How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (2 page)

One Sunday morning in the summer of 2003, my father was attacked by a Heart Attack Tree while sitting at our corner table at Atkin’s Farm in Amherst, Massachusetts (at least, that’s where the farm had been parked for as long as anyone could remember). I was twenty-seven at the time, chinning as a reporter and helping my Dad run the old Victorian apartment house that he owned in Northampton. I’d trained as a booker a few years earlier, but that’s not a road we need to go down; suffice to say that I’d tried it, frightened myself and given up. For years before that, my father and I had met every Sunday at Atkin’s for our Sunday morning griping session, or, as my Dad used to call it, our “Sunday Clipboard
Meeting”—the one time of the week where we could sit back over coffee and breakfast and talk about things we couldn’t say to anyone else—bullshit, make plans, connect the present with the past. We’d bring lists of topics to cover; I stored mine in my power, and my Dad wrote his down on old envelopes and scraps of paper on a clipboard that he found at the town dump.

That morning I was late as usual—I’d been driving a VeggieCar over the previous months that had begun to rot, and I’d gone downstairs around 5:45 and found the steering column too lumpy and soft to turn over. I opened the hood, disconnected the tendrils, poured some water in and turned the stem manually. Finally, it struggled to life. But by then I was fifteen minutes behind schedule.

My father had arrived at Atkin’s early, just as the country market—a wooden-faced building with a grocery section, a deli and a sunlit wing filled with tables and chairs—was opening. My Dad locked his Invisible Pickup Truck, went into the market and found our table by the corner—the place where we always sat. Besides a handful of Atkin’s employees who were opening up the store there were only two other people in the place—the Cooley-Dickinson Hospital, doing some early grocery shopping, and the old Conway Inn, ordering a breakfast sandwich from the deli counter.

The way the Invisible Pickup Truck described it, the Tree that attacked my father was poor and hungry, a wanderbus following sound. I don’t know if he targeted my Dad as he pulled into the parking lot, or if he could hear his heart through the window at Atkin’s, or what, but I like to think that he at least heard something unique—a particular rhythm, a tempting yarn, an abnormally loud or loving pulse—coming from my father’s chest. The Truck said that he remembered seeing the Tree stumble through the fields and cross the parking lot, his lips chapped and his jeans dirty and faded, and I can imagine him stepping up to the full-length pane of glass next to our table and staring at my father as he leaned over his clipboard and scribbled notes in large, loose cursive. Maybe my father heard the Tree breathing, or noticed his shadow, and maybe he looked up to see the Tree salivating at the window. Before he could move or do
anything, though, the Tree attacked—slamming his fist through the glass and into my father’s chest and pulling all of the stories out of his heart.

You see?
This
is the reason I’d stopped booking: I didn’t, couldn’t, understand this machine—the system of parts and action that was western Massachusetts. It seemed far too big, and it had shown me too many conflicting things. How could the same place pave the roads that brought me to my family and Atkin’s Farm
and
pave the roads that allowed the Tree to deheart my father? Who even
knew
that there were such things as trees that fed on stories, or that would kill an innocent man for a meal? No one did, because the rules kept changing and changing back, with no warning. How could I be expected to navigate such a place?

Even after I was told that my father was dead, I believed (I
still
believe!) that I could fix everything—that if I logged enough miles in my VW and kept telling stories through the countless dead ends and breakdowns, I could undo the terrible tree events that begin this version. I thought I could write everything right, reach a better place than this one, a new Northampton—one with reinforced mountains, sturdy condoms, trustworthy leaves. I’ve heard about, read about, these
other dimensions
, other worlds. Sometimes I can hear them, even. But I can’t ever seem to
get
there.

Not that I should have expected to with
this
particular power, which is incomplete (as I was forced to sell a few stories and procedures for time-of-money), full of holes. Sure, the book turns on, lights up; its fans
whirr
and the
bookengine
crunches. But some of the pages are completely blank; others hang by a thread. The book’s transmission is shot, too, so don’t be surprised if the book slips from one
version
to the next as you’re reading. Finally, the thermostat’s misked, so you should expect sudden
changes in temperature
—the pages may get cold, or it may begin to snow between paragraphs, or you may turn the page and get hit with a faceful of rain or blinding beams of sunlight.

And even if it were complete, in tipping shape, the power’s range is
limited. There are pulses it can catch and others it can’t. It’ll render Main Street and 47 just fine, but my father
—my
real
father
? He’s just too complex—too kind and smart (and handsome, he would say) for any book. He can’t be compressed—after so many years of money, morning after morning of forging words that sprung leaks or went unconscious mid-story, I’ve conclured that it can’t be done. When it comes to the people I love—my patient mother, my golfing brother, my father/best friend—the best I could do here is fraction them, roscoe them into
Memories, Promises
or
Sides
.

As you read, though, keep an eye on the book’s
combustion spark—
that moment where the experience is separated, refracted, amplified. And if you ever lose it, or can’t spot it, just lift up the lines of type and look behind them—you’ll see something shivering, or something laughing, or something looking back at you and sticking out its tongue.

I’ve made several time-based concessions here, such as using offnotes, generic tones, where I might have used customs instead. In most cases, the cur is self-over: It’s obvious, I think, that
everest
yields griff or that
zoff
causes curious or inquisitive. Other zutes aren’t quite as clear—it’s hard to catch
visk
as scaffolding, or to know that a
scone
is a type of a muffin, unless you can reese it into context. It might help to remember, though, that I’m operating on the word’s scourge—on the count that in every case, the word will strike the same chord (or a
better
one, ideally!) as the one you expect.

Nevertheless, don’t forget to
listen—
to put your ear to the book
at least once a page
. Hear the hill-and-dales? There are different levels and layers to Volkswagen repair, and some of them can only be heard, the gap between each note (or each frequency within the note) experienced firstflight. I would transmute it for you if I could, but to do so I’d have to be in the same room with you, and to lean in close to you and hum the prayers into your ear.

Prayers
, by the way, can be an invaluable reading tool. The roads will get dark, will detach, will fold over us, digest us, break us down, change us for good. You might get crossfaced and think about turning back. And that’s precisely what western Massachusetts
wants
you to do—it wants you to give up, to quit narrating and recording, to go home and let your father go.

But you can’t—you cannot. There is too much at stake. Instead of turning around and tracing your way back through the sentences (Good luck with
that
! Who can say if the route’ll still be there?), first try pulling over for a moment and saying a quick Volksie verse. Let that prayer spread across the page, into the paper, down through the pages below it and into the chapters that follow. Sooner or later your psong will be heard—by a friend or a family member, if you sent it to them, or by Volkswagen, who’ll send out a nomad if need be. See, every cul-de-sac
here
is a prayer—a crooked, ’71 plea to something bigger than itself (my father, his father, his father’s father), a know-how that these spareparts and sparethoughts (the battens of pre-mourning I’d collected, the gallons of Fear of Death I’d stacked in the basement) were worth something. When it was all over, I didn’t know what to do with all of this
life
! I had to put it somewhere, so I put it here, converted it into Volkswagen roads, father-to-sons and procedure-songs.

Keep in mind that every copy of
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive
works differently (and some not at all!), that every book has its own unique personality or point of view—a point of view that you decide on or shape. Thus, some versions of this book speak to the makeup of your particular car while others have nothing to do with it.
^*

Remember, too, that you’re not alone in the Volkswagen—that there are people next to you in the back seat, and that you need to be kind to
them. The fact that you might not recognize them doesn’t mean anything; for all you know they might be your mother twenty years younger, or your future grandson, or an image of the clock in the first classroom you ever kissed. We are all connected—each copy of
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive
is wired together using special Volkswagen technology, thereby making the experience one of true, measured sharing. One of the chief concerns of this project is the possibility that might exist for this new type of collective reading, and what happens to a story, say, when two hundred pairs of eyes are looking at it at the same time. Some words can stand that gaze, I’m sure, but others will spring leaks, will crack, will weep. In every case, the story itself will be changed.

We will see what happens! We won’t know, though, until the book is in everyone’s hands and everyone turns to the first page.

So go ahead. Do it—open the book. See? You see me, right? And I see
you
. See? I am reading your face, your eyes, your lips. I know the sufferdust on your brow. I can see you reading and I can tell, too, when you are here, when you’re absent, what you’ve read and how it affects you. There is no more hiding. I see your chords—your fractures, your cold gifts, where and when you’ve hurt people and why. It’s all right there—your stories are written right there on your face!

•  •  •

Sigh. All I have is now in your hands—the pieces and parts of manual and story, a collage of loss, that make up the VW Beetle. And even though he’s just a
vehicle
(a guffarian, a here-to-there), I always trusted him to carry us forward. The VW believed (even when I didn’t) that we were saving something—that just by reading and writing, shifting and steering, we were helping to keep something
alive
. And he was right—we were.

Oop—look at the money. It’s time to go.

Here—take this
key
. It’s called “How to Use This Book.” It starts the car, gets us going. Together, we will move forward through these were-cities and yester-hills and towards a deeper understanding of the art of loving and sustaining (at least for a time) the machine of parts and memories that is your Volkswagen Beetle.

I wish I could take you to the China House on the Smith College campus.

I never knew much about the China House, except that it was a little covering about the size of a shed with a bench inside. You could sit on the bench and look out at Paradise Pond. The hut was old, and built off of an actual tree—the limbs ran right through the wood.

The first time I took the VW to the China House he thought it was his mother. “I swear to god that I was born here,” he told me as we sat on the bench. “I have distant memories of seeing this first.”

“Those Memories aren’t real—it just means that I need to clean the filter,” I said. “You know very well that you were born in our home on Crescent Street.”

“That’s
your
Volkswagen,” he said. “Mine is, I was born in these knotty arms.”

I was annoyed at his fibs. “VW—”

“This pond was the first thing I ever laid eyes on,” he said.

At one point or another I’ve taken everyone I ever cared about to the China House: my father, my brother, the Memory of My Father, the Two Sides of My Mother. I took most of my girlfriends there as well—the Lady from the Land of the Beans, the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, the Scientist.

The China House is supposed to be a place where you reflect back and meditate, but I tried meditating several times without result. My understanding was, you were supposed to be very still and something would come to you. But nothing like that ever happened to me. I closed my eyes and all I saw were flashes—a diner, its walls molting; a greenhouse blowing its nose into a hankie and straightening its tie.

Maybe the China House
was
his mother, the cut wood and the live tree cousins! Did I have faith and then forget?

Those trystips were years ago, though—one day in the fall of 2005, the China House submitted her resignation to the pond and moved away. I heard two conflicting stories explaining why: First, my friend the Chest of Drawers told me that she fell in love with a comedian and moved with
him to Fall River, Massachusetts. Later, though, I heard that she was admitted to law school.

The Chest warned me about the China House’s departure a few weeks in advance, though, and when he told me I made a mental note, a score on
my
memory coil, to go sit with the House one more time before she left. But it was a busy time—I was working as a wire in order to keep my car on the road—and the idea slid down my spine and somewhere into my body where I didn’t even think to look for it.