by Mike Ashley
I did as I was told, and found myself in a sort of sunken neighbourhood, on a wide dirt street running between decrepit houses set at odd angles on weed-grown lots. It looked like one of those leftover neighbourhoods in the meadowlands of Jersey, or down South, where I did my basic training. There were no sidewalks but plenty of potholes, abandoned gardens, and vacant lots. The streets were half-covered by huge puddles. The houses were of concrete block, or tarpaper, or board and batten; no two alike or even remotely similar. There was even a house trailer, illegal in New York City (so, of course, is crime). There were no street signs, so I couldn’t tell if I was in Brooklyn or Queens, or on the dotted line between the two.
The other Vinnie (or third, if you are counting) had told me to follow my nose until I found a small junkyard, which I proceeded to do. Mine was the only car on the street. Weaving around the puddles (or cruising through them like a motorboat) gave driving an almost nautical air of adventure. There was no shortage of junk in the Hole, including a subway car someone was living in, and a crane that had lost its verticality and took up two back yards. Another back yard had a piebald pony. The few people I saw were white. A fat woman in a short dress sat on a high step talking on a portable phone. A gang of kids was gathered around a puddle killing something with sticks. In the yard behind them was a card table with a crude sign reading MOON ROCKS R US.
I liked the peaceful scene in the Hole. And driving through the puddles quieted my brakes. I saw plenty of junk cars, but they came in ones or twos, in the yards and on the street, and none of them were Volvos (no surprise).
After I passed the piebald pony twice, I realized I was going in circles. Then I noticed a chainlink fence with reeds woven into it. And I had a feeling.
I stopped. The fence was just too high to look over, but I could see between the reeds. I was right. It was a junkyard that had been “ladybirded”.
The lot hidden by the fence was filled with cars, squeezed together tightly, side by side and end to end. All from Sweden. All immortal and all dead. All indestructible, and all destroyed. All Volvos.
The first thing you learn in law school is when not to look like a lawyer. I left my tie and jacket in the car, pulled on my coveralls, and followed the fence around to a gate. On the gate was a picture of a snarling dog. The picture was (it turned out) all the dog there was, but it was enough. It slowed you down; made you think.
The gate was unlocked. I opened it enough to slip through. I was in a narrow driveway, the only open space in the junkyard. The rest was packed so tightly with Volvos that there was barely room to squeeze between them. They were lined up in rows, some facing north and some south (or was it east and west?) so that it looked like a traffic jam in Hell. The gridlock of the dead.
At the end of the driveway, there was a ramshackle garage made of corrugated iron, shingleboard, plywood, and fibreglass. In and around it, too skinny to cast shade, were several ailanthus – New York’s parking-lot tree. There were no signs but none were needed. This had to be Frankie’s.
Only one living car was in the junkyard. It stood at the end of the driveway, by the garage, with its hood raised, as if it were trying to speak but had forgotten what it wanted to say. It was a 164, Volvo’s unusual straight six. The body was battered, with bondo under the taillights and doors where rust had been filled in. It had cheap imitation racing wheels and a chrome racing stripe along the bottom of the doors. Two men were leaning over, peering into the engine compartment.
I walked up and watched, unwelcomed but not (I suspected) unnoticed. An older white man in coveralls bent over the engine while a black man in a business suit looked on and kibitzed in a rough but friendly way. I noticed because this was the late 1980s and the relations between blacks and whites weren’t all that friendly in New York.
And here we were in Howard Beach. Or at least in a Hole in Howard Beach.
“If you weren’t so damn cheap, you’d get a Weber and throw these SUs away,” the old man said.
“If I wasn’t so damn cheap, you’d never see my ass,” the black man said. He had a West Indian accent.
“I find you a good car and you turn it into a piece of island junk.”
“You sell me a piece of trash and . . .”
And so forth. But all very friendly. I stood waiting patiently until the old man raised his head and lifted his eyeglasses, wiped along the two sides of his grease-smeared nose, and then pretended to notice me for the first time.
“You Frankie?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“This is Frankie’s, though?”
“Could be.” Junkyard men like the conditional.
So do lawyers. “I was wondering if it might be possible to find some brake parts for a 145, a 1970. Station wagon.”
“What you’re looking for is an antique dealer,” the West Indian said.
The old man laughed; they both laughed. I didn’t.
“Brake hardware,” I said. “The clips and pins and stuff.”
“Hard to find,” the old man said. “That kind of stuff is very expensive these days.”
The second thing you learn in law school is when to walk away. I was almost at the end of the drive when the old man reached through the window of the 164 and blew the horn: two shorts and a long.
At the far end of the yard, by the fence, a head popped up. I thought I was seeing a cartoon, because the eyes were too large for the head, and the head was too large for the body.
“Yeah, Unc?”
“Frankie, I’m sending a lawyer fellow back there. Show him that 145 we pulled the wheels off of last week.”
“I’ll take a look,” I said. “But what makes you think I’m an attorney?”
“The tassels,” the old man said, looking down at my loafers. He stuck his head back under the hood of the 164 to let me know I was dismissed.
Frankie’s hair was almost white, and so thin it floated off the top of his head. His eyes were bright blue-green, and slightly bugged out, giving him an astonished look. He wore cowboy boots with the heels rolled over so far that he walked on their sides and left scrollwork for tracks. Like the old man, he was wearing blue gabardine pants and a lighter blue work shirt. On the back it said –
But I didn’t notice what it said. I wasn’t paying attention. I had never seen so many Volvos in one place before. There was every make and model – station wagons, sedans, fastbacks, 544s and 122s, DLs and GLs, 140s to 740s, even a 940 – in every state of dissolution, destruction, decay, desolation, degradation, decrepitude, and disrepair. It was beautiful. The Volvos were jammed so close together that I had to edge sideways between them.
We made our way around the far corner of the garage, where I saw a huge jumbled pile – not a stack – of tyres against the fence. It was cooler here. The ailanthus trees were waving, though I could feel no breeze.
“This what you’re looking for?” Frankie stopped by a 145 sedan – dark green, like my station wagon; it was a popular colour. The wheels were gone and it sat on the ground. By each wheel well lay a hubcap, filled with water.
There was a hollow thud behind us. A tyre had come over the fence, onto the pile; another followed it. “I need to get back to work,” Frankie said. “You can find what you need, right?”
He left me with the 145, called out to someone over the fence, then started pulling tyres off the pile and rolling them through a low door into a shed built onto the side of the garage. The shed was only about five feet high. The door was half-covered by a plastic shower curtain hung sideways. It was slit like a hula skirt and every time a tyre went through it, it went pop.
Every time Frankie rolled a tyre through the door, another sailed over the fence onto the pile behind him. It seemed like the labours of Sisyphus.
Well, I had my own work. Carefully, I drained the water out of the first hubcap. There lay the precious springs and clips I sought – rusty, but usable. I worked my way around the car (a job in itself, as it was jammed so closely with the others). There was a hub
cap where each wheel had been. I drained them all and collected the treasure in one hubcap. It was like panning for gold.
There was a cool breeze and a funny smell. Behind me I heard a steady pop, pop, pop. But when I finished and took the brake parts to Frankie, the pile of tyres was still the same size. Frankie was on top of it, leaning on the fence, talking with an Indian man in a Goodyear shirt.
The Indian (who must have been standing on a truck on the other side of the fence) saw me and ducked. I had scared him away. I realized I was witnessing some kind of illegal dumping operation. I wondered how all the junk tyres fit into the tiny shed, but I wasn’t about to ask. Probably Frankie and the old man took them out and dumped them into Jamaica Bay at night.
I showed Frankie the brake parts. “I figure they’re worth a couple of bucks,” I said.
“Show Unc,” he said. “He’ll tell you what they’re worth.”
I’ll bet, I thought. Carrying my precious hubcap of brake hardware, like a waiter with a dish, I started back toward the driveway. Behind me I heard a steady pop, pop, pop as Frankie went back to work. I must have been following a different route between the cars – because when I saw it, I knew it was for the first time.
The 1800 is Volvo’s legendary (well, sort of) sports car from the early 1960s. The first model, the P1800, was assembled in Scotland and England (unusual, to say the least, for a Swedish car). This one, the only one I had ever seen in a junkyard, still had its fins and appeared to have all its glass. It was dark blue. I edged up to it, afraid that if I startled it, it might disappear. But it was real. It was wheel-less, engineless, and rusted out in the rocker panels. But it was real. I looked inside. I tapped on the glass. I opened the door.
The interior was the wrong colour – but it was real, too. It smelled musty, but it was intact. Or close enough. I arrived at the driveway, so excited that I didn’t even flinch when the old man looked into my hubcap (like a fortune teller reading entrails) and said, “Ten dollars.”
I raced home to tell Wu what I had found.
Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu, just to keep them guessing. Wu worked his way through high school as a pastry chef, then dropped out to form a rock band, then won a scholarship to Princeton (I think) for math (I think), then dropped out to get a job as an engineer, then made it halfway through medical school at night before becoming a lawyer, which is where I met him. He passed his bar exam on the first try. Somewhere along the line he decided he was gay, then decided he wasn’t (I don’t know what his wife thought of all this); he has been both democrat and republican, Catholic and Protestant, pro and anti gun-control. He can’t decide if he’s Chinese or American, or both. The only constant thing in his life is the Volvo. Wu has never owned another kind of car. He kept a 1984 240DL station wagon for the wife and kids. He kept the P1800, which I had helped him tow from Pennsylvania, where he had bought it at a yard sale for $500 (a whole other story), in my garage. I didn’t charge him rent. It was a red 1961 sports coupe with a B18. The engine and transmission were good (well, fair) but the interior had been gutted. Wu had found seats but hadn’t yet put them in. He was waiting for the knobs and trim and door panels, the little stuff that is hardest to find, especially for a P1800. He had been looking for two years.
“Wu lived on my block in Brooklyn, which was strictly a coincidence since I knew him from Legal Aid, where we had both worked before going into private practice. I found him in his kitchen, helping his wife make a wedding cake. She’s a caterer. “What are you doing in the morning?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for him to tell me. I have never been good at surprises (which is why I had no success as a criminal lawyer). “Your long travail is over,” I said. “I found an 1800. A P1800. With an interior.”
“Handles?”
“Handles.”
“Panels?”
“Panels.”
“Knobs?” Wu had stopped stirring. I had his attention.
“I hear you got your brakes fixed,” Wu said the next day as we were on our way to Howard Beach in my car. “Or perhaps I should say, ‘I don’t hear.’”
“I found the parts yesterday and put them on this morning,” I told him. I told him the story of how I found the Hole. I told him about the junkyard of Volvos. I told him about stumbling across the dark blue P1800. By then, we were past the end of Atlantic Avenue, near Howard Beach. I turned off onto Conduit and tried to retrace my turns of the day before, but with no luck. Nothing looked familiar.
Wu started to look sceptical; or maybe I should say, he started to look even more sceptical. “Maybe it was all a dream,” he said, either taunting me or comforting himself, or both.
“I don’t see P1800s in junkyards, even in dreams,” I said. But in spite of my best efforts to find the Hole, I was going in circles. Finally, I gave up and went to Boulevard Imports. The place was almost empty. I didn’t recognize the counterman. His shirt said he was a Sal.
“Vinnie’s off,” he said. “It’s Saturday.”
“Then maybe you can help me. I’m trying to find a place called Frankie’s. In the Hole.”
People sometimes use the expression “blank look” loosely. Sal’s was the genuine article.
“A Volvo junkyard?” I said. “A pony or so?”
Blank got even blanker. Wu had come in behind me, and I didn’t have to turn around to know he was looking sceptical.
“I don’t know about any Volvos, but did somebody mention a pony?” a voice said from in the back. An old man came forward. He must have been doing the books, since he was wearing a tie. “My Pop used to keep a pony in the Hole. We sold it when horseshoes got scarce during the War.”
“Jeez, Vinnie, what war was this?” Sal asked. (So I had found another Vinnie!)
“How many have there been?” the old Vinnie asked. He turned to me. “Now, listen up, kid.” (I couldn’t help smiling; usually only judges call me “kid” and only in chambers.) “I can only tell you once, and I’m not sure I’ll get it right.”
The old Vinnie’s instructions were completely different from the ones I had gotten from the Vinnie the day before. They involved a turn into an abandoned gas station on the Belt Parkway, a used car lot on Conduit, a McDonald’s with a dumpster in the back, plus other flourishes that I have forgotten.
Suffice it to say that, twenty minutes later, after bouncing down a steep bank, Wu and I found ourselves cruising the wide mud streets of the Hole, looking for Frankie’s. I could tell by Wu’s silence that he was impressed. The Hole is pretty impressive if you are not expecting it, and who’s expecting it? There was the non-vertical crane, the subway car (with smoke coming from its makeshift chimney) and the horse grazing in a lot between two shanties. I wondered if it was a descendant of the old Vinnie’s father’s pony. I couldn’t tell if it was shod or not.
The fat lady was still on the phone. The kids must have heard us coming, because they were standing in front of the card table waving hand-lettered signs: MOON ROCKS THIS WAY! and MOON ROCKS R US! When he saw them, Wu put his hand on my arm and said, “Pull over, Irv,” – his first words since we had descended into the Hole.
I pulled over and he got out. He fingered a couple of ashy-looking lumps, and handed the kids a dollar. They giggled and said they had no change.
“Wu told them to keep it.
“I hope you don’t behave like that at Frankie’s,” I said, when he got back into the car.
“Like what?”
“You’re supposed to bargain, Wu. People expect it. Even kids. What do you want with phoney moon rocks anyway?”
“Supporting free enterprise,” he said. “Plus, I worked on Apollo and I handled some real moon rocks once. They looked just like these.” He sniffed them. “Smelled just like these.” He tossed them out the window into the shallow water as we motored through a puddle.
As impressive as the Hole can be (first time), there is nothing more impressive than a junkyard of all Volvos. I couldn’t wait to see “Wu’s face when he saw it. I wasn’t
disappointed. I heard him gasp as we slipped through the gate. He looked around, then looked at me and grinned. “Astonishing,” he said. Even the inscrutable, sceptical Wu.
“Told you,” I said. (I could hardly wait till he saw the 1800!) The old man was at the end of the driveway, working on a diesel this time. Another customer, this one white, looked on and kibitzed. The old man seemed to sell entertainment as much as expertise. They were trying to get water out of the injectors.
“I understand you have an 1800,” Wu said. “They’re hard to find.”
I winced. Wu was no businessman. The old man straightened up, and looked us over. There’s nothing like a six-foot Chinaman to get your attention, and Wu is six-two.
“P1800,” the old man said. “Hard to find is hardly the word for it. I’d call it your rare luxury item. But I guess it won’t cost you too much to have a look.” He reached around the diesel’s windshield and honked the horn. Two shorts and a long.
The oversized head with the oversized eyes appeared at the far end of the yard, by the fence.
“Two lawyers coming back,” the old man called out. Then he said to me: “It’s easier to head straight back along the garage till you get to where Frankie is working. Then head to your right, and you’ll find the P1800.”
Frankie was still working on the endless pile (not a stack) of tyres by the fence. Each one went through the low door of the shed with a pop.
I nodded, and Frankie nodded back. I turned right and edged between the cars toward the P1800, assuming Wu was right behind me. When I saw it, I was relieved – it had not been a dream after all! I expected an appreciative whistle (at the very least), but when I turned, I saw that I had lost Wu.
He was still back by the garage, looking through a stack (not a pile) of wheels against the wall.
“Hey, Wu!” I said, standing on the bumper of the P1800. “You can get wheels anywhere. Check out the interior on this baby!” Then, afraid I had sounded too enthusiastic, I added: “It’s rough but it might almost do.”
“Wu didn’t even bother to answer me. He pulled two wheels from the stack. They weren’t exactly wheels, at least not the kind you mount tyres on. They were more like wire mesh tires, with metal chevrons where the tread should have been.