Driver's Education

by Grant Ginder

  My granddad took the sight in quietly and respectfully; he allowed the man’s eyes to adjust to the light. But then, from outside, there was the whispered creak of the chain and the mewing wails of the onlookers, the subtle whoosh of a wrecking ball in motion, and he said, “Friend, it’s time to get you out of here.”

  “I ain’t moving,” the Rev said back.

  “They’re going to tear this place down, whether you’re in it or not.”

  The Rev wiped soot from the corners of his eyes. “So go ahead and let them whether I’m in it or not.”

  Whenever my granddad recounted this story for me—which was often, very often—he’d always say how he wished the Rev’s response, this man’s desire to die, puzzled him.

  “I even waited for it to, Finn,” he’d say. “But the cold truth is I had no questions to ask; I understood.”

  I suppose my granddad learned the hard way that when someone, something made the irrevocable decision to go, there wasn’t a damned thing you could do to change its mind. He’d say, “I’ve seen it happen everywhere. From dogs who dig their own graves to your own blessed grandmother. Only thing to be done in a situation like that is to protect the person from himself. To build up walls high enough to keep out whatever’s eating him in hopes that when the sun starts shining again, he’ll be there to take a better look around.”

  Which I’ll say is precisely what he did.

  While the whoosh from the wrecking ball grew louder, my granddad zigzagged through the store’s racks, emptying them of their records, creating stacks that were three, four, five feet high on the linoleum floor. Seven separate times the Rev demanded to know what he was doing, but my granddad kept his plans hushed; he knew that if he let on in the slightest, the old man would object. He’d press himself up against one of the store’s walls until that dull steel globe came crashing into his gut. And my granddad—who was above all things heroic—wasn’t about to let that happen.

  He knew that he’d need something with girth to start: a bass that could resonate along a scale’s deepest notes, while still having a bit of flexibility. He went with Louis Armstrong. He stacked his arms with Struttin’, with LPs of Black and Blue and All of Me and Basin Street Blues. He arranged them around the Rev as he would if he were setting down the foundations for a house: great thick beams of vinyl, set squarely atop the dusty floor.

  Again, the Rev shouted, “Boy, what in the hell are you doing!”

  The walls were a different matter entirely. With them, he needed range. Materials that were comfortable at the bottom but could also support themselves up top. A baritone, he figured. Or a mezzo-soprano. A low tenor in a pinch. He shuffled through the records he’d emptied onto the linoleum, his feet kicking aside Rose Murphy and Blossom Dearie albums, their high-pitched trills ricocheting off the shop’s walls. The shadow of the wrecking ball crept in through the window from which he entered, and it grazed his bristled neck. My granddad made a game-time decision: Mildred Bailey for the north side, Al Bowlly for the east and west faces. And for the south end, where he’d leave room for a door: the big band standards of Cab Calloway.

  “I already got a house.” The Rev was still sitting as my granddad secured Minnie the Moocher to the top of the south wall.

  “You may have a house out there,” he said. “But you don’t have a house in here.”

  The Rev thought this over, turning it around on his eyes and his lips as he sipped from his gin. “I never figured you could build a house from records,” he said, finally.

  “You can build a house from anything.”

  The biggest problem, as my granddad explained it to me, was the roof. They couldn’t use something heavy—your standard bass, for example—due to fear that the weight would cause the whole thing to come crashing down. The other option was something light and airy—a soprano—but then, as the Rev pointed out, what sort of protection would that offer? A third dilemma as they scanned the rummaged aisles: there wasn’t much material left. My granddad had emptied the shelves to construct the foundations, the floors, the high walls—and now, the pickings were devastatingly slim. A Bing Crosby here, a Jimmy Rushing there—nothing, though, that contained the heft he knew they needed.

  He turned, then, to the Rev. To the pile of records on which he sat. “What about those?”

  The Rev paused at this. He bit his lower lip, wiped another clump of soot from a bone-dry eye. As he stood, ash fell from his shoulders, from the slender tips of his fingers, floating down to the floor in airy feathers.

  He handed the first of the records to my granddad, who fixed it in place, the first of the countless shingles that would save them.

  “ ‘Song for a Lonely Woman’ by Art Blakey,” the Rev said as he watched my granddad work. “That’s the first time I saw my wife. She was sitting alone on a bench on the north side of Bigelow wearing a big old hat that covered her face. Could’ve been the ugliest woman on earth for all I knew. Only thing I was sure of was that woman would end up mine and this would be the song that’d come to mind each time I thought of her.”

  The Rev passed my granddad record after record, the pile below him shrinking as the shadow surrounding them grew.

  “ ‘Summertime’ is the first time I tasted an apricot.”

  “ ‘Georgia on My Mind’ is when I got whacked for falling asleep and snoring in church.”

  “ ‘The Best Is Yet to Come’ is when I realized that if the sky was blue enough you could see the moon on a clear day.”

  “ ‘Day by Day’ is riding the Duquesne Incline with my old man.”

  “ ‘Stella by Starlight’ is kissing girls I shouldn’t have been kissing.”

  “ ‘Mood Indigo’ is watching my mother dance as she dries dishes.”

  “ ‘Tuxedo Junction’ is drinking too much and smoking too much and having one hell of a time either way.”

  “ ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ is when I learned that love doesn’t last much longer than a spider bite.”

  • • •

  The halo over the hills grows wider until it isn’t a halo at all, but instead an industrial sunrise, and at four minutes after midnight I-76 drops onto a lower section of the Allegheny Plateau and Randal and I begin to see the first buildings along the city’s eastern outskirts.

  • • •

  No one could stand to watch once the onslaught began. Arms no longer linked, they left the place, embarking on a million different death walks to a million different homes.

  The thing is, though, my granddad and the Rev didn’t even hear the wrecking ball when it took out the shop’s north wall. Before my granddad had sealed up the record home’s door, he’d dragged in an old phonograph he’d uncovered in one of the store’s abandoned corners. As chunks of the shop tumbled off the vinyl roof to the earth around them, they drank from the cup of gin and listened to the last record they had, the only one they didn’t use, Stan Getz’s Here’s That Rainy Day.

  When the song stopped and the wrecking ball had ceased its silent banging, the Rev emerged into a vacant lot. He kicked at the broken pieces of everything that used to be, and he looked up at the sun, which through the smoke looked like a cotton ball, all pulled and frayed and roughed up along its edges.

  He turned to my granddad and said, “The sky! I haven’t seen the sky in weeks.”

  WHAT I REMEMBER

  1958–1963: Used Cars

  By Colin A. McPhee

  In the beginning, the Bel Air sat in the driveway unused.

  After my father arrived at the Avalon to pick me up on that evening in June, the car began to make dreadful sounds—the crash of cannonballs shattering glass—and I remember halfway believing that it was protesting my presence, boorishly rejecting my father’s introduction of me. But then on a Saturday morning in June he brought it to the city, to some man in Chinatown who tightened a few screws and replaced the missing rear window, and after that my father began driving away.

  Initially the drives were short, and only on weekends. He�
�d leave for two, three, rarely four hours. If the weather allowed it, he’d remove the car’s canvas top. Always during these excursions he wore a tweed hat—a ratty thing with a wide brim that he bought in the city, and which wasn’t meant for driving, though I suspect he thought it was. On three separate occasions he complained of almost losing it; the car’s top would be down and the wind would steal it from his head, carrying it to the corner of some old dirt road. He didn’t stop wearing it, though: instead, he bobby-pinned the damned thing to his head.

  Early on, he’d sometimes ask me to join him. He’d pick me up after a matinee at the Avalon, and he’d say, “How about we go someplace?”

  “Where?”

  He’d shrug. “Anywhere?”

  I’d look at him for a moment, at how he’d pinned the hat impossibly high on his head, how he looked like a cockeyed version of James Stewart in Vertigo but with lighter hair and more worn cheeks.

  I’d say, “Sure. Yeah, okay.”

  Though inevitably, each time we pulled on to the highway—448 or 9 or 117—the car would begin its abominable screaming again. The incessant booming and snapping that caused the floorboards to shake and the windows to rattle.

  “It wasn’t doing this earlier,” he’d explain as he pulled over to the shoulder. As he popped the hood and began inexpertly examining the car’s guts.

  I’d be hanging out the passenger’s side window and I’d yell to him, “Maybe it’s me?”

  He’d push the cap up higher on his head. He’d laugh meekly. “Of course it’s not you.”

  But soon afterward he stopped inviting me entirely.

  • • •

  The first time my father drove away and didn’t come back was in the fall of that year, of 1958.

  It was October seventeenth. Sixteen months after my mother passed away. Eighty thirty in the evening. The sun had set, but the night was clear, and there were still traces of light. To the west, primarily. But also on the steel of the car: it reflected in shards off the fenders.

  I watched my father from where I was sitting, on his bed. It was the only location from which, if I sat on my knees, I could see the driveway. My view was obstructed by a sycamore in the front yard, but it was enough to see him in the negative spaces left by the curves of the leaves: half of him was him, and the other half was orange, yellow, red, engulfed. It was enough to know that he wasn’t looking back at me.

  He placed a hand on each tire to check its pressure. He knelt at each one and ran his palm in half circles over the rubber. I laced my fingers together. Once he finished with the tires, he opened the car’s hood. The creak and snap of the rust cracking against the metal hinges.

  He was hidden by a branch when he leaned over the car. But over the course of the week I’d seen him do this ten, twenty, one hundred times. I’d watched him as he examined each hose; I’d heard him whisper as he checked the oil.

  My father sat on the curb and lit a cigarette once he’d shut the hood. The leaves were just shadows then—any light had faded—and he sat beyond them. He held the cigarette down low, between two knuckles. Its embers grew bright each time he inhaled and then faded as his hand fell from his mouth to his side. My legs, bent beneath my body, ached as I watched him.

  He sat on the curb for nearly twenty minutes. I don’t remember seeing him get into the car, but I heard the door slam shut. I held my breath as he started the engine—I waited for one thousand cannonballs followed by the screams and wails of falling glass, but instead there was nothing. It just thumped as he reversed down the driveway, and then lurched as he shifted into first and plodded to the end of the street, where it intersected with the main road. But I’d lost sight of him before this. The leaves, then black, hid him once he’d cleared the curb.

  I slept in my father’s bed that night. I didn’t leave his room once he’d driven away. I listened to the clock and I stayed on top of the sheets, wrapping myself in an unfinished blanket my mother had tried to knit. I slept restlessly. Each hour, I’d sit on my knees and watch the driveway, silver underneath the sycamore. When I fell back asleep, I didn’t dream.

  The next day—it was Saturday—I stayed on his bed, my own private island. I was afraid to leave. I was afraid to get water when I was thirsty, or to make toast when I was hungry. I was afraid that in the brief moments of my absence, he’d end up returning and leaving again. I was afraid, I think, that I’d miss my opportunity to convince him to stay.

  I only ventured out once I had to. Once the stench of myself became too nauseating, and the emptiness sloshing about my stomach became too gnawing, I washed and dressed and rode my bike to the Avalon, where Earl allowed me to watch The Big Country three times for free.

  After the end credits were rolling the second time around he asked me, “Had enough Gregory Peck yet?” I sat in the balcony’s front row, and he took the seat next to me.

  “Never.”

  “What about Charles Bickford?”

  “I think they should’ve cast Don Murray.”

  Earl nodded slowly. He was an unusually tall man—he had to duck when he crossed through a number of the theater’s doors—but the rest of his body hadn’t caught up proportionally to his height. His head was a cap size too small and his shoulders were too thin and sloped steeply inward. The sleeves of the uniform he wore (a grey usher’s jacket with gold piping as the trim) fully concealed his ten fingers, which stopped just below his waist when his arms were resting against his sides. His legs, though: they were long and flimsy with a grasshopper’s sense of hurried mobility; his pants reached the middle of his calf.

  The house lights rose and the sparse audience filed out of the theater, allowing the Avalon’s ushers to sweep the aisles between the seats. I watched as they traversed the rows, picking up discarded chocolate boxes and lone soggy kernels.

  Earl placed a hand on my knee. “Well then,” he said. “Enjoy.”

  • • •

  That week I watched The Big Country fourteen times. I memorized not only the picture’s dialogue, but also the cuts, the different sorts of fade-ins and dissolves that bookmark its scenes. I ditched school entirely, spending vast stretches of my day at the Avalon. At night, when the lobby lights were finally shut off and Earl had locked the theater’s front doors, I’d ride my bike the eight minutes home. I’d sit on my father’s bed, my legs always folded beneath me, and I’d write movies.

  The ideas I had then, when I was ten, were flimsy and weak. They stretched clumsily beyond the infantile and raw knowledge I had of the world. And when they didn’t work out (which was often), I’d crush the sheets on which they were written into neat balls that I’d throw to the bedroom floor. I littered the carpet with two entire notebooks’ worth of paper until, finally, I hit upon a concept with which I was familiar. Or, one that, at least to me, seemed to make sense.

  The premise was this: a boy who spends his days in a movie theater, subsisting on popcorn and candy and soda, eventually starts hiding in the films he watches.

  Logistically, the conceit was simple, which means that it was impossible—much more so than anything I could imagine writing now. One Saturday, as a matinee showing of Pal Joey was ending and the audience had its back turned, the boy simply reached one finger, then a hand, an arm, and finally his whole torso into the screen. When the curtain fell, it just missed clipping his right heel. If you were at the theater for the later showing that evening, and if you were compelled to look hard enough, you’d be able to find him: ducking between the chorus girls’ legs as they belted out “That Terrific Rainbow.” Swaying his blond head while Joey and Linda crooned “I Could Write a Book.”

  I assumed then—or, perhaps more accurately, I so wanted to assume—that movies intertwined in a world that was separate and complete, that once the chorus girls from Pal Joey had finished their act, they’d saunter over and have a drink with Auntie Mame. That despite the obvious anachronisms, Dorothy visited Tara, where she, Scarlett, and Ilsa Lund discussed Anna Leonowens’s move to Siam. So,
when that evening’s showing of Pal Joey ended, the boy didn’t disappear, nor did he unfold himself from the theater’s dark screen back into the house: he just moved on to the next picture.

  He wore broad-rimmed cowboy hats and rode horses alongside Ethan Edwards and Captain Samuel Clayton in The Searchers; he broke into torrential sweats while he trained alongside Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me, jumping rope and punching dusty bags. When Gaston kissed Gigi’s cheek, the boy kissed the other one. It was easy, and lovely, and perfect, until one moment during The Vikings when he was helping to lead a bloody raid and he decided he wanted to go home.

  He’d just sliced into an enemy warrior’s skull when he turned to Einar, who was Kirk Douglas, but truthfully not, and said, “Look, I’m going to miss dinner.”

  The Viking growled, baring his teeth, which should have been yellow, but were in fact Hollywood white.

  “I mean it,” the boy said, cleaning the blood from his blade. “If I’m not home by six, my mom’ll let me have it.” He shook Einar’s polished hand. “Good luck, though. Really, I mean it.”

  But there was no screen to melt into. No slick white vinyl upon which to dissolve himself. He tried passing through other objects: He pushed aside the chopped-up limbs of vanquished opponents and charged full speed into giant stones. He dove headfirst into Norway’s half-iced sea. He sat on a pebbled beach with a bruised nose and frozen fingers.

  And thus he was left to wander. To try to poke holes into the paper-thin world he’d created. In a dragon boat with one oar, he crossed traceless seas, landing on the shores of Oz, on the lawns of Sunset Boulevard’s mansions, on Wabash Avenue. He rounded his hands around glass mugs and streetlamps and pillars; he touched every object he could, seeing if he could find something that was fleshed out with the right number of dimensions. He interrupted Brick Pollitt as he leapt over hurdles and asked if he knew the way home.