How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (25 page)

There was still one procedure I hadn’t tried yet. It was called “Jumpstarting the Volkswagen Beetle.”

Despite stories and swordfish, the Volkswagen is dead.

• A new believer
  
• At least one week
  
• One City of Northampton, including:
  

• One Crescent Street, sunsung
  
• A decemberchord Main Street
  
• One chai-stocked Haymarket Café
  
• A park for Pulaski
  
• The museum dedicated to sequential art
  
• The Revenge of the Fire and Water Cafe
  
• One pleasant Pleasant Street
  

You’re here because you can’t start your Volkswagen Beetle—because, at the end of every chapter, the disease of writing-in-the-blood won’t bring him or her back to life. This is why many recommend the writing removal procedure; writing can be instructional, but it’s not the end or the be. All it does is make time—and I say that as an author, as someone who makes a
living
with words!

In any case, the condition is: The Volkswagen is very dead. If so, the answer to bringing them back to life—the last and best option, in my opinion—is to jumpstart them. There are storysongs out there about jumpstarting with electricity—even transplanting the electricity from
another car
—but this is nonsound. If you were to really try that? You’d probably kill both cars
and yourself in
the process. Every car’s language is different, so the translation would have to be exactly right, and it almost never is. Something is always lost or changed.

So I suggest a safer route: jumpstarting the car with
Northampton itself
. This is your book, after all, and all song long you’ve been traveling through a very particular set of cities and towns. We don’t need a logic sweater to know that, if life itself is the problem, the energy and motivation needed can be found in those very cities and towns. See for yourself! Stand outside the BayState on a Saturday afternoon and watch all of the motion: the veggies and bio’s traveling to Main and King, the joking sidewalks, the easthamptons and amhersts. All
you
need to do is create a situation in which your Volkswagen can capture some of that energy. There are stories and there is experience—there is the page and there is
life
—so I say, ward off Memory and jumpstart the Volkswagen with the effervescent rhythms of western Massachusetts.

How? Simple. Carry the Volkswagen down Main Street, Northampton, and let them smell the chai and remember the scones. Buy the VW
a cup of coffee at Jake’s, or a breakfast sandwich at Sylvester’s. Your Volkswagen will remember that life is where it’s at! And soon, he or she will decide to return. Because that’s all living is: a decision. Breathing is a choice. Opening your eyes is an act of will—so is driving along Route 63, and taking a sudden turn onto 47!

And you never know when the VW will make that decision—when they’ll choose Northampton. It might be on the bike path bridge, or at the China House. Your Volkswagen might be sitting there at the Florence Diner, perfectly dead, and then suddenly open his eyes and order a peanut butter and bacon sandwich.

I followed those procedures to the letter. The day after I read that how-to, I carried the VW down to Northampton Center and into the Haymarket Café. I ordered a cup of chai and set it on the table in front of him, hoping that the smell of ginger would revive him. When the chai grew cold, I carried him over to Kathy’s for some eggs.

We were sitting there in the booths, though, when I heard the sound of a familiar engine outside. I looked through the window and saw a Volkswagen—the same Volkswagen I’d seen that day on Route 91—parallel parking outside the diner. I hadn’t recognized him on the highway but now I knew who he was. I left the VW in the booth and I huffed out to the street. “Don’t even bother parking,” I shouted.

The Memory of the Volkswagen turned to face me. Its eyes were punchlines.

“Go—get out of here,” I told it. “Go away and don’t come back. This is not your home.”

It silently sulked away.

When I got back inside our food had arrived. “Mmm!” I said to the dead car, “Eggs over-easy. That looks good, VW!”

But the VW would not eat, would not speak.

I continued carrying him around Northampton, to every place I thought might jumpstart him: the China House, Words and Pictures, Look Park, the Lord Jeff in Amherst, the Northampton Brewery, JavaNet. Everywhere it was the same—the same post-life quiet, the same stares
from pedestrians, who were probably wondering why I was carrying a dead car in my arms, ordering it a salad or asking it questions.

As the days passed, I saw the Memory of the Volkswagen more and more. One day I took the VW to the Academy of Music to see a film and I spotted The Memory of the Volkswagen sitting in an adjacent seat. Another time, I was carrying the VW to Rao’s Coffee in Amherst when I saw the reflection of a Volkswagen in a store window and realized that The Memory of the Volkswagen was following us.

I stopped walking and turned to face the Memory. “Stop following us,” I told it. “Shoo. You’re not supposed to be here.” Then I turned and kept walking.

But the Memory of the Volkswagen followed us right to the door of Rao’s and stared at us through the window as we stood in line for coffee. I ignored him and found an empty table. When I looked out the window ten minutes later, the Memory was gone.

After a few weeks of trying to jumpstart the VW, I lost one of the external engines one day while we were walking down the bike path in Northampton. I don’t even know where I lost it—I just noticed that it was gone when we got back to the apartment.

A few days after that, I was carrying the VW to Florence when I heard a
clang
on the sidewalk and I noticed that one of the VW’s wings had fallen off. I stopped walking, put the VW down and picked up the wing. By now it was all rusted and it smelled terrible, like forgotten words.

Something changed for me as I stood there on the sidewalk with that wing in my hand. It was at that moment, I think, that I surrendered. This procedure wasn’t working—the book of power was wrong again. There was nothing more that I could do. The VW couldn’t be resurrected and he couldn’t be jumpstarted—no story on earth could save him. The VW was dead.

•  •  •

That night, I wrote one more story for the VW—a story of apology. I was the main character and the plot was, I was very sorry. Sorry for not taking
better care of him. Sorry for ignoring the signs of his failing health. Sorry for writing the book of power, which had been wrong at every turn.

I wasn’t listening
, I wrote.
I thought I was, but I wasn’t. I thought the stories would save you. That they would save my father. I thought they were worth so much more
.

And I wasted so much time! Time I would do anything to have back again
.

No VeggieCar will ever replace you
, I wrote.
All of my roadtrips will be
Volkswagen
roadtrips
.

Sometime that night, while I was writing that story, the Memory of the Volkswagen sat down at the kitchen table.

“How’d you get in here?” I said.

“Easy. I’m a Memory,” said the Memory of the Volkswagen.

“Please go away,” I told it.

“I’m not going anywhere, Dad,” the Memory of the Volkswagen said.

The next day I brought the Volkswagen back to the swordfish. I wouldn’t look the fish in the face when I walked in with the car. All I said was, “How much again for the headlights?”

The swordfish crossed his fins. “Twenty-five,” he said.

“I thought you said thirty,” I said.

“They weren’t so dusked then,” he said.

I looked into his whiskery face.

“Twenty-eight,” he said.

That day I sold that swordfish the memory coil, some of the morning cables, the passenger seat, the steering wheel, the dashboard and two transmissions. And whenever I needed time, I’d go back there and sell something else. Over the next year I sold him all of the transmissions plus the sound stage, the differential, and dozens of other parts. Some
parts weren’t worth saving (the fin, the second engine), so I put them in the dumpster behind the Crescent Street apartments. Other parts I stored in the VW’s room; they’re probably still there.

Every time I went to see the swordfish he asked about the engineheart. I always declined to sell it. He offered me fifty-five for it once, then sixty another time. I shook my head and said, “The heart still beats.”

“Seventy,” he said.

“The heart of the Volkswagen is not for sale,” I said.

“Seventy-five hours,” he said.

“Not for all the time in Northampton,” I told him.

These days, all I have left are these spare waltzes, sitting around and fermenting in jars. Like these over here, about the VW’s experiences as an actor. Have I told you any of these yet?

I remember one time in particular, when they were holding auditions for the air-cooled play,
Emily Dickinson Rides Again
. The three of us—the Volkswagen, the Memory of My Father and me—went down to the Academy of Music one Saturday morning so the Volkswagen could read for a part.

When we got there we saw that the hallway outside the audition room was filled with other parents and children—baby lamps, small air conditioners, toddlers sitting cross-legged on the floor—but I didn’t see any other Volkswagens. A spider came by and I gave her the Volkswagen’s name. Then the Memory of My Father stepped forward and asked her to write his name down as well.

“What are you doing?” I said to him.

“Auditioning,” he said.

“You have a role already—you’re the Memory of My Father.”

“I can play two parts at once,” he said to me. “So can you, if you want to.”

“But you’re the Memory of My Father, which means that you’re going to have to do your best to look and act like my
father
,” I told him. “He would never audition for a play.”

“There’s a role in this play for the Memory of Mount Holyoke,” the Memory of My Father said, and he flexed his bicep muscles. “And look—look at these guns. Are these things mountain muscles or what?”

“We’ve got a whole
book
ahead of us—” I began, but the Memory of
My Father flickered away, which he sometimes did when he didn’t want to hear it from me. A minute later he reappeared in a far corner of the room.

In the end, I decided to audition too. I used to act as a kid, and I figured that I’d be making frequent trips to the Academy anyway if the VW was cast. An hour or so after we arrived, I was called into the audition room and told to take off my clothes. As I stood there, a man with a ponytail came in with two women and they sat down at the table. “Good morning,” the man said.

“Hi,” I said.

He looked at his clipboard. “That is a very interesting name,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

He sounded it out slowly: __________________.

“It’s French Canadian,” I told him.

Over the next few minutes the three of them made various requests: They gave me a sandwich and asked to see me eat it, they asked how I felt about fences and they told me to read a few lines from the character named Tom, who was a General in the play.

“Tantamount
Price
!” I boomed, stretching my arms up to the sky. “Let go of my wallet, and let me seep into the night!”

I thought it went well, and when I spoke to the Memory of My Father he said he thought his audition went fine, too. But in the end, neither of us got a part. Only the VW was cast, and even he didn’t get the part that he wanted; he auditioned for the role of the Volkswagen, but was cast as the Unforgettable Thermos instead.

After the parts were announced, the VW cascaded the director. “The Unforgettable Thermos?” he said.

“Of course,” the director said.

“I read for the part of the
Volkswagen.
”

“You did, I know,” said the director. “And you were really very fine—you have a lot of talent.”

“Then why didn’t I get that part? I
was
that Volkswagen in there,” said the VW.

“But you are so
right
for the Unforgettable Thermos,” said the director. “The minute I heard your voice I could tell.”

“
I’m
the Volkswagen, though,” said the VW. “This is my story.”

“You’re
a
Volkswagen.”

“Who’s playing the part, then?”

“The podium’s going to play the Volkswagen,” said the director, and he pointed across the room at a podium, leaning against the wall and talking to a woman.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said the VW.

•  •  •

A few weeks later I went to see the play. I took the Memory of My Father and a half-faced woman who I was dating at the time. She was a real beauty, but we only dated for a short time because she fell in love with a pharmacy and left me for him. But we weren’t there yet; things were still good.

The production was wonderful. The podium did a great job; he was the best Volkswagen I’d ever seen. His facial expression when looking into the dream, seeing Emily Dickinson for the first time? For me it held a real moment of growth, when a child realizes there are
walls
in life, places we cannot go. There is this world and there are other worlds, and pain blooms when we can see into those places, feel the need to get to them, and then find ourselves unable to, trapped in the here and the now.

The VW was good, too. He held still as the Unforgettable Thermos, he poured the sacred chai, he helped row the boat during the river scene. The lights reflected his blue, perfect face, filled with concentration. He looked, there on the stage, like a young milk cart in the making, and I was proud and filled with confidence for what he was and what he would become.

I reached for the hand of the woman with half a face, and I whispered into her one ear. “That’s my son,” I said.