Car Trouble Read online

  Riding in the front seat of that car was like being on a roller coaster. First we passed the world we knew: the schoolyard at St. Maria Goretti and the white brick rectory where Mom sent me to buy mass cards for dead relatives. Everything dramatically changed, and for the worse, as we drove east. In two minutes, we were passing the slums of East New York. I stared at the grim, collapsing houses, with broken stoops and peeling porches—Brooklyn’s rotted edge.

  Mom put her hand, with its thin blue veins, on the dashboard. “Pat, do you think you could slow down?” she asked as the needle in the speedometer edged past fifty, sixty, seventy.

  “What for?” he shot back, smiling. “I’ve been waiting to drive like this for years, Mrs. Flynn.” He looked in the rearview mirror. “Anybody back there want me to slow down?”

  “No, Daddy,” said Mary Ellen.

  “That’s my girl.”

  I gripped the door handle as we barreled ahead, my feet firm against the floor, my eye on the silver hood ornament at the tip of the creamy, sea-green hood. It was bird-shaped, sleek, and savage. I didn’t use the seat belt. Back then, if you strapped yourself in, it was considered an insult to the driver. We were a captive audience no doubt, but I thought I could get him to slow down if I got him to talk.

  “How’d you come up with the nickname the Green Hornet?”

  He passed a Mister Softee truck in the left lane. “I used to listen to a program on the radio”—he went a little Irish here, pronouncing radio with an exaggerated brogue, as if he had just stepped off the boat—“called The Green Hornet when I was a young lad. Me and your uncle George, in the living room on a Tuesday night, but only after we’d finished our homework. Of course.”

  The blarney was piled pretty high. “Maybe your mother listened too. Remember the music, Claire? ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee.’”

  “Yes,” Mom said brightly. She was beginning to come around, forget about the dinner she wouldn’t have to cook tonight. “I remember.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Does the radio work?” Maureen asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s try it. Which station, my dear?”

  The speedometer dipped as Himself fiddled with the dials. We mainly heard a lot of static, but then something came through: WABC. Dad didn’t hate rock ’n’ roll as much as he hated “jigaboo music,” as he called it, and luckily, we tuned in, in the middle of the Beatles singing “Hey Jude.” He could deal with the Beatles. Everybody had to then. Half the song was choruses and soon my sisters were singing along. The slums receded as the octopus of highways and their grassy embankments—green like our new/old car—took over. An oldie by Martha and the Vandellas followed the Beatles, and Dad switched stations to the Mets game. The score was 3–3 at the bottom of the sixth.

  I looked at the highway signs—the Van Wyck, the Grand Central—and thought now that Himself had the Green Hornet, he could take a detour on any one of them the next time he didn’t want to come home.

  Soon we were cruising past Flushing Meadows Park and the Unisphere, a giant steel globe, a memento of the 1964 World’s Fair, it rested like a giant Christmas ornament on the grass. Dad and Mom reminisced about the day they took us there, a summer day none of us could remember, except Patty, who liked the Clairol exhibit because it had a booth that showed what your hair would look like in different colors. The Green Hornet slowed down as cars were boxing Himself in on all sides now. The wind stopped whipping my face and I pushed my hair, which was all over the place, behind my ears. The air, even though it was kind of metallic, felt great and I knew I would love driving myself one day. Maybe I’d break the speed limit too.

  Dad said nothing about the traffic but I could see him looking to wedge his way into a line headed for the eastbound exit. Vermilion and black clouds streaked across a sapphire sky as we headed back on the BQE. The Midtown Manhattan skyline rose above the flat tableau, boxy and dazzling.

  Dad didn’t talk much about the city across the river; that was public domain. Brooklyn was his.

  “Now this here is the Kosciuszko Bridge,” he announced as we crossed a half-moon-shaped green span overlooking a narrow waterway. He drove with his right forearm on the steering wheel and his left out the window. “It separates Queens from Brooklyn. That down there is the Newtown Creek. Don’t fall in.”

  He knew everything there was to know about Brooklyn. When he was a boy, he had delivered papers for the Brooklyn Eagle; he had worked all over the borough for the telephone company, installing phones, climbing up wooden poles, and entering some ugly apartments overrun with roaches and worse. His version of the borough’s shocking, sad decline was a little hard to take, especially when he droned on about it. And he always knew whom to blame—the blacks, the spics, the usual suspects. There was no way for me to contradict him because that was his world; mine was just taking shape.

  We were getting closer to home, passing a Russian Orthodox church topped with an exotic green onion dome. Then the Brooklyn Bridge flashed by. He swept past the white-fortress factory buildings of the Bush Terminal and the ocean liners trudging up Lower New York Bay. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge hovered over them, majestic in its sleek lines and elongated arc.

  “Longest suspension bridge in the world,” Dad said with pride, as if he had helped build it.

  We weren’t used to him showing us a good time or talking so much. Especially since he hadn’t come home after work on Wednesday. And he hadn’t been there when we’d gotten up the next morning and got ready for school. While Mom had made bologna-and-cheese or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for our lunch, the phone rang. Before any of us could jump up from the kitchen table, she’d put the knife down and said, “I’ll get it.”

  She took the call upstairs in her bedroom, and we’d all stared at one another around the table, awkwardly chewing our Cheerios and buttered English muffins. We had to eat and get going, run off to our separate schools. When Mom came downstairs, she said nothing. She’d just finished making lunch and hustled us out the door. Then, I suspected, she had cleaned up the kitchen and sat and waited for Himself to come home. Dee Dee and Mary Ellen were the first kids home from school that day. I passed them playing double Dutch when I walked down the street. I went upstairs to change into jeans and saw the black door of the master bedroom shut, impregnable as Fort Knox. He was in there, sleeping it off. Nobody wanted to guess why he hadn’t made it home—he’d called, so he wasn’t dead—but his absence, even for one night, was hard to fathom. When was he not there? He had his chair, a recliner upholstered in earth tones, in the living room. He had his cup—clear glass—for coffee in the morning. Both remained empty and untouched that day.

  It was his first step away from us.

  The Green Hornet rounded the curve on the Belt Parkway that would take us to Coney Island. The Wonder Wheel lit up the sky with pink and green neon. The dark tower of the Parachute Jump stood off to the right, a rusted sentinel.

  Mom had taken her hand off the dashboard and said, “Pat, don’t you think it’s time we got something to eat?” We were way off schedule.

  The cars in our lane were slowing down, and we soon saw why. A motorcycle had gone down in the middle of the westbound traffic; there was a kid, wearing jeans and boots, black-helmeted, facedown on the asphalt. Dad drove onto the shoulder and got out.

  “Stay in the car,” he told us.

  My sisters crowded around the back window to watch. I couldn’t see well enough over my mother’s shoulder, so I stepped out of the car and leaned against the side, warmed by the engine. The curve of Gravesend Bay was out my window and a light breeze came off the water, tickling my neck.

  “Nicky, your father said to stay in the car.” Mom bit off the words.

  “I want to see. Just for a minute.”

  He waded out into the traffic, straight-backed and fearless. The cars made way for him as the drivers saw where he was going. He stepped over the lane divider and walked into the oncoming traffic in the east
bound lane. Big cars shot by, honking. Oldsmobiles. Buicks with heavy chrome fenders, not the plastic crap they use today. They must have been going sixty, seventy miles an hour, engines droning like insects. I don’t know how he didn’t get hit, but somehow he didn’t. He kept his hands up and strode to the spot where the motorcycle rider lay sprawled on the asphalt. Hit and run. Dad bent over and scooped the kid off the ground and put him over his shoulder, like he weighed nothing. A siren cried in the distance and we watched the traffic finally slow down as a white ambulance edged across the lanes to where Dad stood holding the injured boy. When the paramedics wheeled a stretcher out of the back of the ambulance to meet him, Dad turned and came back the same way, with a hero’s slow stride. This time, the traffic stopped for him.

  I got back into the car. My mother wiped a tear from her eye.

  My sisters sat openmouthed until he opened the car door again.

  “Goddammit, Pat, you could’ve been killed,” Mom said.

  Dad shrugged it off and started the engine. “Yeah, well. Better luck next time.”

  Another driver would have stayed on the road until a rest area with a pay phone presented itself. Another driver would have passed the accident by in a big hurry. But Dad operated purely on instinct, which didn’t always work in his favor. Tonight it did. He had seen the kid before we had, and then he was out of the car. The other drivers should have honked their horns in tribute but were too dead set on getting where they were going.

  My sisters were grinning in the backseat. I knew they were going to brag about him at school to their girlfriends.

  By the time we made it to Brennan and Carr, a Sheepshead Bay restaurant famous for hot roast beef sandwiches, we had forgotten about the night Himself hadn’t come home and what that might mean for the future. We didn’t usually eat roast beef, or even pot roast, until Sunday, so this was a treat. As the waitress, a girl with straight blond hair and a nameplate necklace that spelled denise, passed out menus, my sisters asked Dad for the gory details of the accident: was the guy dead, what did the guy look like, was he cute.

  “I didn’t have time to look. The guy was pretty banged up.”

  “Your father was too busy saving his life to see if he was cute, Maureen,” Mom said. She was in a better mood than when we left the house, but she was still studying Dad’s expression while he perused the menu.

  “I hope you can cover this,” she said.

  “Not to worry.” He flashed some bills in his wallet. “We’re covered.”

  “I hope there’s enough in there for the mortgage,” Mom whispered across the table.

  Dad raised his eyebrows as if scandalized. I knew he would file that remark away. “There’s enough for everyone, and the bank, Mrs. Flynn,” he said, opening the menu in front of his face.

  Poker, I thought. So that’s how he paid for the car. Plus, he saved a kid’s life. He was having a good night on our first drive in the Green Hornet. Most amazing of all, he didn’t so much as order a beer.

  Three

  We took many trips in the Green Hornet that summer. We drove up to Palisades Amusement Park. We went to visit Mom’s sister in Staten Island, and to Rockaway for barbecues at Uncle Tim’s house. He lived one block from the beach. Dad tried to teach my sisters to swim. The waves were loud and sandy with a vicious undertow that sucked Mary Ellen into the surf. We got fried—the sunburns made us squirm in bed at night and led to a contest to see who could pull the biggest pieces of skin off when we started peeling.

  We’d cleaned up the Ford, inside and out, until we could see out the windows. I Brilloed the chrome wave that crested on the side of the car and used some kind of stinky polish that restored a little bit of the sheen to the green-on-green body. I’d found some holes on one side of the car that I figured were made by bullets. So the Green Hornet was a real getaway car. A stick of air freshener now adorned the rearview mirror, but that old ashtray smell lingered.

  While Dad was getting to know the features of his brand-new baby, like the built-in tissue box next to the glove compartment, he accidentally found a record player hidden beneath a drop-down door under the dashboard. You opened it by pushing a button. The turntable was only big enough to play 45s, but I had four boxes of them in my bedroom closet, including hits by the Supremes in their original, glossy Motown jackets, and once he found the button that switched the power from the radio to the record player, I was ready to be the Death Seat DJ. If there wasn’t a Mets game on, we could play a few oldies while we were on the road. The sound crackled in the speakers and sometimes the Green Hornet would hit a bump and the record would skip right over Martha Reeves’s growling “Yeah-yeah, yeah-yeah”s at the end of “Heat Wave,” but otherwise I loved it. Now I saw why he didn’t covet the Buick Skylarks and other new cars parked on our street. None of those vehicles were like the Green Hornet, with its colors like the surface and the depth of the ocean and where you could play your own tunes.

  One of our strangest journeys came just after we all went back to school. Dad’s older brother was moving to Germany and my grandparents were throwing a goodbye bash, not at the house, where all the holidays were usually celebrated, but at a rented hall in Greenpoint.

  It would be a night to remember.

  When Himself appeared in front of his family, everything had to be perfect, like he was going to the Oscars. After he showered, dressed, and splashed himself with Old Spice, he squeezed some VO5 into his palms and massaged it into his hair, which was straight, the kind of brown that is almost black, and cut short, with a brush effect at the back. He then took a black pocket comb and drew it over the front of his hair and shaped it into the ducktail style, with a cannoli-shaped curl in front.

  I shined his shoes in the kitchen. He kept his supplies in a brown paper bag so old it had become soft and crinkly, like a piece of chamois. Inside, there were tins of Kiwi black shoe polish, the rags I used to rub it into Dad’s old shoes—Thom McAn slip-ons—and the wooden brush I used to put some luster into the cracked leather. I worked on the shoes for ten minutes and brought them upstairs. The bathroom was still steamy from the shower and smoky from the lit cigarette balanced on the tile ledge under the mirror.

  How could one person spend so much time in front of the mirror? Even if I had a pimple I was trying to beat into submission, I would give it a quick scrub and reach for the Clearasil.

  I wondered if I would grow up to be as vain as my old man.

  I handed him his shoes while he inspected his freshly shaved face. “Nice job,” he said, taking a drag from the Lucky Strike. He wore navy trousers and a white shirt, open at the neck. The aroma of the Old Spice pinched my nose.

  He nodded at my chest. “Is that the shirt you’re wearing?”

  My hand immediately flew to the buttons on my shirt, as if a pigeon had just pooped on me. The shirt was short-sleeved and purple, with a pattern of small black and white tulips printed on the fabric. I had spotted it two weeks ago at Benhil on Flatbush Avenue and loved it. I waited until the shirt went on sale and begged Mom to buy it for me, for the party.

  Leave it for Himself to find something wrong with it. “It looks like an LSD trip,” he said.

  I came downstairs and sat on the living room couch with my sisters. Mom came in from the kitchen, a lit Newport in her left hand, and stood on the staircase landing, two steps up and next to a red-leather telephone bench. “Anytime you’re ready, Mr. Flynn.”

  She was wearing an outfit that was very different for her—a white dress with giant, diaphanous red and black flowers that looked like nasturtiums, cinched by a thick black belt. She was even wearing makeup—green eye shadow and red lipstick—so we knew this party was a big deal. The last time she had dolled herself up was at my aunt’s wedding in July. With five of us to take care of, there wasn’t much time to get dolled up, but she also didn’t have the inclination. She let Himself hog the mirror.

  He finally came downstairs, whistling as the steps creaked beneath him, wafting Old Spice. “Let�
�s not keep everybody waiting,” he said.

  “Right, Daddy,” Maureen said. She stood and smoothed the front of her dress, pale pink eyelet with a lace collar; she’d sewn it herself from a McCall’s pattern. She flicked her long brown hair behind her ears and led my other sisters out the front door.

  We all piled into the Green Hornet, party clothes swishing as the girls and Mom, who sat in the backseat now with one child on her lap, found places. It was a hot evening in late September. I sat in the Death Seat, prim and neatly pressed in black chinos and my acid-trip shirt. The engine grumbled and the muffler coughed as the car warmed up. The Ford probably had two hundred thousand miles on it and the chassis was groaning for automotive euthanasia. I had a five-dollar bet with Maureen that the Green Hornet wouldn’t make it to the end of the year.

  Our destination was a Catholic War Veterans hall in Greenpoint. By then, we were accustomed to Himself’s daredevil driving and knew we were going to get anywhere we were going fast. He took his predictable path through urban squalor, corner boys staring at our car like it was from another planet when we stopped for a light in Bed-Stuy, and we made it to Greenpoint in half an hour. This was an old, old part of Brooklyn with narrow streets. Brick buildings leaned against one another for support. Taverns with neon shamrocks in the window bumped up against butcher shops with neon signs written in Polish.

  Dad let us out in front of a one-story building on Java Street while he parked. Nearly everyone in the family was already at the party, plus a lot of people I didn’t recognize. Priests. Friends of my aunt and uncles, I guessed. But no one my age, and no girls. I was at a weird place socially. I was finished with grade school and hadn’t seen much of my classmates this summer. I wasn’t really friendly with the few guys from my class who were also going to the same high school as me. St. Mike’s. All boys.