For the next three bolts, Benjy repeated the instructions word for word as I carefully drilled. He wasn’t reading, of course. He had memorized them the first time. With all four bolt holes finished, I had successfully avoided blowing us up.
“Still think we need professional help?” I teased. I raised my hand for a high five.
“Maybe we ought to have a professional do this, Dad,” Benjy repeated, as flat as before, while ignoring my high-five invite. My skills had not impressed him.
“Do you want to go underneath or stay up here in the rear of the car?” I asked.
“If I go under the car,” he said, “it could fall on me.” I armed him with a pair of locking pliers and had him take my place in the back of the car. I then slid under the car on my new creeper. With my snout just a few claustrophobic inches beneath the underbody of the car, Benjy’s “It could fall on me” reverberated in my ears. I worked nervously yet purposefully, as if defusing a ticking time bomb. As I pushed each bolt through a wide washer and then through the hole in the rear panel, I called for Benjy to grab it, put a belt anchor, washer, and nut on it, then lock the pliers on the nut while I tightened the bolt from below.
“OWWW!” he suddenly hollered.
“WHAT?!” I hollered back from below.
“MY KNEES! I CAN’T FIT BACK HERE! I’M TALLER THAN YOU!”
“Shift around,” I suggested. “Or hold the pliers from the front seat.”
“I HAVE SIZE THIRTEEN FEET, DAD! I’M STUCK!” Then he suddenly changed his tune, shouting, “I’M OKAY! I’M FINE!”
And then, as we moved from bolt to bolt, he yelled “OWWWW” again, and repeated the same cycle of complaints, in the same order.
For the few minutes it took to tighten the four bolts, we bellowed constantly at each other. Then I crept out from under the car, stood up, and extricated him from the back seat.
“I think we did it, dude!”
“I guess,” he answered, nonplussed.
I demanded a more exuberant celebration. “With our own hands and minds we actually installed these seat belts, and didn’t have to rely on some professional to do it for us!” I exulted. “I thought it would take all day, and it was less than an hour! Isn’t that tremendously satisfying? Don’t you feel a great sense of accomplishment? Or maybe a calm, Zen-like inner satisfaction?”
“I guess,” he said. Then he added, “You probably saved a lot of money.”
“It’s not about the money!” I insisted. “It’s about personal fulfillment—pride in doing your own work and solving your own problems. I’m wired. I want to do more. Let’s rotate the tires!”
“Maybe we ought to have a professional do that, Dad.”
“Compared to what we just accomplished, it’s a walk in the park. We’ve already got the car jacked up. C’mon, whaddya say?”
“No, thank you,” he said politely, “I’m bushed.” He returned to the house.
An uneventful tire rotation later, I was lowering the Corvair off the jack stands when Benjy returned. “Y’know how you said we should feel pumped up and proud?” he said. “I think we should celebrate. McDonald’s will begin serving Chicken McNuggets in nineteen minutes.” He fixed his brown eyes on me, his face an open book; he had more than Chicken McNuggets on his mind.
“You have to go—I can’t talk to you,” Lydia whispered with quiet urgency as she made change for us at her drive-thru window. She sneaked a glance back at her manager. “He nearly fired me the last time you were here, and he’ll recognize this car.”
“We have the seat belts installed in the back,” Benjy whispered back, leaning across me.
“Yo, Benjy, you don’t whisper,” Lydia whispered. “Only me. So the manager doesn’t hear me. If you whisper, I can’t hear you.”
“Do you want to go for a ride?” Benjy boomed. “We have seat belts in back now so it’s safe.”
Hearing Benjy’s bellow, the manager looked up at Lydia. “I get off in two hours,” she hissed, then slammed the window shut.
When Benjy was much younger, Annie had arranged play dates for him, and it wasn’t easy. To Benjy, a play date didn’t mean playing games or activities that involved interaction with other children. It meant reciting his stories to a captive and sometimes unappreciative audience. Second dates were rare. Then Benjy reached the age where boys didn’t do play dates anymore. There were no birthday party invitations, no calls, no e-mails. It wasn’t that Benjy had no interest in friends; after rehearsals for the school play, I would see him hovering eagerly around his fellow actors, hoping to join in their conversations. But, despite years of professional and parental social coaching, the fine art of making friends still eluded him.
So there was no way I was now going to blow this opportunity for him to make a friend. We found a shady spot in the McDonald’s parking lot, put the convertible top down, ate our lunch, and prepared to wait two hours for Lydia.
Within minutes, however, a steady stream of humanity visited us with questions to ask, stories to tell, or insults to deliver about the Corvair. After wolfing down his McNuggets and fries, Benjy hopped out of the car to give tours. The conversations went like this:
Several Baby Boomers: “My dad (or mom or granddad) had a Corvair. They were cool.” Benjy: “Many people owned Corvairs. Nearly one-point-eight million Corvairs were built by GM over ten model years starting with the 1960 model. My grandfather had a blue 1965 Monza four-door with the Powerglide transmission,” etc.
Another Boomer: “Unsafe at any speed. Right? The car Nader hated?” Benjy: “This car is different, not defective. In 1972, after testing the Corvair against comparable cars, the United States Government issued a report that said the Corvair was as safe or safer than…,” etc.
Three Harley riders in leathers: “Nader! That [expletive deleted]! It’s cuz of guys like him that we gotta wear [expletive deleted] helmets.” Benjy: “That is not nice language. My mother said people use bad language because they have an ‘abject failure of imagination.’ She told me to look up ‘abject’ in the dictionary, because I didn’t know what it meant. It means ‘extremely bad’ or ‘miserable’ or ‘degrading.’” At this point, I quickly intervened.
Teens on skateboards: “Cool car. What is it?” Benjy: “A Corvair. It’s the most innovative car made in America in the past fifty years,” etc.
Classic Mustang driver: “A hundred bucks says I can kick your car’s tail at any distance and on any course you choose.” Benjy: “I don’t gamble. But your car is not as innovative as the Corvair. The Corvair is the most innovative …,” etc.
A Porsche owner: “I hear Jay Leno calls it the American Porsche. Anyone who thinks that must have never driven a Porsche.” Benjy: “Who is Jay Leno? What’s a Porsche?”
In what seemed like a blink, the two hours had passed, and Lydia slunk covertly out of McDonald’s, still in her uniform. “I don’t want the manager to see me,” she explained. “He’d probably fire me.” And then, “Thanks for the ride, by the way. I needed it. This is awesome.”
As I held the seat back for her to climb in the rear, she took off her hat like it was a pair of handcuffs and shook out her hair. It was jet black, other than those hot fluorescent locks up front. I hopped behind the wheel and pulled smartly out of the parking lot.
“Top down! Super awesome!” Lydia buckled the new seat belt and told us where she lived. “I’ve never ridden in a convertible before,” she confessed.
“You’re the first person to use that seat belt,” Benjy said.
“Well, I am honored,” she chirped, then exulted, “Yee Haw! Blue sky and Blue Ridge!” She breathed deeply, then twisted and turned to see everything. “We should write a song with that title.” She took her hair clips out and let her hair blow in the breeze.
“I don’t know how to write a song,” said Benjy.
“Neither do I,” admitted Lydia. “We’re not gonna let that stop us, are we?”
“No!” agreed Benjy. He paused to consider what to say next
. “Because the Corvair has the engine, transmission, and differential in the back, there’s no hump in the floor,” he finally offered. “They call the transmission and differential together the transaxle.” I realized he’d spent more time researching the Corvair than I had, and was glad to show off what he’d learned.
“It is very roomy back here,” Lydia agreed. “Much more comfortable than my mother’s Prius. Of course, I have to sit behind her big, fat, stupid new husband. She has to drive him, cuz his license got suspended for DUI.”
“My mother died,” said Benjy matter-of-factly. “Because she didn’t get a flu shot, she got the flu, and after she went to the hospital, she got a big infection called sepsis and her organs failed.”
I cringed. We had been driving just four minutes. That was waaaaay too much information too soon, I thought. It risked being a conversation stopper for all eternity.
“That’s so sad,” Lydia said, reaching over the seat to touch Benjy’s shoulder. “I am so sorry.”
“Senior citizens and kids were supposed to get flu shots then,” Benjy explained. “She took me to get one but she didn’t get one.”
“So she sacrificed hers so a child or senior could have one,” said Lydia. “She was, like, a hero.”
Suddenly, with tears in my eyes and a big lump in my throat, I liked Lydia a lot. I sneaked a peek over at Benjy, and he stared out to the side as he usually did, betraying no emotion. “She was a heroine, not a hero,” he corrected.
“Right! Heroine!” nodded Lydia, grinning. “You’re a nice person, Benjy,” she said after a moment. “I could see that when we did the play. How come you didn’t come to any of the cast parties?”
“I didn’t know about them,” Benjy said.
“Well, that sucks. Aren’t you on Facebook? Wasn’t your e-mail address on the cast list?”
“I’m not on Facebook, and I don’t have an e-mail.”
“I wish I’d known, I would have told you. But I didn’t know you didn’t know. Next play, you’re there.”
“Okay!” Benjy said. “Except I’m a senior,” he realized. “I’m graduating. There won’t be a next time.”
“Then that super sucks.”
“In the fall, I’m going to James Monroe Community College.”
“I might go there, too! I hear it’s really good, and it’s all I can afford.”
“It’s not Dartmouth or Wheeler,” Benjy said. “And they make you take math. But it is much cheaper.”
“Math?” Lydia groaned. “Haven’t they heard of calculators and computers?”
My sentiments exactly! Gawd, I hoped she’d be a friend to Benjy. I checked my gas gauge, wanting to drive them both forever.
“Does this car have a name?” Lydia asked.
“It’s called a Corvair,” answered Benjy. “A Corvair Monza, to be precise.”
“But you know how some people give their cars people names? Like Herbie was the name of the Love Bug? Like they’re a member of their family?”
“I don’t believe in anthropomorphizing inanimate objects like cars,” declared Benjy.
“Oh,” said Lydia, grinning, without a clue about what Benjy had just said. “Me either.”
“Corvair is a good name,” Benjy reaffirmed.
“Corvair is an outstanding name,” Lydia confirmed.
Their conversation flagged and Lydia gazed out to the mountains, still nodding, still grinning, as if exploring a peaceful new refuge.
Benjy finally broke their silence. “Before the Corvair, in 1948, the Tucker Torpedo also had the engine and transmission in the rear,” he said, “but the big car companies put Tucker out of business because Tuckers were more innovative. There was a movie made about it in 1988. It starred Jeff Bridges and was directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Since there were only 51 Tuckers built, I think the Corvair should be considered the most innovative car.”
As Benjy regaled Lydia with increasingly obscure details about the wonders of the Corvair, my attention turned to a new sound from the back rear—a metallic pinging and rolling, as if a marble was loose somewhere. What the heck was that? Did we leave some nuts and bolts loose under the rear seat when we were installing the seat belts?
“In 1965, Ralph Nader said the Corvair was unsafe at any speed,” Benjy was saying. “He said it killed people. But he wasn’t talking about the Late Model, he was talking about the Early Model. This is a Late Model. And what he said wasn’t even true about the Early Model. It wasn’t true about any Corvairs. It just got stereotyped because it was different. People shouldn’t do that.”
“I don’t like riding in our Prius,” Lydia said. “They recalled it and say they fixed it so it won’t accelerate out of control now. But what if it did just go crazy on its own? How scary would that be?”
“Our other car is a Toyota Camry,” said Benjy. “It got recalled too. I don’t like it. It’s not different. I only like different cars.”
Behind me, the pinging and rolling grew louder. We were on a busy four-lane highway without a place to pull off. Fortunately, less than a mile ahead was an exit with a service station where I could check it out.
“My dad’s friends called his father’s Corvair a Deathmobile,” Benjy said. “They didn’t know it wasn’t true.”
Lydia laughed. “That’s funny! Deathmobile!”
A loud CLANK suddenly shot out from underneath Lydia. The driver’s side rear wheel wobbled, and we lurched from side to side.
“What’s going on?” Lydia asked anxiously. “What’s happening?”
“We’ll stop at the end of the exit ramp to check it out,” I assured her as I swerved into the exit lane. I couldn’t stop sooner; there was no shoulder, and traffic was racing up behind me.
The lurching grew worse, pitching us from side to side. “What’s happening?!” repeated Lydia, unnerved. In the rear view mirror, I saw the color drain out of her face.
The car weaved back and forth like a drunk on a bender. “Dad, I think something’s wrong,” said Benjy, his voice flat as usual.
“We’ll be fine,” I said, exiting the highway while doing my best impression of cool-as-a-cucumber pilot Sully Sullenberger safely landing his airplane in the Hudson River. “But brace yourselves, just in case.” Benjy wedged his arms against the glove box and ducked down. Behind my seat, Lydia assumed the crash position.
I slowly wrangled the Corvair into the gas station, parked, yanked up the brake, and shut off the engine. “Safe and sound,” I assured all. “Sorry for the unexpected excitement.”
Benjy got out of his crash position and seemed okay. Lydia, however, was quietly murmuring, “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,” over and over, rocking back and forth to calm herself.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m really sorry. But we’re fine now. Really.”
Lydia nodded, but kept repeating her Oh God mantra.
After I extricated myself from the Corvair, I saw the tilted rear wheel. Removing the wire wheel cover, I discovered that two of the five lug nuts were sheared off completely. A few more revolutions and the wheel might have snapped off the car. Clearly, I had somehow managed to botch the simple task of rotating the tires by not properly tightening the lug nuts. This morning’s supremely satisfying Zen moment had become this afternoon’s near-death experience.
I offered my hand to Lydia to help her out of the car. “Want to stretch your legs, get something to drink? We’ll have some time before the tow truck comes.”
Lydia leaped out of the car as if it was on fire. “It is a Deathmobile!” she cried.
I looked over to Benjy. Corvair kaput…Lydia mad…. His chin fell to his chest. This wasn’t what he’d hoped for.
CHAPTER 9
The wrecker driver carefully dropped the Corvair’s rear wheel drum onto a cinder block in front of our garage, capping off a mortifying return to the scene of this morning’s triumphant seat belt installation. Before leaving, he handed me his business card. “You’ll need it,” he advised. In a few hours, I’d fallen from
the euphoria of nominating myself to the Mechanics’ Hall of Fame down to the humiliation of needing my own personal on-call-around-the-clock tow truck.
Inside, I found Benjy in his bedroom, buried under the covers. As soon as the wrecker stopped in our driveway, he had raced dejectedly straight into the house. “How ya doin’?” I asked.
“Fine.” He sounded Not Fine.
“I apologize again for the wheel almost falling off. I’m really, really sorry.”
From under the covers, I heard nothing.
“Lydia is really nice, I think.” Still nothing. “Wanna talk?”
“No, thank you.”
I left him alone and headed to my office to catch up on work.
Two hours later, I heard him race downstairs and go outside, which he rarely did. Peering out the window, I saw a wheelchair beside my Corvair, which was now resting on jack stands. A man’s legs stuck out from under the car, looking like the mannequin legs in Kenny’s barn.
“What’s going on?” I asked Benjy when I got outside.
“I called a professional automobile mechanic and asked him to fix the Corvair,” Benjy said.
“You called Kenny? Why did you call Kenny?”
“Because we should have a professional automobile mechanic do this. You are not a professional.”
“I see. So you asked him to fix the broken wheel? Gave him our address?”
“Yes.” He eyed me with his big browns. “When I called, he said he was really sorry about being mean to me, and for the stuff he said, and that he was glad I called him. He said he sometimes gets in really bad moods. Because of his legs and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“I see. You don’t usually use the phone, Benjy.”
“The woman at James Monroe said I had to take the initiative. His phone number was in the Craigslist ad on the Internet.”
I sighed. “Hello,” I finally said to the legs sticking out from beneath the car. “Kenny, could you come out here a second?”
“Looks like someone did a nice job rebuilding this engine,” Kenny replied from under the car. “Not leaking a drop of oil.”
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