Driver's Education

by Grant Ginder

  “Where to?”

  I unfold the map and point to the first of my granddad’s new notes, one of the three that he’s written specifically for me, the letters curving through the blue space formed by the Atlantic.

  I say, “To scout out this house of records.”

  • • •

  We walk east down Forbes, where we decide there’s more lights and more life and just pretty much less per-capita desertion. We walk with our hands clenched in fists and shoved in the pockets of our shorts. We walk till the street’s emptiness gives way to people, to small flocks of women, to packs of men in Steelers jerseys, all huddled in globes of grey ash air that hover outside the bars. We jump in the wet gutters alongside them, inhaling the smoke from their lungs as we pass.

  We walk till the street begins to empty again. We stop for directions at a pub that bows just a hundred yards away from the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, this opulent and overthought structure that throws a shadow even at night. Inside, we sit on red vinyl stools and look across the mahogany bar to the faces of three weathered men who have their chins turned up, their eyes reflecting a TV turned to a local sports channel, and I can tell that it is the type of place where you come to finish, as opposed to start.

  I order us both Lowland scotch, which sets off brushfires in my throat when I swallow it, and I suck on ice cubes between sips. When the bartender—who has a long blond ponytail and bone-white skin and a certain softness you can tell other boys mocked when he was younger but began to silently envy as he got older—when he asks us if he can get us anything else, Randal says yeah, yeah he can, something to eat.

  “The kitchen closed about five minutes ago,” he says, and he begins wiping at wet spots on the counter with a black towel. “I could get you some fries, though. They’ve got tons of fries back there.”

  “All right.”

  “But you—you’re going to need to turn that camera off first.”

  “It’s not even on.”

  “It is. I can see the red light.”

  I suck on my upper lip. The men who have their chins turned up begin to howl at the television.

  “Look at them,” the bartender says. “Sitting there, yelling at the top of their lungs like someone’s actually listening.”

  He sets both hands on the counter, spreading his fingers away from one another. “To hell with it. I’ll get you some fries.”

  Randal says, “Thank you.”

  “They’re good,” he tells us. “They’re famous. Get that. If you’re going to keep that thing going, get that—get me saying they’re famous.”

  “I got it. What makes them famous?”

  He looks into the camera and waits and I expect him to say something strikingly brilliant. But then: “Fuck if I know.” He stops wiping and tightens his apron and disappears into the kitchen. Across from us, all three of the men wince in unison at something on the television. One of them whispers Jeez-o-man.

  “How are they?” He’s brought back a red plastic basket lined with wax paper, heaped with French fries. Randal eats one, or half of one, and he winces as it singes his gums. “Should’ve given you warning—they just came out of the deep fryer.”

  “They’re good,” he says.

  I suck on another piece of ice.

  The bartender reaches across the bar and takes a handful. “Probably not good enough to be famous, though?”

  “Probably not.”

  He refills our glasses, then turns around to ask the men if they need anything, and they answer him with Dabby good and Hauscome you gotsa ask and It’s cordorda two and We got a whole nother hour and Keep ’em coming downa minute, and none of it, absolutely none of it sounds anything like English.

  “What are they saying?” Randal says.

  “Who knows what Yinzers are ever saying?”

  He pushes his hair, which looks too soft, synthetic cotton, out of his face.

  “I don’t know what a Yinzer is.”

  “Yinzers. People who say ‘yinz.’ People who speak Pittsburgh English. Pittsburghese.”

  “That isn’t English, what they’re speaking.”

  “Ha,” he says. “No? No, I guess it doesn’t sound like it, does it. I guess I’d probably say the same thing if I were hearing it for the first time.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just how they talk. A lot of it comes from Scotch-Irish, I think. Or German. Maybe some Slavic.” He pulls more on his hair. “Whatever the ugliest languages are. Those are them, right? Slavic, German, bastardized Irish?”

  Randal watches how they move their mouths, how the words and sounds sit in the middle of their fantastic melted throats. He tries incredibly hard to copy them.

  The bartender puts up his hand and there are cuts on his fingers. “No,” he says. “No, don’t try. You’re setting yourself up to sound worse off than them.”

  A clock above the bar blinks 1:45 in green perforated numbers. The scotch spins in whirlpools as I make circles with my glass and when I drink it the brushfires seem smaller, or at least more contained. I ask, “Can you tell me how to get to Wylie Avenue?”

  “Wylie Avenue?”

  “Yeah,” I say, standing.

  He says: “That’s over in the Hill. You don’t want to go there.” I watch as he drops two fresh ice cubes into Randal’s glass. “You go there right now, looking like you do, putting that camera up in people’s business—you’re not coming back with your face intact.”

  “I’d like to go. There’s something there that I’d like to see.”

  “There are other places to go.”

  I say, “Tell me anywhere else.”

  He reaches for a white square napkin from a stack of them that’s 8 million inches high. Pulling a pen from behind his right ear he says, “Everywhere. There’s everywhere else to go.” He scribbles as he speaks. “There’s a mattress factory.”

  “A mattress factory.”

  “There’s a Warhol Museum. There’s the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. There’s the South Side and the Phipps Conservatory and the Strip District.” He looks at the napkin and slides it across to me. “There’s everywhere else to go.”

  We thank him. We finish the scotch. We eat three more hardly famous fries, and we leave.

  • • •

  On the street, Randal and I sit on the curb and we swat at gnats clawing at our bare ankles and thighs before finally, after twenty minutes, we flag down a cab. The driver takes Forbes to the Boulevard of the Allies. We sail down giant hills. We roll down our windows and the wind crashes around us in towering waves. To the south everything sleeps, but most of all the Monongahela, which looks inky black and is interrupted only by the city’s bridges, its silver bones that stretch at uneven intervals and angles.

  “They’re trying to cancel the show,” I say when we’ve reached Kirkpatrick. “I spoke with Karen tonight.” There’s a stoplight, and there’s the first traffic we’ve seen and so we’re forced to stop.

  “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s time.”

  “That’s not what you were supposed to say.”

  The light changes and the cab lurches forward. I lean my head against the window and I open my mouth to catch more of the night, to eat it in great wide gulps.

  North along Kirkpatrick we’re stopped by another traffic light, the longest one in history. The buildings on all sides of us have shrunk into sad affairs, their warped windows sloped downward into frowns.

  I say, “They’re replacing it with a show about having famous babies.”

  “I think I’ve seen that show before.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It’s about these parents—these young mothers—who want their babies to look like famous children. Famous babies. So they do all these things to make that happen. Like buy them wigs and dress them up. Find doctors who will perform plastic surgery on them.”

  “Oh. Oh. Ha. That’s particularly awful.”

  I ask, “But would yo
u watch it?”

  “Maybe? All right, it’s particularly awful, but doesn’t that also mean it’s particularly fascinating?” Then, after a few moments: “I suppose my biggest worry would be that there’d be just too many obvious choices.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well. I’m assuming that unless they’ve got, like, weird cuteness-competition issues, these mothers would want their kids to look like adorable baby stars, right?”

  “Right. Right, sure.”

  “Have you ever seen a picture of Freddie Mercury as a kid?”

  “I haven’t.”

  Randal stretches his arms out and sets them on the seat in front of him. Flexes his ten fingers. “No mother would want that. No mother would wish a baby that looked like that on anyone. But, like, Shirley Temple?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can’t you see it? Every episode would, simply by default, feature at least one Shirley Temple transformation.”

  “I’d say at the very least.”

  “By the end of the first season you’d have an army of them.”

  “An army of Shirley Temple babies.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say with obvious choices.”

  The driver shifts in his seat, drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel.

  “But what about the moral issues?” I ask.

  “The what?”

  “The moral issues? Of deciding for a baby that she’d like to look like Shirley Temple? Without even asking her?”

  “Oh. Ha. Oh, Finn. I think we’re pretty far beyond that.”

  • • •

  It’s quiet, almost. There’s some dog barking somewhere. And then that bark turns to human yelling, and then grunting, swift blunt kicks, and then crumpled whimpering, and then music, something loud, then more barking, more yelling, grunting, kicking, crumpled heart-wrenching whimpers, in that pattern a million times over. I listen, holding my breath. I try to discriminate between the different voices, human and canine. I try to decide how far away they are, counting short seconds after hearing thunder.

  “Is this it?” Randal rocks on his heels. We’re both drunk. So drunk. The hour-old scotch draining the wetness from our mouths.

  “Shh.”

  “But—there’s nothing here.”

  The plot of land where my granddad and the Rev built their house of records is now empty. The few buildings that do surround it are brick and look desolate and heavy, like hangovers. When I step from the curb to the sidewalk and then onto the earth there are weeds that are too tall, and there are gnats, making laps around my neck, my ears.

  The wind’s starving. It blows weakly, pushing just hard enough to move the leaves of these giant oaks overhead. Slices of light from the streetlamps above us shift, following patternless tracks. I trace the lot’s perimeter with the camera. I follow the lines of its overgrown boundaries, zooming in on the blades of grass so many times until the world exists solely as spotted green pixels. I expect to be trembling, but I’m actually deathly still. The only change, I realize, is that I’ve quite suddenly become hot. Human-torch hot.

  Randal jogs to the middle of the space and the streetlamps light up his forehead and his shoulders.

  I keep filming for my granddad. I go from an extreme wide shot to a long shot; I cut away to the buildings that surround the empty lot so he’ll have a sense of context and place. So he can imagine where things might’ve stood.

  “I mean, you didn’t think anything would actually be here, though, right? It’s not as though you believe that story.”

  He says again: “Because there’s nothing here.”

  WHAT I REMEMBER

  1964: Unbelieving, Part 1

  By Colin A. McPhee

  When I turned sixteen, Earl asked me if I’d like to work at the Avalon.

  It was on a Sunday afternoon, and during the previous week my father had been gone on one of his itinerant wanderings, as he so often was. I had just finished watching The Night of the Iguana for the second time, and I can recall leaning against the ticket booth, weighing the options of what to do with the weekend’s last precious hours.

  “You spend enough time here as it is,” Earl said. “You might as well get paid for it.”

  Fittingly, Earl had aged cinematically since the theater first opened. The grooves and wrinkles that pleated his cheeks were so pronounced that they seemed to be a trick of makeup or lighting—not normal wear. The grey in his hair so suddenly thick that it had to have been painted on, dyed. When he spoke, he pulled absently at a Twainish mustache he only very rarely trimmed.

  “What would you have me do?” I asked.

  He shrugged, and his too-short arms fell to his stretched sides. “Whatever you’d like. You know this place better than most folks who already work here.”

  “Give me some options.”

  “Ushering. Ticket sales. The projector.”

  Behind me, a customer counted out $1.25 for a ticket to the evening show and the wind whistled in the waning light. On at least ten separate occasions Earl had offered to give me a tour of the theater’s projection room (Earl being a man who knew very much, though very much about only one thing, that thing being how movies worked), and each time I had declined. Until that day, the closest I had ever been to the projection room was the second row of the theater’s balcony, from which I would periodically turn back to stare into the machine’s wraithy white light.

  At that point, I was beginning to parse out why I was spending so much time at the cinema. In the films I found an escape from the realities that boiled near the back of my brain. My father’s absence, my mother’s death—her indirect suicide. I wanted to believe, fervently so, that movies—my refuge—lacked the mechanical, banal explanations that so accurately explained those ghosts.

  “How about the concession stand,” I said.

  I bargained for a wage of $1.75 per hour and we set a schedule consisting primarily of nights and weekends—and our house, where I was born and where my mother died, sat mostly empty and alone. I’d return there in the evenings, after the Avalon’s last showing, and after listening to the echoes of locks tumbling shut, I’d search for signs that my father had been home. Fingerprints in the dust that clothed the kitchen table. Dissected newspapers. Overturned pages of my script. His ratty hat, his smell.

  More and more, though, it was becoming just me. I’d brush my teeth in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, where my mother used to lock herself away. I’d lock my bedroom door when I slept at night. I’d leave the house to itself, to its conversing sounds.

  • • •

  The girl who worked at the concession stand with me was named Clare Murkowski. She was a year older than me, and at first I thought I recognized her in a vague, unsure way from the high school I attended, where I had very few friends and wanted even fewer. She had shoulder-length hair the color of coffee beans and a stark face: Faith Domergue in Vendetta, minus a quarter of the softness in the mouth and nose. Our shifts were nearly identical, save an hour or two on Sunday, when she often had to leave to babysit an eight-year-old half sister who was a result of her mother’s second marriage.

  “It’s strange,” she told me as she loaded corn kernels into a giant steel drum. “Only sharing part of something with someone.”

  I said, “But isn’t that exactly what sharing is?” and Clare ate a kernel raw, sucking away the oil before crunching it between her molars.

  “She doesn’t look a thing like me. She’s supposedly my sister—”

  “Half sister.”

  “And she doesn’t look a thing like me. She looks like my stepfather.”

  “Well, that’s not the part you share.”

  I was wiping dust from the menu that hung on the stand’s back wall while Clare slipped behind me, her boyish hips gliding alongside the glass candy display. She began positioning boxes of Milk Duds and Junior Mints in stacks, and then in perfect rows.

  “I know you from somewhere,” she said. “You go to Hackley?
”

  “Sleepy Hollow.”

  “Then that’s not it.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “we have the same mother.”

  It was the first Friday afternoon that I had worked, and as I’d learn in coming weeks, Friday afternoons were a dismally slow time for the Avalon. No one attended matinees at the end of the workweek, and the evening show didn’t start until 8:00, which meant the audience wouldn’t start trickling into the theater until 7:15. And so we passed those arid hours doing precisely what we were doing then: cleaning surfaces that didn’t need to be cleaned, building skyscrapers with boxes of candy that’d already been neatly arranged, popping enough popcorn to fill one of the lumbering buses that we’d watch pass on Saw Mill Road. Listening to Earl as he instructed us, Never ask if that’ll be all—always say, “Will that be a large?”

  “You smoke?” Clare had fanned out the Milk Duds in a spoked half circle, peacock’s feathers. She tilted her head and chewed at the ends of her dark hair as she regarded the new design.

  “Sure,” I said, though the truth was that I didn’t; I didn’t but often I’d imagine, very vividly, that I did.

  Clare gave Earl a wave as we passed through the lobby’s two grand doors, the brass lions that served as their handles now a little tarnished, a little rusted. And because the theater was empty, and because Earl’s white head was buried in yesterday’s newspaper, he waved back. A shooing away.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” she told me when I’d choked my way through half the cigarette.

  “What do you mean I’m doing it wrong?” I shifted the cigarette from the base of my fingers to between the two middle knuckles; I brought it to a different corner of my mouth. “It’s smoking. You can’t do it wrong.”

  “You can,” Clare said. She leaned against the theater’s brick wall and crossed her feet at the ankles. She held one elbow and let the cigarette dangle from a drooped wrist. “And you are.”

  There was a popping blast from a Chevy that pulled away from the curb where we stood, and we fanned the exhaust away from our faces. Clare explained, “There are seventeen different ways to smoke.”