Truck (10 page)

Mark heads in to watch Sidrock for the evening and I putter a bit longer, bagging the nuts and bolts from the spare tire frame, making notes (
spare tire rack—one bolt missing
), picking up tools, cleaning up some. A few days after I answered her e-mail, Anneliese and I spoke on the phone. Tomorrow we will meet at a coffee shop. I tell her, Don't look for that guy with the long hair. I was wearing my scurfball camo cap when I did the reading, so I'm wondering if she knows how much chrome I'm sporting up top. But I'm not real nervous. I'm ready.

There was this pop song—“Drops of Jupiter” by Train—that peaked right about the time I took up with my last girlfriend. It is a beautifully overproduced musical tid-bit. In my teens, I would have wallowed in it. In my late twenties I would have sneered at it. In my mid–thirties—having been told by a wise friend that “there are no guilty pleasures, just
pleasures
”—I simply enjoyed it for what it was. The first time I heard it, I grinned and turned it up. There were strings, and longing, and a sweeping chorus, and just as I thought,
the only thing missing here is some na-na's
, the “
na-na
's” kicked in. I sang out.

The prevalence of this song coincided with the sweet harmony stage of the relationship, that initial stretch where you marvel at the alignment of the planets while ignoring the fact that you are astride a falling star. When things went unignorably south, I really couldn't bear to hear “Drops of Jupiter.” If it came on the radio while I was driving, I punched the scan button, hoping to snag a George Jones song. At home I listened to Tom Waits.
Closing Time
, mainly.

Then one day I was running errands, and “Drops of Jupiter” came on the radio, and I liked it again. The
na-na
's came and went, and my liver did not twinge. Put me back in, coach.

And so now I am in the car driving home in the dark nursing a quiet little blend of excitement and hope. God bless our unkillable hearts.

 

I got to the coffee shop a little early, shaven and dressed in my favorite T-shirt, a black one that says
ROAD KING
across the chest. Karmic groove-wise, that is one of my top ten all-time T-shirts. The logo is encircled by stylized lug nuts. Wearing it feels like vitamins and valium. I wore steel-toed boots—the shinier of my two pairs. Jeans. Anneliese arrived minutes later and parked across the lot. She was driving a worn Honda Civic, black, with dents, a bike rack, and state park stickers on the windshield. She was small and blond and walked with grace and strength, and shook my hand with a smile that threatened to derail my objectivity. I held the door like a gentleman and, I cannot tell a lie, checked her out as she passed through. She looked delightful in her jeans. Civility is sublime, but humankind owes its existence to the animal urge.

We ordered tea and talked, nonstop and variously and with ease, as you do on any first date that comes up short of a train wreck, and then we had more tea and more talk, and then, it being a sunny day, we decided to go for a walk. By this time my bladder was distended to the point that my abdominals were creaking, and as I rose to my feet, I adopted a slight crouch in order to remain continent. Later she would admit to similar difficulties. We took a bathroom break.

It was a fine sunny day, and we walked and walked. I clomped along in the boots, learning more as we went along. She spent a fair chunk of her childhood on a farm, growing onions and sweet corn to be sold in town from the back of a pickup. She had gone to school with some of my cousins but she shot down my theory of Aunt Pam as matchmaker. There had been no contact. After teaching high school Spanish she was now teaching at the local university. We walked two miles. Then we stopped for Thai noodles in a strip mall, one of those places where you get rice in a pile the size of an orthopedic pillow and the sauce runs heavy to salt and fat. We ate and talked and then drank green tea and talked, until the sun dropped below the upper sill of the plate glass storefront and blasted me in the eyes, and then I walked Anneliese to the Honda, where she
paused to stand with one hand on the roof and the other on the top edge of the open door long enough to say, yes, she'd like to see me again.

 

Anneliese and I walked in the sun on Sunday, and by Monday the temperature set a record at 90 degrees. But it was a trick, a meteorological head-fake. The warmth was pushed in on the bumper of a cold front, which on Wednesday overtook us, precipitating a good inch and a half of rain. As the last few tenths fell, temperatures dropped to freezing and everything got a fat round coat of ice. This morning sunbeams flared from the trees in a million pieces and the clusters of precocious grass illumed the granulated snow in pale refractions of green.

Many of the seeds I started—including the oregano and sweet marjoram—haven't sprouted, so I head back in the basement at my gardening bench, sprinkling more seeds into more planters. I'm also repotting some leeks, cilantro, and two basil plants. Three basil plants had come up, but this morning I discovered that one had damped off and died. I am studying it now, pale and flat on the vermiculite, and I am thinking,
Why didn't you call? Why not wilt a little first, give me some warning? More water? Less? Should I have pulled your plastic cover? Lifted it less often?
Oh woe, and whither the pesto.

I drop the living basil plants on the garden bench four or five times in order to break the soil cube from the roots the way I saw Brian Minter do in a gardening video, then tuck them into new, larger receptacles. Then the leeks, and then the cilantro. I suspect the reason so many of the seeds I sow directly in the earth will catch and pass most of these presprouted plants lies in the fact that they are not forced to endure my fake lights and fiddling.

When I finish with the plants, I put them under the lights, clean up, and leave for my second date with Anneliese. I take my copy of
Waiting for Guffman,
and we watch it in the basement while her daughter sleeps upstairs. Anneliese laughs in all the right places, which I snootily think bodes well. My taste in films is largely nonexistent. When she says
Tommy Boy
is one of her favorite movies, I am so delighted I want to give her a noogie, but it's early. Then she says she and her sisters and
mother can recite every line in
What's Up, Doc?
and I admit I have never seen it. We talk and laugh and watch all the DVD extras and talk and laugh some more, and then, in the half-light of the foyer, I look at her smiling up at me and thank her for a wonderful evening and as I turn to leave a voice inside my head says,
If you don't kiss her right now, you are a clod,
and I turn again, backtrack three steps, put my hand in the small of her back, draw her to me, lean down, and kiss her. She makes a soft little
mmmmm
sound that will echo in my heart until my brain fades to black.

Half delighted and half panicked, I turn to leave and trip over the doorsill, not falling, but stumbling onto the porch like a drunk. Composing myself, I walk straight down the sidewalk, where I misjudge the curb and smack my knee on the car bumper.

Feels good.

 

If you're going to have a shop, you've got to have a shop radio and a shop chair. Mark's shop radio is a beat-up boom box, which is nowadays an acceptable substitute, as long as the radio works. The thing about working with the radio in the shop is that it should be a background thing, not a dominating thing. The songs, the ads, the deejay, if they still have one, they all bear you along through the hours. It's not about loudness or high fidelity. A lot of farmers used to play the radio during milking, and part of the comfort was the way the sound changed as you moved around the barn. Mark is not a purist in this respect. He keeps a stack of CDs in the shop: Metallica, Slayer, Pantera. “Nothing like a little ‘Cowboys from Hell' to ease your mind,” he says with a grin. When I'm there he usually compromises with Classic Rock, a favorite of neither of ours, but acceptable for wrench work. Right now it's “Proud Mary” coming from the shelf up in the corner there, the Creedence Clearwater Revival version, which is a good thing, because the Tina Turner version tends to preoccupy me.

Meanwhile, the significance of the chair may be lost on anyone who hasn't spent any time doing manual labor while standing on a concrete floor. The simple relief of taking weight off your feet, of relieving the pres
sure on your backbone, cannot be overstated. The chair should be comfortable, and it must be durable. One of the best I've ever known was a chair in a shop on a ranch in Wyoming. It didn't look comfortable—it was an all-metal, uncushioned minimalist beast—but it was constructed of spring steel, and when you sat on it, it sank down and back to the perfect angle of recline, cradling you with a soft bounce. My brother Jed has a vintage paint-spattered kitchen chair in his shop. The wooden legs are sawed off short, which gives it a nice low-slung feel, but the seat is split so if you're not careful you'll literally catch your tail in a crack.

Mark's shop chair is a heavy four-legged office model. I peg it to be a product of the late 1960s based on the fact that the steel frame is upholstered in burnt orange Naugahyde. The chair is padded enough to be comfy and sturdy enough to withstand rough treatment. I am sitting in it now, eating a fast-food burrito with my feet up before the fire. I have come to work on the truck late at night, as I often do. I like to drive through the country when the houses are dark, and work into the early hours when it feels as if the rest of the world is beneath the blankets. I usually call ahead during the day to let Mark know of my plans so he doesn't come creeping around the corner with a shotgun. Before he went in to bed, he started the fire for me. I am struck by the thoughtfulness.

As I eat, I peruse the J. C. Whitney catalog. If you're not familiar I'm not sure what to tell you other than if you place a Victoria's Secret catalog and a J. C. Whitney catalog before your average man, he will of course scamper off with the first, but later you will find him snoring on the couch hugging the latter. It defies brief description but “lots of cool doo-dads” will do. When we were boys we loved it, and now that we are men, we love it more. You can burn a lot of cash and quality time with a J. C. Whitney catalog, as I'm sure any number of marriage therapists will verify. It is hard to tear myself away, but the burrito is done. Crumpling the wrapper and chucking it in the fire, I harness the filter mask to my face, don my goggles, insert my earplugs, and set to scrubbing the truck. The sidewinder grinder proved to be overaggressive, so I've switched to an electric drill and sanding pads. I'm working on the passenger side
door, and the pad generates a steady plume of erythmatic dust—the color a combination of the orange-brown rust, the pink primer, and the remaining genuine Harvester Red paint beneath. Even with the mask in place, I get this sweet ferrous taste back by my uvula that tells me some of the paint and rust particles are seeping through. The drill bogs a little, and the spinning wheel takes on a brighter tinge. When I lower the drill and inspect the area I've been scrubbing, the steel is smeared with gummy yellow paint. Some faint yellow has always shown through the primer on each door. I never gave it much thought, but really, this is a bit of a mystery. In 1949, the L-Line trucks came in four standard colors: Harvester Red, Adirondack Green, Apache Yellow, and Arizona Blue. Prior to 1949, the same four colors were known as Red No. 50, Dark Green No. 10, Yellow No. 165, and blue was not available. This disturbing trend would continue with the availability of optional colors including Black Canyon Black and Palomino Cream, and would culminate in the industry-wide disaster of those horrific factory graphics packages slapped on so many pickup trucks of the mid-to-late 1990s, which, combined with all the flare fenders, will one day render them the disco shirts of our age.

I am happy that my truck was originally Harvester Red, which seems honest enough and was in fact used to repaint International tractors when there was trouble with Tractor Red in 1953. But this yellow paint—for a moment I thought maybe it was the Apache Yellow and these were not original doors, but it's only on the main panel and doesn't extend all the way up to the windows or back to the trailing edge of the door, and the Harvester Red is still under there, so that's not it—must have been slapped on there by somebody sometime for some reason. I go around to the other door and find the same thing. I come back around and try a while longer to sand the first door, but the yellow paint just keeps gumming everything up, so I leave it and move to a fender.

I run the grinder late into the night. It is a good thing, to work with your muscles, to feel the grit on your skin and the vibration in your bones. The goggles and the mask and the earplugs create a silent core at the center of the noise and dust, and I relive the kiss from the night before, again and again, around and around.

 

I wish I had thick beautiful hair the same way I wish I was six-foot-two with abs. I'm not, and so it goes. I'm okay with it, but you won't hear me buying into that whole bald-is-beautiful thing, which is the follicular equivalent of Size Doesn't Matter. You can only invoke Sean Connery so many times. And there are other problems. In the past week, I gouged my head on a protruding roofing nail in the garage and slammed my skull into a copper pipe in the basement. I did the usual head-clutching curse dance. I have been doing this sort of thing for years and no one the wiser. But this week two people asked me how I hurt myself. I was baffled until I got to a mirror. Without hair cover, two prominent scabs announce to all the world that I am terminally clumsy.

If a simple, safe, and affordable baldness cure comes along, I'm interested, and willing to hasten that cure by offering my remaining hair to science. In particular, three specific hairs composing a paltry little thicket just one-half inch south of my hairline. (Three-quarters of an inch, perhaps, by the time you read this, as in my case the term
hairline
represents the optimistic characterization of what has become a frankly hazy demarcation
in transitus
.) Like ship masts dwindling beyond the curve of the earth, the bulk of my hair is receding along the horizon of my bean, and yet this rebellious little trio stands fast, each strand apparently bald-proof. Why do they survive where so many have fallen? It strikes me that the holy grail of hair loss—a cure for baldness—may be woven in their DNA. I plan to alert the proper scientific authorities. Of course I hope to turn a buck. As such, I shall convene my accountant, my barber, my bioethicist, and a coven of intellectual property lawyers to compose a contract making all three strands available for lease, individually or as a package deal useful in conducting control group studies. Scientists in Pennsylvania recently announced that they were able to grow hair on a bald mouse using implanted stem cells. More than any time in our history, it seems reasonable to believe that a legitimate cure for hair loss is on the horizon, and my three hairs are prepared to provide the missing link.