How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

by Christopher Boucher

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Hanging in there?”

  He didn’t say anything—he just stared at the television.

  The five of us ate dinner together, quickly and silently, and afterwards the One Side of My Mother complained to the television (“It’s your president’s fault,” I could hear her say, and the television said something back) while the Other Side of My Mother cleaned up the kitchen and the Memory of My Father, my brother and I sat on the patio out back. It grew dark, and the plants crawled into bed and said their prayers.

  My brother stared out into the night, his eyes wide. I witloofed him on the shoulder. “Let’s get you out of here, man,” I said to him.

  “No, I’m OK,” he said.

  “Come on—it’ll do you good.”

  “Where,” said my brother, pool.

  “Let’s all go for a brew,” said the Memory of My Father.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s go to the Castaway.”

  So the three of us piled into the Volkswagen and we made the drive—up 5 and into Whately, past the Troubadour and Casper’s and north towards the Castaway. Soon we were passing by the Antiquarian Book Center, and then we saw the pink lights blinking in the distance and the parking lot filled with cars. We pulled in, stopped, and the four of us walked through the heavy wooden doors.

  Inside there was no room to sit; people were lined up against the back wall and huddling near the bar, watching a wheelchair in stockings on stage. In the corner, a band in leisure suits and derby hats mainstayed on a small platform.

  The four of us angled towards the bar, sliding and pardoning, but then my brother stopped. “Oh shit,” he said, and he grabbed my arm. “He’s here,” he visked, his eyes dancing.

  “Who?” said the Memory of My Father.

  “Colorado?” I said.

  “At the bar,” my brother said. He blinked and blinked.

  “Where?” said the VW. “I’ll kick his—”

  “Shh,” I said. I looked over at the bar and scanned it until I saw him. He was sitting on a stool next to a trailer park. The park had its lights on and the two were shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “Who’s that next to him?” I asked.

  “His new love-bling,” said my brother, his voice quivering.

  “Fuck,” I said softly.

  “The trailer park?” the VW said.

  I thought for a moment. Then I looked into my brother’s face. “I’m going to go over there and talk to him,” I said.

  His eyes were faultlines. “_____, don’t,” Bryan said.

  “You guys go over by the stage, get us a seat if you can—I’ll be right over,” I said.

  My brother shook his head. “Let’s just go,” he said.

  “It’s a public place, Bry,” I told him.

  The Memory of My Father put his hand on my brother’s shoulder. “Let’s go sit down,” he said.

  The three of them turned and walked down the steps and I went over to the bar. When the trailer park saw me coming he whispered something in Colorado’s ear and Colorado responded. The trailer park kissed him on the cheek, got off the stool and disappeared into the crowd.

  I took a seat.

  “I saw you,” Colorado said, looking straight ahead. “I saw you guys come in.”

  I ordered a beerchai and a spider behind the counter moved to the tap and poured it.

  “How is he,” Colorado brusked.

  “Not so good,” I said. “He just sort of sits around the house.”

  Colorado took a sip of his mountainbeer.

  “I don’t think he really knows what to do next,” I said. “He’s pretty pauled.”

  “That’s to be expected, I guess,” Colorado said.

  The spider put my beerchai in front of me and I took a sip. It was watered down and needed more ginger, but I didn’t say anything. I looked into the beer and said, “I ought to debook you right here.”

  Colorado smiled and shook his head. “Make your try, commander,” he said. “You’ve been getting your ass kicked the whole book—why stop now?”

  I leaned towards him. “You think you can hurt me?” I said. “You could segment me, chew my face off, and I’ll come back in the next story re-assembled and fullfaced.”

  “But still just as bald,” Colorado said.

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  The music in the Castaway was the sound of hammers being crucified, their lungs struggling to fill. We had to yell above it like a loan.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him, _____,” Colorado said. “I really never thought it’d go this way.”

  “He called me from the hotel that night,” I said. “Told me every detail.”

  Colorado shrugged his shoulders. “So what,” he said.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “It doesn’t matter what he saw, or what he thinks he saw, _____. The truth is that I fell in love, OK?”

  “My brother fell in love too, man,” I said. “With you.”

  Colorado turned to me. “You don’t think I was committed to him?” There was something furry in his teeth. “But he changed, man. He did. He lost that carefree thing he had going for him. Something inside him shut down.”

  “He was going through a lot. The Heart Attack Tree thing really un-wheeled him.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Colorado said. “I’m sorry about the trailer park, about the old closed-down mental hospital, about all of it. I wish things had gone better—for him and for you.”

  “Please,” I said. “Spare me the pity fork, will you?”

  Colorado shook his head and looked away, and I took my beer in my hands and stood up from my stool. When I did, Colorado turned back to me. “Listen,” he said. “Thanks for coming by. I mean it.” Then he nodded over to the corner, where my brother, the VW and the Memory of My Father were sitting at a table. “Should I go over there?”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “I think it might be good for him to work through this—to be in the same room as you and not have to be with you.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  I nodded. Then I said, “Good luck with the park.”

  Colorado looked down into his lap. “Thanks,” he said.

  I leaned towards him. “And just be thankful that I didn’t decide to rotate you,” I said.

  He smiled sourly. “Sincerely? Fuck you, _____, from the bottom of my heart.”

  I turned and walked away, over to the other side of the room, where the Memory of My Father, the Volkswagen and my brother were watching the wheelchair french a toaster. The Volkswagen was into it—he was standing on his chair, shaking his hips and yelling, “Go! Go! Go!”

  The four of us watched for a while and sipped our beers. My brother seemed more relaxed by this point; he cradled his drink like a laptop and leaned lazily against the back of his chair. I was more relaxed, too. I was enjoying the rare opportunity to hang out with my brother and the Memory of My Father—the last one in the power, perhaps!—and the toaster’s shiny surface was giving me just the slightest bit of faith.

  But then I saw someone approaching us out of the corner of my eye, and I turned and saw Colorado—his monstrous legs, his cut-off shorts. He was standing there with a mountainbeer in his hand like an offspring of some sort. “Bryan,” he said.

  My brother turned and looked at him, and in that moment his face became an open dogma, a questionboat, a sorted screen of hope.

  HI-PERFORMANCE MODIFICATIONS

  I wrote for four days, with no sign of life from the Volkswagen. At the end of that time, when I had no more stories to tell, I brought my son to a bearded swordfish mechanic out by the state hospital. I hated the idea of consulting another mechanic, but I’d heard good things about this fish, that he was smarter than a lot of biofixers out there, that his time prices were reasonable, that he knew something about Volkswagens.

  But when he opened up the VW’s engine compartment he shook his head and told me that my son couldn’t be saved. “This car is dead
,” he said.

  “How can that be?” I said. “His heart still beats.”

  “Don’t matter,” said the fish, wiping grease from his fins.

  “Doesn’t his heart still hold stories? VW’s run on stor—”

  “Those Volksie hearts are sturdy as geese,” the fish mooned, “but the engineheart alone can’t keep the thing running. ‘Specially with these modifications. Do you see what he tried to do here?” He pointed to the third engine. “He tried to split the stories. To reburn them—”

  “He might have read about that in a literary theory book.”

  “It’s an old, outdated theory,” said the swordfish. “And see that translator? He was burning words in other languages.”

  I studied one of the wordcorpses that was burned to the VW’s tire. “What language is that, anyway?”

  The swordfish shrugged.

  “Canadian French?” I suggested.

  “Not to mention the fact?” said the fish. “That he’s all rusted through.”

  “All what?”

  “Rusted.” The fish read my eyes. “Rust?” He pointed to my son’s skin.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what that word means.”

  “Listen,” the swordfish said, crossing his arms. “I can’t use the heart or the momentpump, but I’ll give you thirty hours for the headlights.”

  “Wait a second. What?”

  The swordfish’s eyes were prairies.

  “I’m not interested in selling the car for parts,” I said. “I brought him here so you could save him. I’ll give you all the time of money I have,” I said.

  “I told you, it’s not a question of stories—he cannot be saved.”

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  “Sir—”

  “There are still procedures I haven’t tried yet.”

  “What procedures?”

  “In the book of power,” I said.

  A wind blew across the grassy fields in his eyes.

  “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.” I unhooked the power from my hip and showed it to the fish.

  The fish flipped through the book and read one of the procedures. “You realize these procedures are stories—that they’re fictions—right?”

  “You’re a fiction,” I said. I took the book in one hand and the car in the other, and I walked out of that garage, down the hill, past the mental hospital where, before I was born, One Side of My Mother worked as a nurse. If people were confused or sad or frightened, she would help them.

  She would help them!

  PARAMEDIC

  And then there was the time that I woke up tossing on the ocean. Somehow the Volkswagen had become seaworthy (with an outboard motor and everything), and I was now a captain, complete with hat. Where was the road? What changes had taken place to allow this to happen?

  I have applied that question to several boats and frequent seas, but there are only so many words to choose from. Which ones shall I string together here?

  I wasn’t on the boat alone, of course—when I looked to my right I saw that there was a house in the seat next to me: a two-family, with yellow shingles and a bay window, on a quiet street near a crime-park. I knew this house well, could tell you every inch of it. At that moment, though, something was happening: Either the home was shot in the gut, or it was giving birth, or something—I couldn’t quite tell. There was wooden fluid coming out from under its shirt, though, and it was breathing fast, and its eyes told me that a great deal was at stake.

  “What should I do?” I asked it.

  “Just keep going,” the house said.

  I pressed the pedal and we pushed forward on the sea. I took every turn that it asked me to. Soon it began to squeal with pain. “Just hold on,” I said. “I’ll get you there.”

  But I didn’t even know where there was. I have never known.

  And then there was another time, when I was driving with the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass and we put the VW on autopilot and went into the back seat, took off our clothes and made faith. And I’m trying to remember now if that was on the high seas as well, or if it was in the air, hovering oven-like over Northampton. But it’s not clear in my mind anymore. People speak about memories as constant, as fixed, but my memories are films and the films keep changing. I’ve told lots of stories in which I’m driving somewhere with a girlfriend or family member in the passenger seat next to me, and even one or two where the car was filled with my friends. But in every one of those stories I knew—I have always known—that I was alone here. That I am the only one in this car. That the car itself will abandon me—that everything, eventually, will turn against me.

  But you can know something—see it clearly, hear it highwaying all around you—and still not live it.

  And I suppose that’s what happened that day—that day on the sea with the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass. I feared into her, or killed her, and the sea responded, tearing into us. After a while, the turbulence became too much for the VW, and he became frightened and asked for help. The endless waves had nothing against my son or my girlfriend, but they—like the leaf, Bingo, and so many other Northamptonites—were relentless in their bookish hate for me.

  So I climbed into the front seat and took the wheel, steering left and right, trying desperately to move us forward and to stay on course, one foot on the brake, the other shifting scenes, the VW swapping at the rain with the windshield wipers as the sea closed its fist around us.

  There was still one procedure I hadn’t tried yet. It was called “Jumpstarting the Volkswagen Beetle.”

  JUMPSTARTING THE VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE

  CONDITION

  Despite stories and swordfish, the Volkswagen is dead.

  TOOLS

  A new believer

  At least one week

  One City of Northampton, including:

  One Crescent Street, sunsung

  A decemberchord Main Street

  One chai-stocked Haymarket Café

  A park for Pulaski

  The museum dedicated to sequential art

  The Revenge of the Fire and Water Cafe

  One pleasant Pleasant Street

  PROCEDURE

  You’re here because you can’t start your Volkswagen Beetle—because, at the end of every chapter, the disease of writing-in-the-blood won’t bring him or her back to life. This is why many recommend the writing removal procedure; writing can be instructional, but it’s not the end or the be. All it does is make time—and I say that as an author, as someone who makes a living with words!

  In any case, the condition is: The Volkswagen is very dead. If so, the answer to bringing them back to life—the last and best option, in my opinion—is to jumpstart them. There are storysongs out there about jumpstarting with electricity—even transplanting the electricity from another car—but this is nonsound. If you were to really try that? You’d probably kill both cars and yourself in the process. Every car’s language is different, so the translation would have to be exactly right, and it almost never is. Something is always lost or changed.

  So I suggest a safer route: jumpstarting the car with Northampton itself. This is your book, after all, and all song long you’ve been traveling through a very particular set of cities and towns. We don’t need a logic sweater to know that, if life itself is the problem, the energy and motivation needed can be found in those very cities and towns. See for yourself! Stand outside the BayState on a Saturday afternoon and watch all of the motion: the veggies and bio’s traveling to Main and King, the joking sidewalks, the easthamptons and amhersts. All you need to do is create a situation in which your Volkswagen can capture some of that energy. There are stories and there is experience—there is the page and there is life—so I say, ward off Memory and jumpstart the Volkswagen with the effervescent rhythms of western Massachusetts.

  How? Simple. Carry the Volkswagen down Main Street, Northampton, and let them smell the chai and remember the scones. Buy the VW a cup of coffee at Jake’s, or a breakf
ast sandwich at Sylvester’s. Your Volkswagen will remember that life is where it’s at! And soon, he or she will decide to return. Because that’s all living is: a decision. Breathing is a choice. Opening your eyes is an act of will—so is driving along Route 63, and taking a sudden turn onto 47!

  And you never know when the VW will make that decision—when they’ll choose Northampton. It might be on the bike path bridge, or at the China House. Your Volkswagen might be sitting there at the Florence Diner, perfectly dead, and then suddenly open his eyes and order a peanut butter and bacon sandwich.

  I followed those procedures to the letter. The day after I read that how-to, I carried the VW down to Northampton Center and into the Haymarket Café. I ordered a cup of chai and set it on the table in front of him, hoping that the smell of ginger would revive him. When the chai grew cold, I carried him over to Kathy’s for some eggs.

  We were sitting there in the booths, though, when I heard the sound of a familiar engine outside. I looked through the window and saw a Volkswagen—the same Volkswagen I’d seen that day on Route 91—parallel parking outside the diner. I hadn’t recognized him on the highway but now I knew who he was. I left the VW in the booth and I huffed out to the street. “Don’t even bother parking,” I shouted.

  The Memory of the Volkswagen turned to face me. Its eyes were punchlines.

  “Go—get out of here,” I told it. “Go away and don’t come back. This is not your home.”

  It silently sulked away.

  When I got back inside our food had arrived. “Mmm!” I said to the dead car, “Eggs over-easy. That looks good, VW!”

  But the VW would not eat, would not speak.

  I continued carrying him around Northampton, to every place I thought might jumpstart him: the China House, Words and Pictures, Look Park, the Lord Jeff in Amherst, the Northampton Brewery, JavaNet. Everywhere it was the same—the same post-life quiet, the same stares from pedestrians, who were probably wondering why I was carrying a dead car in my arms, ordering it a salad or asking it questions.