It was a 1968 Pontiac something-something station wagon. It was blue. I would have to have been ten or eleven; I feel smaller in the memory, but I would have to have been at least that old because my parents never bought cars new back then. On the way home from the beach, on a long, straight empty stretch of road, mom in the passenger seat, us three kids in the back seat with our crackers and games and the coffee can full of urine (Dad was a busdriver and didn’t like to stop for anything) dad stepped on it. (On the accelerator, not the coffee can.)
He floored it.
“What are you doing?” my mom asked him in a voice that suggested white knuckles and fingernails digging into blue imitation leather upholstery.
“Cleaning the cobwebs out,” he said.
I looked over the top of the seat at the speed-o-meter. He got the needle all the way to the right, to where it maxxed out at 120 mph. Then he took his foot off the accelerator pedal and we coasted back down to 65.
I did that once in February 1981 in Czechoslovakia, which has (or at least had then) some long straightaways and nice flat freeways en route to Poland. I was driving a Polish woman to Cracow in her blue Volkswagen Scirocco and got it up to 240 kph before she started screaming.
It’s fun to do that when you’re writing, pile on the hyperbole until you burn out the cobwebs. It works best with humor. If people think you’re serious about it it sounds stupid, so you act like you’re not serious.
It was pitch dark this morning and I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was drizzling and my headlights seemed to be powered by fading AA batteries. The heat was on and so was the Bylsma/Bach CD and Beta was snoozing in the passenger seat. Sometimes I wish I understood her better. Maybe I do, and just amn’t sure. Maybe I understand no one really; bad for someone who wants to write, on the one hand, but I have sworn allegiance to bewilderment and confusion, on the other.
I posted to Painsuit a story I wrote about 15 1/2 years ago, just before Beta was born. I posted it because I recently found it again and hadn’t posted anything there for so long.
Re-reading it, I saw it was not brilliant but also I seem to have worked harder on the structure end of things back then. It still needs work, but it’s not a bad story. It’s interesting to see how I’ve changed and how I’ve stayed the same since then.
In particular, from a non-literary point of view, I found three things most interesting:
- There is an “adult bookstore” in it, which no longer exist in that form so much, due I suppose to the Internets etc.
- There are no cell phones
- The description of the one character at the end proved to be a near-perfect match for the way Beta looked when she was born
This story, in fact, was one of about three I wrote back then that came true in unexpected ways. Since most of what I wrote back then — no, all of it — was negative or scary or sad, I quit writing for a long time.
Oblivio has a story about this very thing, called End of Story, that you should go read. He writes better than I do.
Here is a bit of the description from my story:
- …face was purple… tubes ran up … nose… respirator tube …
… so tiny… on bleached white sheets.
…I stroked his forehead. All his hair had been shaved, eyebrows, everything. “I never knew you were so tiny,” I said. There were big yellow and purple bruises on his arms where needles and tubes were taped. I sat on the edge of his bed and listened to the machines click and hum and peep. I … held his tiny hand. … I cradled him in my arms and he felt hot. It wasn’t until I saw tears falling on my skin that I realized I was crying…
I was so close to him that I could feel my own hot breath bouncing back when I whispered. I smelled acrid medicine on his skin. I held him close. He was so light in my arms, like a single breath.
Whatever. Writing the story, I thought I was describing a little guy who had been beaten, but when my daughter was born 10 weeks early, it was too close for comfort.