There was another hippie with kindred secrets, Alan R (now a respectable commercial artist). How we found each other out, I don’t know. Perhaps we were so stoned that right in the middle of a discussion of astral projection, one or the other of us blurted something about Weber carburetors or de Dion axles. Anyway, we would closet ourselves in the furthest reaches of the crash pad and jabber for hours about the relative merits of Bertone, Zagato, and Pinifarina.
Alan R and I did eventually get jobs and haircuts, if not Ferraris. And in 1975 I noticed I hadn’t renewed my driver’s license since the late sixties. After all, the world had been going to end in atomic holocaust and a revolution had been about to happen and I’d meant to move to Kathmandu. But I found these arguments unpersuasive with the Highway Patrol.
To get a new driver’s license I had to take driver’s education as if I were a sixteen-year-old instead of just someone who’d been acting as if he had a sixteen-year-old’s brain. Thus I wound up in night courses at a Manhattan high school. My class consisted of half a dozen Asians who spoke no English, half a dozen Eastern European women in babushkas who wouldn’t speak at all, ten jiving teens clustered at the back of the room, and me. The instructor wore liberal clothes, a medley of corduroy in dirt colors. His pedagogical method was simple. “The function of the steering wheel is to control the direction of the car,” he’d say. And then he’d ask, “Can anyone tell me what function the steering wheel performs?” The Asians stared politely into space. The babushkas looked at the floor. The teens continued to exchange high fives, dis each other, and rhyme things. “Can anyone tell me what function the steering wheel performs?” the instructor repeated. I lifted a mitt. “Yes, third row,” said the instructor.
“The steering wheel controls the direction of the car,” I said.
“Good,” he said, and continued his lecture. “The function of the accelerator is to control the speed of the car. Can anyone tell me what function the accelerator performs?” No response. He repeated the question. Again, nothing. The instructor had the look of resigned insignificance that comes from years of inner-city teaching. I could see he was prepared to keep asking this question for the next fifty minutes or until I went nuts and strangled him. I raised my hand. “Yes, third row.”
“The accelerator controls the speed of the car,” I said. And so it went every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for six weeks, with the liberal in corduroy saying, “Yes, third row,” each time as if he’d never seen me before. And to this day, if you want to know what function the steering wheel performs, I’m the guy to ask.
The written part of the driver’s license exam was given in the horrible Department of Motor Vehicles building downtown, in a number of languages, fortunately including English. “The function of the accelerator is to control the speed of the car. T or F” was one question. We were given forty minutes to complete the test. It took five. I handed my exam paper to a large irritable woman at the front of the room who laid a template over the pencil-checked answers and said, “Ditchyoo cheat?”
“Did I what?”
“Nobody got all them right before,” she said. Which tells us everything we need to know about New York drivers. And apparently I’d become one because I flunked the driving test. I’d borrowed my boss’s Chrysler. After an Age of Aquarius spent illegally driving paisley bread trucks and Volkswagen microbuses full of marijuana smoke, I was unused to automatic transmissions, much less power brakes. Attempting to back into my parallel-parking space, I belatedly realized I’d put the Chrysler in drive instead of reverse.
“My sister did something like that,” said Nick.
I gave a good hearty Volkswagen microbus stab to the brake pedal and spring-launched the driving examiner—who was not, by the way, wearing his seat belt. His clipboard hit the dash, he hit the clipboard, and the clipboard clip left a big red ankh mark in the middle of his forehead. He drew an X through my paperwork.
I think it was that precise moment—seeing the ancient Egyptian symbol for eternal life impressed on my driving examiner’s face—when my love of automobiles returned in full force. About this time I also quit smoking pot and began to drink again. And the next thing I knew I was waking up with a terrible hangover realizing I’d bought a 1965 Alfa Romeo GTC convertible from Alan R’s brother.
This is how I happen to write for car magazines. A few days later I was in Gillhooey’s on Thirty-fourth Street in New York, which was my neighborhood tavern and also a hangout for the employees of Down-Shift magazine. I was standing at the bar next to Jim Williams, then Down-Shift’s sport editor. He said, “I heard you bought an old Alfa. It so happens I’ve got an old Alfa repair kit.”
“You do?” I said.
“Yeah. A truck full of money to follow you everywhere you go.”
When the editor-in-chief of Down-Shift, David E. Davis, Jr., learned that there was someone stupid enough to own an old Alfa and silly enough to be obsessed with Buicks, he gave me an assignment to take a silly old Buick on a stupid trip across the country. The ’56 two-door Special broke down every day. I remember being somewhere in New Mexico, reduced to tears, beating on the fuel pump with the fat end of a screwdriver and howling words of Anglo-Saxon etymology.
That was when you were in diapers, Max. I remain absorbed in the culture of the automobile. David E. Davis has sent me on numerous stupid trips since. And, although the GTC was sold and the Buick fixation eased somewhat, a succession of silly vehicles has accrued to me anyway, including—whoops—another Alfa; a pickup truck made from the front half of a Jimmy that had been in a head-on and the back half of a Chevy Fleetside that had been rear-ended; a Rabbit convertible for which I took cruel “chick car” ribbing from your father, Nick; a Subaru wagon so well built and reliable that I traded it in out of boredom; a BMW 325 convertible with more miles on it than the Jupiter probe; a 911 used mostly for urban commuting; and a Jeep that I’ve just, unaccountably, had restored even though it’s a 1984 and as rare as eating disorders in the fashion industry.
To this day I can be found out in the garage reduced to tears, beating on a fuel pump with the fat end of a screwdriver, howling words of Anglo-Saxon etymology, and causing my wife to say, “I thought you knew something about cars.”
Perhaps this is the moment to confess that I do not. I mean, “The steering wheel controls the…” But I don’t know much else. And I suspect none of the O’Rourkes ever has—at least since Grandpa quit being a mechanic about the time the acetylene headlamp was invented. As a kid I would be given a couple of simple tools and sent to amuse myself on the wrecked cars behind the O’Rourke dealership. This is how I learned to hammer on things with the fat end of a screwdriver. The rest of my knowledge of automotive construction and repair I gleaned from building plastic scale-model kits. Whenever my car makes a funny noise I first make sure the engine is still glued in and then check whether my sister has knocked the continental kit loose by sitting Barbie on the trunk lid during a doll homecoming.
To tell the truth, I’m not much of a driver either. That is, I’m okay—in theory. I went to race-car driving school and did very well in the classroom work. I remember the instructor telling me so, just as the large, irritable woman at the Department of Motor Vehicles had done. Though the race-car instructor didn’t accuse me of cheating since, on the track, I was the absolute slowest of the ten people in my course. In fact, I believe the instructor’s exact words to me were, “You’ve got a goldbrick mouth and a tin-slug gas-pedal foot.”
Never mind. To me, automobiles are not mere physical objects. My love of motor vehicles transcends the material plane. The flivver, the jalopy, the crate—these are things of the spirit. The place taken by religion, philosophy, or art in other men’s lives is occupied by cars in mine. Spend an hour in a church and where are you? Spend an hour in a car and you’re at the beach. Three thousand years of Western philosophy has not been able to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” But when you’re driving a car, the meaning of life is to fin
d a parking place. And as for art, take the most beautiful and sublime sculpture by a Renaissance master—it brakes, corners, and accelerates like a large chunk of marble.
7
MARCH 2001
You should write a book,” said my godson Nick, who was back at our house, having slipped chicken sushi onto the hors d’oeuvres platter at his school’s alumni lunch.
I stared balefully at Nick. [It so happens that I’m the author of a number of books, including The Agoraphobe at Large and New Truths About Eternal Verities and One-Man Honeymoon (travel); A Dog’s Breakfast (poetry); and Woolly (Thanks to Rogaine) Bully, recounting a month on the road with the Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs reunion tour. This was briefly on the best-seller list in, I believe, the Netherlands. Plus there’s the forthcoming How the Financial Collapse of 2001 Happened, Unless It Didn’t. Not to mention a series of “Rape Mysteries” written under the pseudonym Scarlet O’Bronte: Rape Be Not Proud; Rape Comes for the Archbishop; Night of the Living Raped; Rape Takes a Holiday, etc.]
“I mean a real book,” said Nick. “You know, a memoir.”
Yes, Nick, that’s the modern idea. After years of effort in the author trade, I discover an ideal topic, an inexhaustible subject of discourse, a literary inspiration—me. I’ll write a memoir. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this ages ago. It will be liberating to sit down at the typewriter and just be myself, as opposed to being you, Nick, which I don’t have the clothes for.
Even though my memoir is still in the idea stage, I’m full of enthusiasm. I’ll give the secret of my success—the success I plan to have as a memoir writer. As far as I can tell, the secret is thinking about myself all the time. No doubt my memoir will be inspirational, inspiring others to think about themselves all the time. They’ll see the meaning in their lives—they’ve been meaning to write a memoir, too.
So what if it’s a crowded field? My memoir will stand out. It will show readers a side of life they little guessed at, the side with the writer sitting in his boxer shorts surrounded by six empty coffee cups and three full ashtrays playing Go Fish with the dog.
Maybe readers had guessed at that. But I’m going to recount my personal struggles, such as having to come up with things to write about all the time. I’ve spent decades looking for stories that would interest other people. I’ve surmounted enormous obstacles—thinking about other people, just for instance.
But enough about them. This isn’t going to be a mere self-help book. This is the story of how one young man grew up to be…a lot older. That is probably the most serious issue I need to work through in my memoir. The issue being that I haven’t really done much. But I don’t feel this should stand in my way. O. J. Simpson wrote a memoir, and the jury said he didn’t do anything at all.
There’s also a lot of anger I need to deal with. I’m angry at my parents. For memoir purposes, they weren’t nearly poor enough. They weren’t rich either. And they failed miserably at leading colorful lives. My mother did belong to Kappa Kappa Gamma, which is a secret society, I guess. And my father was a veteran of the Pacific war, but the only casualty in his battalion was one fellow crushed by a palm tree. Furthermore, we lived in Toledo, Ohio. I suppose I could write a comic memoir. But in today’s society there are some things you just don’t make fun of, and chief among these is yourself.
My parents also neglected to abuse me. They’re gone now, alas. (Downside: no publicity-building estrangement when memoir is published, to be followed by tearful reconciliation on Oprah. Upside: I’m an Adult Child of the Deceased.) I’ve thought about asking my wife’s parents to abuse me, but it seems too little, too late. I did have a stepfather who bowled.
Perhaps I’ll keep the section on my childhood brief, just emphasize that I’m a survivor. That’s what’s unique about me, and there are six billion people in the world who know how unique I feel. This should guarantee excellent sales. And—here comes that literary inspiration again—memoirs do sell. Readers want to know what real people really did and really felt. What a shame that the writing geniuses of the nineteenth century wasted their time making things up. We could have had Jane Austen Reality Prose: Got up. Wrote. Went out. Came back. Wrote some more. Vicarage still drafty.
Modern book buyers have become too sophisticated for imaginary romance and drama. They want facts: Roswell, New Mexico; the missile that shot down TWA flight 800; the Republican majority in the Florida popular vote. Unfortunately, I don’t have many facts like that, but I do have some terrific celebrity gossip. I’ve read all their memoirs.
I also know about some awful things my friends have done. I’ve noticed, while memoir reading, that one of the main points of the genre is ratting on your pals. I was going to gather that material together and commit it to paper. Then I realized that other memoir writers, as a class, seem to have very few friends who weigh 200 pounds and own shotguns.
Probably confession is a safer route. I’ve done all kinds of loathsome deeds myself and am perfectly willing to admit them, if it sells books. But thumbing through my memoir collection, I noticed another thing. Good memoir writers only confess to certain of the more glamorous sins—drastic sexual escapades, head-to-toe drug abuse, bold felonies after the statutes of limitation have run out. Nobody confesses to things that just make him look like a jerk-o. Nobody admits he got up at 4 A.M. with a throbbing head after five hours of listening to the kid’s pets squeaking in the exercise wheel and drowned the gerbils in the toilet. Most of my transgressions fall into this category and will need to be excised. I don’t want to get caught writing one of those “unauthorized autobiographies.”
This brings me to the other little problem I’m having with the story of my life, which is remembering it. There were the 1960s. I recall they started out well. Then there were the 1970s. I recall they ended badly. In between, frankly, I am missing a few candles on the cake. Also there were the 1950s, when nothing memorable happened, and the 1980s, when everything memorable was happening to somebody else. And the 1990s went by in a blur. But, no worries, I’ve been keeping a diary: Got up. Wrote. Went out. Came back. Wrote some more. Drowned the gerbils.
Maybe I can make up for my lack of reminiscences by inserting various vivid fantasies I’ve had. But this is cheating on the memoir form, since I’m admitting that those things—the New York Review of Books swimsuit issue, for example—never happened.
Or perhaps I should go back to all those challenges I’ve faced. I’ve had to endure enormous prejudice. True, since I’m a middle-aged white male Republican, the enormous prejudice came from me. But I still had to endure it. This is one reason that learning to love myself was another huge challenge. But I’ve overcome that too. Although, now that I’m completely self-infatuated, I keep waiting for me to give myself a raise. It’s been a bitter disappointment.
Thank goodness. Bitter disappointments are crucial to memoirs. Thinking of something to write in this memoir has been a bitter disappointment so far. That means I can write about not being able to write. Should be good for a chapter, if I can make it sound bitter enough.
Wait. I’m forgetting spiritual transformation. I’ve been touched by an angel—and a big one, too, all covered in glitter. It got me right in the forehead three months ago, when the dog knocked over the Christmas tree.
And I have a good title: My Excuse for Living. That should count for something.
Anyway, I’m not daunted. The memoir is the great literature of the current era. All that we ask of art, the memoir provides. Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and if we can get a beauty to tell the truth, then Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss is all ye need to know. Art justifies God’s ways to man like The Art of the Comeback does. God is going to fry Donald Trump in hell, and He is perfectly justified. As with all art, the memoir holds a mirror up to life, and if there are some lines of cocaine on that mirror, so much the better. Out of chaos the memoir brings order—a huge order from a major bookstore chain, it is to be hoped. The memoir is nature’s handmaiden and also nature’s butt
boy, bagman, and patsy if Behind the Oval Office by Dick Morris is anything to go by. The memoir exists on its own terms, art for art’s sake, if you happen to be named Arthur—vide Risk and Redemption: Surviving the Network News Wars by Arthur Kent. The memoir speaks to us; indeed, it won’t shut up. Vita brevis est, memoir longa.
And mine is going to be really long. Nick, thanks to you, I’ve got a major book happening here. After a whole ten minutes spent wrestling with my muse, I’ve made a vital creative breakthrough. I now know how to give my memoir the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic impact that the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky had on previous generations. As with all insights of true originality, it’s very simple. It’s called lying.
“Speaking of books,” said Nick, “I’ve got to read one. And write a report as makeup work in my Touch and Feel World History class.”
The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.) Page 16