By this time in my life, I had gotten to know many of the lowlifes that hung around downtown during the day. Rug, Stump, Fatso, and Freddie. And Willie the bookie and Charles the pimp. I found Rug sitting in a doorway next to a Miller High Life beer sign.
“Rug, can you go over to Burtle’s and buy me some porn? The good stuff, from under the counter. Buy me five good ones and you can keep one for yourself.”
He was still hesitant.
“Come on, I’ll buy you a quart of Schlitz.” That did it. I could have saved the cost of a magazine for a sixty-nine-cent quart of beer.
“Okay.” Rug smirked, thinking I was buying material to satisfy my own base desires.
“Fuck you, Rug,” I said. “It’s not for me. It’s for my teacher.”
“Hey, you don’t have to explain yourself to me,” he said. He clearly did not believe the magazines were for my teacher. But he bought them anyway.
That evening, I looked up my teacher’s address. I filled out the subscription cards in his name, checking the “bill me” boxes. Then I hid one of the leftover magazines in my father’s chest of drawers and another in his part of the bookcase—places where my mother would find them and not associate them with me. I slipped one into the parents’ waiting area in the school guidance office. And I left the last one in a pew in the church downtown.
Before distributing the magazines, I looked through them to verify the quality of my gift. In the back pages of one, I found the ideal product for a lonely high school teacher.
REVERSIBLE URSULA
THE ULTIMATE INFLATABLE DOLL
BOY OR GIRL
A FRIEND WHO WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN
She was too good to let get away. I went to the post office with seventeen of my panhandled dollars and ordered her.
Nothing happened for a few weeks. Then, out of the blue, my biology teacher walked up to me one day in the hall.
“Say, John, what do you know about Ursula?”
“Ursula? I don’t know her.”
“I thought not.” He sounded sarcastic. I knew then that I had won, and I smiled to myself. He gave me an F in the course, but I didn’t care. I got Fs in all my courses by that time. Failing grades didn’t scare me anymore. I don’t know if he gave me the F because he didn’t like my work, or because I stopped going to class, or because he suspected me of sending the lovely Ursula into his life.
But I had the last laugh. After school let out, I called Lane Quarry and ordered him two loads of crushed stone.
“Just drop it in the driveway, please,” I said. “Leave the bill in the mailbox. The workmen will take care of it tomorrow.”
More than 100,000 pounds of rock. And best of all, they were going to expect him to pay for it.
Maybe Ursula would help him shovel it out of his driveway.
5
I Find a Porsche
When I was eleven, my father got tenure, and my parents finally bought a house of their own. The one they chose was way out in the woods, in a small town called Shutesbury. I looked up Shutesbury in the Reader’s Digest atlas my grandfather had given me. Population: 273. Small towns don’t come much smaller than that.
Our house seemed very remote. There were five houses in a row where we lived, but they were all separated by trees so none of us could see our neighbors. After the row of houses, our dirt road went on forever with no houses at all. Just woods and hills. In fact, all the roads through the woods were named for hills. We lived on Market Hill Road. Nearby, I found Sand Hill Road, Pulpit Hill Road, January Hills Road, and even Flat Hills Road. And shortly after we moved in, they built a new road, High Point Hill Drive.
All the houses on our street were brand-new. And all the parents living in them taught at the university, except for a few who taught at other schools, like Amherst College or Smith or Mount Holyoke. I soon discovered that some of them had kids my age. We were a little neighborhood in the middle of the woods.
It was the spring of 1968 when we moved. My parents moved me from the big Hadley school to a two-room school in Shutesbury right at the end of the school year. Once again, I made new friends. The couple in the house on our left had five kids. Their son, Ken, was my age, and we quickly became buddies. He had just moved into his house, too, so we spent that summer patroling the woods around our new homes.
After living in cities and then the open fields of Hadley, Shutesbury was a big change. We were only miles from a busy college town, where all sorts of interesting things were always happening, but there were also miles of woods and roads to explore, delineated with signs reading:
TOWN OF AMHERST
WATERSHED
NO TRESPASSING
Which every boy in the neighborhood understood as:
PRIVATE PRESERVE FOR KIDS
One day, I saw fresh tracks going down one of the abandoned roads into our private preserve. I walked those old roads every day, but I never saw cars driving on them. The roads were narrow, with trees and rocks in the middle and brush hanging over the sides. It had been many years since cars used those roads, many of which didn’t even go anywhere anymore. Or if they did go somewhere, the somewhere was now a hole in the ground with a stone post out front where horses were once hitched.
Cautiously, I followed the tracks. A few hundred yards in, I reached a clearing. In the clearing sat a new Porsche. A blue one. With tan seats. And a chrome “90” on the back.
Someone had left it there. Just for me. I knew what it was. I read Hot Rod and Road and Track, and I knew every model of car there was. So I had read about Porsches, but up till now I had never seen one up close.
I approached it slowly. The hood was open. I looked inside, but I didn’t see any engine. Had it broken down? Maybe someone had removed the engine to fix it. Then I had another thought. Maybe it was stolen. I remembered what I’d read about car thieves in my Hardy Boys stories. Maybe they were hiding nearby. Suddenly, I was scared. I didn’t want to end up tied to a tree with tape over my mouth like the kids in the Hardy Boys stories.
I looked all around, but I didn’t see anything. There were no sounds but the rustle of the wind and the chirping of birds. Quietly, I closed the hood and crept away.
I walked to Ken’s house. He was a year older than me. He would know what we should do. Together we returned to the Porsche. Ken looked at it. Right away, he knew what was going on.
“The police parked it here. It’s a stakeout. I’ve seen them on TV. They hide and watch until someone steals it. Then they jump out and arrest them. Maybe they’re watching us now. Maybe they’ve staked out the road.”
“But it doesn’t have an engine,” I said.
“That’s so we can’t get away. They must be watching us right now,” he answered confidently. I looked around, imagining police in camouflage, hiding under bushes. Or maybe in foxholes, like the Green Berets I read about in National Geographic.
We ran off. When we crept back the next day, the car was still there. We circled it, but found no evidence of a stakeout. We entered the clearing.
“I’m getting in,” I said to Ken.
“Maybe they’ll fingerprint it. And arrest you at school.”
I paused. Could they do that? Then I made up my mind. “They can’t arrest me. I’m just a kid. I’m too young to steal it.”
The car was still sitting just as we had left it. I opened the door and climbed inside. I can still remember the feel and the smell of the tan leather seats. I shut the door and looked around. The speedometer went to 120. But I knew it was faster. I had heard any Porsche could pin the speedometer needle. There was a tach, too, to show the speed of the engine. And a clock and some other gauges.
There was also a radio, with push buttons marked “AM” and “SW.” It took a moment to figure that out. Shortwave. American cars didn’t have shortwave radios. I was really impressed. My father had a shortwave radio at home, but I had never seen an SW button on a car radio. I imagined listening to the BBC from London, or HCJB from Quito, Ecuador. The Voi
ce of the Andes. We listened to them at home some nights.
Seeing the SW on the radio reaffirmed how special Porsches were. My mother had just gotten a new car, but it was a Chrysler Newport. A brown one. Why didn’t she have a car like this? I started it up, though there was no key. Suddenly, I was driving at Le Mans. I raced through the corners, sliding off the course at one point. I had read how Porsches had the engines in the back, and they spun out on corners. I had to be careful.
I sped down the straightaway. Over a hundred miles an hour. Or maybe it was 150. It got dark, and the headlamps cut tunnels through the night.
I drove for hours in that Porsche. Then I got out, shut the door, and walked home for dinner.
The next day, a truck appeared and took the Porsche away.
“I guess the stakeout didn’t work. They’ll probably plant it somewhere else,” Ken said as we watched Amherst Towing carry it off. They did all the towing for the police in town. I realized Ken had probably been right all along about the stakeout. But I couldn’t figure out how they were watching us.
When I got a little older, and walked a little farther, I realized people had been stealing cars and dumping them in the woods for years. I’d find them in the strangest places, with trees growing where windows used to be. A ’37 Buick Roadmaster. A ’56 Chevy Nomad. A ’52 Studebaker Champion. And the occasional sports car or truck.
My next encounter with a Porsche was three years later. I could drive for real by then, and I was more worldly. I had friends with cars of their own, and I helped work on them. Sometimes I even test-drove them.
It was summer, and I was at my grandparents’ house in Georgia. My grandfather called home from the road. He traveled all over the South, selling veterinary medicines. He knew everyone and every place in Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas, and Tennessee. He even knew people in Mississippi and Louisiana.
“John Elder, we have to go to Birmingham. I just bought a car at an estate sale. It’s a Porsche.”
“What model is it?” I asked. I knew all the models. The 911. The 912. The new 914. The old 356s. I even knew about rare models like the 904 and the 550. I could identify every single Porsche on the streets of my town. I hoped he had bought a 911S. Maybe he would get tired of it and give it to me. He always drove Cadillacs, and I thought he might be too fat to fit in a Porsche.
My grandfather knew exactly what he had bought.
“It’s an orange one, John Elder. I gave two thousand dollars for it. Let’s go drive it back.”
My grandfather was always buying stuff at auctions. The Porsche was his latest in a long string of diamonds, oriental rugs, fur coats, boat motors, china cabinets, and jade figurines. We headed out together to get the Porsche. In a few hours, we arrived at the car, which was parked in front of a nice-looking house whose contents were being dragged away, piece by piece, by movers and thugs in pickup trucks.
It was a 914. The more powerful model, with the two-liter engine. I opened the hood and proceeded to check it out. It looked like a VW Squareback motor. I was familiar with them, because my friend Mark had a Squareback, and I’d helped rebuild its engine that spring.
“Can I drive it?” I asked. I had never driven a Porsche before. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, but Jack didn’t know or didn’t care. Licenses weren’t as big a deal down South in those days.
I got in, and immediately I recognized the smell from that long-ago day in the woods. I started it up and Jack stuffed himself in the passenger seat.
“Damn! These furrin cars sure are tight,” he said. Jack gave me directions as we headed for the highway.
It was very tight, but I liked it. The only small cars I had driven before this were VWs. The Porsche was a lot quicker, and it handled like it was on rails compared to the Volkswagens. I pulled onto the interstate and, without noticing, my speed crept higher and higher.
“You’re gonna get a mighty expensive ticket, boy.” Jack was looking at the speedometer needle, which sat right near the one hundred mark. I hadn’t realized I was going so fast. I slowed down till he looked away. But I knew they wouldn’t give us a ticket anyway. Not in Alabama. My grandfather had a proclamation from the governor, George Wallace, appointing him a colonel in the state militia. And he had a little plate for his own car. It said GOVERNOR’S STAFF. And below that, STAND UP FOR ALABAMA.
When we got back to Lawrenceville, I carefully washed and waxed the Porsche. I tried to impress my grandparents by taking really good care of that car. I even polished and waxed the farm tractor to earn brownie points. With any luck, The Porsche would soon be My Porsche. My grandfather just had to lose interest in it, and what else could he do but give it to me?
But he didn’t give it to me. He let my uncle Bob borrow it. And Bob ran it into a tree. Once again, my Porsche was lost.
I would not get another Porsche until I was twenty-five years old. That was when I saw a beige 912 for sale on a side street a few miles from where I lived. I bought that car and drove it home.
I spent countless hours restoring that old Porsche. I rebuilt the engine, and then rebuilt the body. I probably removed and repaired every single part of that car, one piece at a time. I stripped the old beige paint and refinished it in a nice aqua green. I got tired of that and repainted it metallic red. It looked flawless. Then one day, I realized that there was a fundamental problem with my Porsche: There was nothing left to fix. So I sold it and found another Porsche to restore, a gray 911E.
Since that day, I’ve owned seventeen Porsches, and I’ve fixed up or restored every single one. Even when I had money, I never bought new cars. Any fool with money can buy a new Porsche, I thought. It takes a craftsman to restore an old one. And that’s what I dreamed of being. A craftsman. An artist, working in automotive steel.
6
The Nightmare Years
A dark cloud slid over our family about the time we moved to Shutesbury. There were some bright spots—the woods and my Porsche, for example—but things were spiraling out of control with my parents. Life turned really ugly when we moved into the April House, to use the moronic jolly name my brother and mother gave our new home. They gave it that name because we moved there in April 1968.
My father had been drinking for quite a while, but now he picked up the pace. The empty bottles began accumulating under the kitchen table. They lined the wall, and when we went to the dump, they filled the back of the car. They were not little bottles, either; they were gallon jugs. S.S. Pierce and Gallo were his favorite wines. Sherry, actually. His smell changed, too. He began to reek of liquor.
He had always been quick to spank me, but as his drinking increased, he turned meaner and nastier. He became dangerous. Shortly before we moved from Hadley, my father was sitting at the dining table drinking. I walked by him, and I guess I was too noisy, because he grabbed me, shook me violently, and then slammed me into the wall so hard that I fractured the plaster. I was stunned, but my mother ran in, yelling, “John! Leave John Elder alone!”
As I sank to the floor, unable to move, he ran outside, got in his car, and sped off.
“I hope he crashes and dies!” I cried.
I didn’t like living in Hadley after that. It was a good thing we moved a few months later. The caved-in spot in the wall was an ugly reminder whenever I passed it.
As an eleven-year-old, I was somewhat able to defend myself. But it’s a miracle that three-year-old Snort grew up to become a Varmint and then an adult. He could easily have ended his days with a little squeal, in a furnace or an unmarked hole in the ground. I’m sure quite a few unwanted three-year-olds end up that way. After all, when you live way out in the woods, who’s going to notice if a toddler’s there one day and gone the next? And my father didn’t like Snort too much, back in those days.
My father would sit each night at the kitchen table, across from the sink and the black-and-white TV. His hair was tousled, his eyes black and sunken. He slouched back in the chair, with his glass in front of him and a half-empty jug on
the floor. His cigarette smoldered in the ashtray, and the pack sat next to it on the table. Sometimes his hand slipped, and cigarette butts scattered all over the table. Sometimes my mother would be there, too, and then their cigarette butts could be anywhere. In the dishes. In the glasses. Even in our food.
As the night wore on, my mother would wander off. Sometimes she returned to taunt him, which made him all the meaner. I learned to be very careful around him at those times.
Sometimes he would call me.
“John Elder, come here, son.”
He would reach out toward me.
If I moved toward him, he would try and grab me. That was bad. He’d say, “I love you, son,” and he’d scrape his bristly chin against me and make slobbering noises while holding me painfully tight.
I was usually able to escape after a few moments, when his grip slackened or he reached for another drink.
“Come back, son,” he would blubber. But I’d run to my room.
Sometimes we’d argue, and sometimes he’d whip me with his belt. If my mother was there, she might try to save me from a beating. Maybe he would turn on her instead. I don’t remember.
Other nights, I’d hide in my room, thinking I’d gotten away.
And then he’d appear in the door.
I buried my face in the pillows, but I could see his shadow, blocking the light from the hall. And I could smell him when he came in. Then I could hear him taking off his belt, and I would hope I had a good pile of blankets on me.
Whack! The belt would come down.
He would hit me as hard as he could. He seemed incredibly strong then, but he was just a drunken, out-of-shape college professor. Otherwise, he might have killed me.
I might sob, or I might be quiet. It depended on how hard he hit me. I thought of the knife my grandfather had given me for Christmas. Solingen steel. Eight inches long. Sharp. I could roll over and jam it into him, right to the hilt. Right in the belly. But I was afraid. What if I miss? What if it doesn’t kill him? I had seen the movies, where they just kept on coming. They didn’t die like they were supposed to. He might kill me for real, then.
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's Page 5