have got to be shittin’ me,” the officer said, laughing.

“Believe me, I wish I were,” Mario replied.

“Yes, I know it seems unlikely and, um, to some, hilarious that a guy with my young friend’s name here needs driving lessons, but however far-fetched it sounds, that’s really what’s going on here,” I said. “It’s the truth.”

“Unbelievable. You can’t make this stuff up,” the officer said between snorts. “Okay, now I need to see some
ID
from you as well.”

“Is that really necessary?” I asked.

“You got somethin’ to hide, smartass? Hand it over.”

Fan-friggin-tastic. I took a deep breath and dug for my wallet.

“Officer, I really think giving you my
ID
is just going to, um, make matters worse.” I passed my driver’s licence over to him. He studied it for a moment. I watched closely and waited for the expression on his face to change, for the penny to drop, for that particular synapse to spark, for his mind to blow. When all four happened simultaneously, I delivered my standard pre-emptive strike. “No relation.”

At first, he accused both Mario and me of, as he so delicately put it, “fuckin’ with me.” It took three more pieces of
ID
from each
of us and long exchanges on his radio before he was satisfied that we might actually be who we claimed to be. Luckily, I’d managed to reacquire enough of my
ID
following the lost wallet fiasco to survive the situation. Twenty minutes later, having squeezed all the fun he could out of our entertaining encounter, the police officer finally drove away, bearing his precious cargo, a great story he could hardly wait to tell his colleagues at their post-shift beer-guzzling. We waited until he was out of sight around a bend in the road before switching seats. I drove Mario home.

“I really think I learned something today,” Mario said when I pulled into his driveway. “About driving, I mean. Thanks a lot, Hem. I’ve got no one to help me get better, so that was awesome. Thanks.”

“No worries. I could really see improvement by the end,” I lied, wanting to be encouraging. “Next time, we’ll do it on a sunny day when it’ll feel more like driving a car and less like helming a submarine.”

As I pulled away, Mario waved from his front porch, so I waved back. Thinking more clearly on the drive home, I wasn’t sure there’d actually be a next time. Reviewing our little driving lesson, I realized I’d feared for my life the entire time. Yes, I guess a generous observer might conclude that Mario had improved over the course of our session. But successfully adjusting your mirrors and remembering only once to bring the car to a full stop before ramming the gearshift into Park was setting the improvement bar rather low.

“So how goes the exciting and interesting life of Earnest Hemmingway the fourth?”

Dr. Madelaine Scott was seated where she always was for our sessions, and I was in my regular chair.

“Oh, you know, same old, same old,” I started. “I’ve managed to persuade nine other New Yorkers with famous names to show up for our little weekly pity party at the Y. We lost our first ball game so spectacularly that the
Times
may consider assigning a sports reporter to document our season. For weeks now I haven’t been able to put two words together on the novel that make any sense thanks to an arrogant literary spectre who’s trying to flatten my prose so much it would bore an entire English-as-a-second-language class. And, wait, there’s something else I’m forgetting. Oh yes, I was almost arrested this morning for teaching Mario Andretti how to drive. Otherwise, it’s been an uneventful couple of weeks.”

“All right, then. I think our work here is done. Thanks for stopping by,” Dr. Scott replied.

I just looked at her.

“Hem, I’m kidding. Contrary to popular belief, psychiatrists quite often have a sense of humour.”

“Sorry, I just hadn’t picked up …” I fumbled. “Um, your deadpan delivery was outstanding.”

I took the next fifteen minutes or so to bring Dr. Scott up to
speed on the NameFame group. I tried to be nonchalant about it all, but I think she noticed the pride I’d gained in the process.

“Congratulations. I confess I was uncertain you’d find anyone to join,” she replied. “So what have you learned and how has it made you feel?”

“Well, there was this almost instantaneous comfort knowing there were others in the same position. I could see they felt it, too. There was a sort of kinship among us that surfaced as the meeting continued. It’s hard to explain.”

“Actually, it’s not hard to explain at all,” Dr. Scott observed. “Even disparate groups with diverse demography that share an unusual life experience quite often come together very quickly. I’m not surprised at all. It’s elemental group dynamics.”

“Okay, so maybe it’s not that hard to explain. All I can say is, I wasn’t really expecting it to unfold that way. It was, you know, nice.”

“All right, we have about twenty minutes left, so let’s move on to the third party in the room,” Dr. Scott proposed.

On instinct I looked around her office.

“Hem, I’m referring to the ghostly presence you believe is thwarting your efforts to write the great American novel. What makes you think the ghost of Ernest Hemingway is haunting you?”

“Okay, I admit it’s a little weird. But I can feel him when I sit down to write. He, um, feels big, bold, brash, cocky, manly, and it’s like he’s taunting me.”

“Do you see him or hear him at all?” she asked.

“Of course not. I don’t believe in ghosts. I accept that it’s all in my head, but his presence feels real enough to stop my brain from assembling words the way I used to.”

“You still speak in rather nice flowing sentences,” she noted.

“Well, the words may be flowing, unimpaired, from my mouth, but they’re certainly not flying from my fingers.”

“And what steps have you taken to manage this … situation?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve tried to rid myself of any traces of Ernest Hemingway. All of my books by him or about him, my fisherman knit sweater, my
History of the Spanish Civil War
DVD
boxed set, even the Paris etchings that hung in my hallway, are now all in my storage locker,” I said. “I’ve also imposed a personal moratorium on big game hunting on the African savannah, and I’ve cancelled my subscription to
Bullfighter Quarterly
.”

“I see you’ve been very thorough. But do you think that’s a rational response? And even if we accept your premise, are you certain it’s Ernest Hemingway and not someone else?”

“Who else would it be?” I replied.

“Who else, indeed?”

“Now that’s another one of your cryptic comments designed to turn everything back to me, right?”

“Remember our roles here, Hem,” she replied. “My job is to pose questions. Your job is to remember, reflect, and respond. Just because you don’t yet know the answers doesn’t mean you don’t have them.”

“That sounds great on paper, Dr. Scott, but I’ve been scouring my own brainpan for quite some time now and I’m not finding much.”