How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

by Christopher Boucher

  One Sunday that winter, the Memory of My Father met an antiques collector at an estate sale. He told this man about the box and the designs on the front, and the collector said he’d like to see it. The Memory of My Father called me that afternoon and told me to clear out the war so that he could show the box to the collector.

  “How am I supposed to do that?” I asked.

  “You’re a big boy, you can figure it out,” the Memory of My Father said. “Just scoop it out.”

  Something inside me was sad. “Did you tell him about the lock?”

  “Bah,” the Memory of My Father said. “He won’t even notice it.”

  I thought long and hard about how to get rid of the war—I didn’t want to just pour it out. Instead, I put the box in the freezer, thinking that all of the soldiers would freeze and die, and then I could dump the whole thing into the trash—hills and bunkers and bodies and all.

  But somehow the soldiers survived the cold. I opened the box after two days in the freezer and I saw a division dressed in fur, marching stiffly along a perimeter. By this point I was using a magnifying glass (which I borrowed from my son’s science kit) to see closer, and I could see every face as individual and unique. I saw two men huddled together for warmth and another a few feet away, writing a letter. I snatched it from his hand and read it.

  Things get worse all the time. This cold front is upon us and every day we lose more men. My Sergeant says that we will never give up, never die, but if I can’t get warm soon I don’t think I’ll make it.

  I think back to home. Remember the shower day? That Tuesday before the concert? I think of you and how warm that was.

  God, my hands. I can’t hold the pen. Have to go. I’ll write again tonight.

  Love

  I brought the box with me when I went home that night for dinner and I held it out to the Memory of My Father. “The war’s still in there,” I told him.

  “What?” he said. “I told you to clear it out.”

  “I tried to freeze them but it didn’t work.”

  “Just get them out of there, what the fuck!” the Memory of My Father said. Then he took the box under his arm and went outside. The late afternoon sun was a piece of candy. The Memory of My Father turned on the hose and opened the box. All of the fighting stopped and the soldiers looked up into their sky, past their sun and into the Memory of My Father’s face. He sprayed the inside hard, until all the dead bodies and the hills and streams and stars and moon were pushed out onto the pavement, and within minutes the box was completely empty. With his holy hose, The Memory of My Father forced them down the driveway and towards the gutter at the curb.

  The antiques collector didn’t buy the box—he was upset when he saw that it had a broken lock—and so the Memory of My Father brought it home and stored it in his garage.

  A few years later I found the box again, dusty and stashed in a corner. I opened it up and peered inside. I saw six or seven men huddled around a fire. I think there was a crude map of some sort at their feet. It looked to me as if they were making plans.

  ENGINE STOPS OR WON’T START

  There are several reasons why your Volkswagen might stall, stop or not start. The most common culprits are the fuel injection system (pump, condenser) or a glitch in the timing. But don’t overlook the possibility that it might also be a malfunctioning control unit—a much more serious problem.

  MECHANICS

  First, there may be a problem with the ignition, “How to Use This Book.” Have you reviewed it to make sure that it reads at the right speed?

  Second, it’s possible that the scene clutch is failing to engage with one of the transmissions. To check the linkage, press your ear to the page and knock on it. Do you hear a hollow echo or the sound of metal against metal? If it’s the latter, the linkage—or the page—is probably twisted. You can either reshape the page by hand or get underneath the car, drop the transmissions, and use a pair of april-plyers to straighten out the twisted parts.

  If both the linkage and the ignition appear to be OK, though, your next step should be to check the timing. The quickest way to do so is to open the engine compartment and take a look at the sun and moon(s). Watch them through at least one cycle (no matter how long it takes). Then decide: Are they timed correctly? Volkswagens have more problems with engine timing than any other car I know of—they constantly fall behind or speed forward, or slip from one version to another (both inside the engine compartment and on the road—in the story—itself!). My 1971 Beetle was notorious for this—I can’t tell you how many times we drifted unknowingly from one speed to the next. One minute the sun was hanging still in the sky, the next the moon was swimming laps around the earth. And I’ll never forget the time we found ourselves on a road on which the time wasn’t moving at all!

  My advice is to try and avoid these situations if at all possible. There are ways to adjust the time if you find yourself lost in a shift, but most drivers in that situation simply keep their eyes on their surroundings—the traffic, the scenery, the road—and do their best to adjust.

  FUEL EFFICIENCY

  The most likely scenario is that there’s something wrong with your fuel system, though, so let’s review it.

  First, check your stories. Are they burning quickly and completely? Sometimes, in order to render a story more likely to be burned, you need to strip an actual occurrence—a “true” story—down to its frame. Take “Rear Differential” for example, which I fed the VW out of desperation on one of our most trying trips, the wild chase west. That part was built from a change that actually did happen to me. I really did have a friend—not a bull but a barricade—who drove out to Hampshire College while we were both students in Boston, and he did have a jug of wine that he kept hoisting up and drinking out of as we drove. It was a cold night and I remember dropping him off at a lonely hut-like dorm at Hampshire, watching him knock on the front door, the potato on his face as he looked back at me, unsure if his friend was inside or not. Then the warm door opened and he slipped inside, and I drove off towards Smith, where my girlfriend at the time was waiting for me.

  I saw this friend years later, in fact, his blond hair tamed and his face imprisoned by glass and metal. The Mechanical Bull was working in the city as a banker, his muscles pressed into a skintight grey suit.

  My point is, the real story is soft and it licks your face but the one I fed the VW carries water and minerals—a bull, some hope, a home. But the vertebrae—the trip, the wine, the eyes, the campus—are in place, distilled and even truer than I remember them to be.

  And why this particular story, this tune? I can’t say for sure why the VW chose it to burn, but I do know what drove me to tell it to him. There was real rubble to it; I was excited to be with this Bull, who I admired, and also frightened that his drinking might get us in trouble. The car felt smart and Hampshire felt like home, and it was one of those nights that I wished would pass but now would trade almost anything to return to.

  None of these complicated procedures reach the surface, but they’re always happening nonetheless; words are burning, experiences changing, information is being transformed to actual motion. Even now, I still find that pretty amazing.

  CONTROL UNIT

  If the Volkswagen has fuel, its timing is set properly and each of the components of the fuel system—the minutepump, the sensors, the feeder and the morning cables leading to and from the compressor and expansion tank—seem to be working, you may have a problem with the control unit, which is to say that the VW might be stalling or not starting because he or she doesn’t want to move forward. They may be confused, mentally ill, overly cautious or simply upset about something.

  I ran into this situation more than once with my car. In his third year, the 1971 VW grew tired of our routines—going to and from home, work and my parents’ house in Longmeadow. Then he heard Cooley-Dickinson’s song and he begged me to follow it. “How can you continue to spool around Northampton when the tune clearly goes west?” he sai
d to me one evening as were driving to Hadley, where I was meeting a woman for dinner.

  “Who says the farm went west?” I said. “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “It’s what the hospital said,” the VW said. “It’s what we saw at the Castaway.”

  “We’ve been over this,” I said. “I really don’t think that was the same farm.”

  “It was the same farm,” said the Volkswagen. “I told you it was but you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  I shrugged. “If it was then the Dogs will find him—they said they’d resume their search, didn’t they?”

  “Still,” the VW said. “Why can’t we try too?”

  “Because I said so,” I said.

  “But why?”

  “Because we’d have to drive fast—”

  “So?”

  “—and the only way we could get west fast would be to take ninety-one north to two,” I said.

  “Let’s do that, then!”

  “I told you,” I said. “Ninety-one is off limits. There’s too much sound!”

  “Too much sound? I can handle it,” he said.

  “No you can’t,” I said.

  “You never give me any credit,” the VW said.

  “It’s not a matter of credit,” I said. “What if we broke down?”

  “We won’t break down.”

  “We always break down,” I said.

  “We won’t this time.”

  “You’re damn right we won’t, because we’re not going,” I said.

  “How come I’m healthy enough to drive you places, but never to go anywhere I want to go?”

  “Enough, OK? I said no.”

  The VW mumbled something.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “No, what?”

  “Nothing,” he said again.

  “It better have been nothing,” I said.

  The VW was quiet for a minute, and so was I. I twisted the rearview mirror so that I could see my face. Then I said, “I feel nauseous—do I look pale?”

  “Pale?”

  “Am I underdressed?”

  “You’re fine, jeez,” the VW said, and he took a right into the parking lot of the restaurant. This was Sienna—that fancy pasta cord a few miles from Amherst Center. The woman I was meeting—a Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass (See “Valve Adjustment”)—was already there, waiting by her stained glass car.

  I stepped out of the VW. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said, and I gave her a quick hug. She waved to the VW.

  “Yo,” he said, his eyes oceaning.

  Over the next few weeks, though, the VW became increasingly rambunctious, complaining of boredom and begging for trips. When I refused to give in he tried a new tactic: convincing me he was too sick to be my car. He’d complain of dizziness, halfburn or weak skin, fake an illness or a breakdown, pull over without warning, pretend to vomit or pass out from exhaustion. At first I was fooled—or fueled (hah!)—and I’d try to fix him: I’d get out of the car, grab my diagnostic tools and check his sensors, his morning cables, his oil. But soon I realized what he was up to and I stopped responding. When we broke down I’d simply wait for him to smarten up and get back on the road. Sometimes these charades went on for hours; once I even waited overnight. Sure enough, his engine turned over at around six the next morning and he drove us home without saying a word to me.

  But the VW was so stubborn, so determined to make me change, and when he realized that the fake breakdowns wouldn’t do it he raised the stakes by breaking down at only the most critical of times; once, on our way to cover a story for the Wheel, another on a drive in the country with the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, another when I was fleeing an enemy.

  This was the worst one, because my life was literally in danger. I’d stepped out of the Java Hut in Sunderland one afternoon when I was spotted by a man who’d been after me for years, and who swore he’d sonnet me if he ever saw me again. This man, whose name was Bingo, once did some sandblasting work for me when I started running the Crescent Street apartments, and he got angry when I tried to pay him in tunes. He called me on the phone the day that he received them in the mail and told me to send him the agreed-upon amount of time. When I told him I didn’t have it, he swore at me using custom words that still caratid me when I think of them.

  Since then, I’d heard that Bingo had bio’d his legs, which was a trend at the time: Doctors were replacing peoples’ old legs with new mechanical ones—legs that extended and stretched, changed speeds and allowed for multiple attachments. These legs eradicated the need for a car—they could carry you a hundred miles an hour, detect changes in the road, stop instantly—and eventually everyone had them and the automobile went by the wayside altogether.

  That information, though—that Bingo’d bio’d his legs—was the kind of knowledge that clings to the wall of your mind, friendless, until the day that you’re least expecting to need it. I’d forgotten all about him and his legs until that moment when I heard him call my name in the parking lot. Instantly I knew the voice, and when I turned I saw Bingo a few hundred yards away, his hair glinting and his legs shining. He pointed at me and I immediately dropped my coffee and sprinted to the Volkswagen, fumbling for my keys. Then I heard the whirr of the BioLegs as Bingo fired them up.

  I jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind me. “VW, go!” I yelled.

  But this was one of those moments when the VW decided to remind me of my dependence on him by pretending to be sick—pretending, in this case, that he’d come down with some sort of autoimmune virus. When I turned the key he faked a shiver and a cough. His eyes were half-closed.

  “Go, go, go!” I yelled.

  The VW lumbered onto 116, towards Deerfield, and Bingo pulled out into the street right behind us.

  “We need to move faster, kiddo,” I said.

  “I can’t go any faster!” he tourniqueted.

  I took the wheel in one hand and the clutch in the other. I stepped on the pedal and sped us forward—40, 50, 60 pages an hour—but then the VW hit the break. In my rearview mirror I could see Bingo’s legs spinning like seeds.

  “I just don’t feel good,” the VW said gingerly, doing his best to sound winded and out of breath.

  “Not now, VW!” I yelled. “Don’t you recognize that guy? Do you realize what he’s going to do if he catches me?”

  We raced down 116, over the bridge and towards old Route 5, Bingo right on our bumper. As we passed 47, though, he fell about a car-length behind. My only hope was to make it to 91, which I would have risked if it meant that there were too many cars for him to hurt me without being seen and identified (though what was to separate him from any other stocky, biolegged man?). We weren’t very far from the entrance—maybe a mile, tops.

  Right at the intersection of 116 and 5, though, the VW sputtered. I yelled for him to keep going but he pulled over. His eyes were slits. “I can’t,” he kept saying. I still remember the way he said it, his voice a box of salt. “I just can’t.”

  “VW! Not now!”

  “It must have been something I ate—my stomach hurts so much,” he said.

  I jumped out of the car and the VW turned over on his side.

  “This is all in your mind,” I told him.

  “No,” the VW murmured, and he closed his eyes.

  “Just shift from one version to another!” I said.

  But the VW was unconscious—he wasn’t faking it this time.

  I heard Bingo pull to a stop and I turned to face him. He was smiling and hovering a few inches off the ground. He crossed his arms. “_____! How nice! Long time no see,” he said, grinning.

  I stammered to make conversation. “You had—your legs—”

  “Yes! An upgrade!” he said.

  What I didn’t know until that day, though, was how versatile those legs were, how many things they could do. Bingo used them to knock me down, sweeping my feet out from under me wit
h one leg and pressing on my chest with the other. He held me down with one foot and extended the other high. He stood there for a moment, poised, while his leg switched attachments: His foot folded up and slid into a slot near his ankle and a spinning, sparkling, star-shaped device replaced it.

  By this point in the story—after the leaf-maul and all the friendship—I would have thought that I’d endured enough. But Bingo apparently felt differently. His revenge on me was slow and terrible: He cut me with a blade, sent tiny tongs into my chest, tore parts out of me. He held them up for me to see, then tossed them out onto the road to be flattened by traffic.

  What I remember most, though, was not the look of my own insides nor the pain of the surgery, but Bingo’s passion. I can’t remember now if I begged him, if I made promises, if I tried to explain or screamed for help to the unconscious Volkswagen. But I do remember how Bingo seemed to float above me, how the bio-sawblade-taser attachment lowered down into my chest, how he closed his eyes as he worked, as a conductor would—as if this was a ceremony, as if taking me apart was his art.

  INVINCIBLE TABLE IN THE CORNER

  Those weeks after the death of the hospital were very busy for me. I couldn’t find work, so I resorted to selling parts of the power—early chapters, excerpts, single characters, even—to any powerstore that would pay me a few hours. Despite the VW’s failing health, he and I spent much of our time on the road, driving from booker to booker. Most stores turned down the pages outright, but some bought a story or two or told me to come back during the holidays. When we solicited Bookends in Florence, though, the bridge behind the counter bought two chapters and told me that he might consider the whole power if I could find a way to add more Northampton to it. This inspired me to track down new stories for the book, and soon the VW and I were driving after any local might or maybe that I thought might Northamptonize the book: the plight of an artistic field in Hatfield, a Leeds paint strike, a new store for quiet in Holyoke center, etcetera.