Forest Green Ford Contour. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 1.0.

In 2016, I bought my first car—a 1997 forest green Ford Contour—for eight hundred bucks cash. Though almost twenty years old, the car had only forty thousand miles on it, which at the time I believed to be an indication of the shape it was in. My main worry was how difficult it would be to find parking in Brooklyn, but when I expressed this, the old Italian woman who sold it to me said, “Oh, honey, don’t worry. This car was blessed by the Pope.” So I gave her the money, and she gave me a comically large car key and a crucifix to hang from the rearview mirror. 

It turned out that the car had not been blessed by the Pope. As soon as I drove off, I learned the AC didn’t work. That’s okay, I thought, at least the windows roll down. Minutes later, I was stuck behind a garbage truck in the dense New Jersey traffic in the middle of July. That’s fine, I thought, at least it drives. That night, for reasons I can no longer remember, I christened the car My Sweet Henrietta. Read More

2005 Saab sedan. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC by 3.0.

I learned to drive in the parking lot of what was then called the A&P supermarket, which marked the turnoff to a house my family owned then, by a cove and across from a small harbor. The idea was that my father would teach me. During the summers I spent a good deal of time alone with my father on a nineteen-foot sailboat called the Nausicaa. In the Odyssey, Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete, is washing clothes by an inlet on the island of Phaeacia, near where Odysseus, after a shipwreck, has washed ashore. When he appears, roused from slumber by the splash in a tidepool engineered by the goddess Athena, Nausicaa’s startled handmaidens flee, but “Alcinous’ daughter held fast, for Athena planted courage within her heart.”

Odysseus is naked. Nausicaa lends him some laundry to wear and takes him home to meet her parents, whom he entertains by telling stories: The Nausicaa episode is a frame for many of the tales of the Odyssey. Oddly, her name is often translated as “ship burner.” The boat had come with that moniker, and it didn’t occur to my father to change it.

On calm days, I liked to lie prostrate on the prow, my cheek against the boat’s warm skin, which smelled of salt, sun, rubber, and seagull. When a storm blew, the boom swung around, lines cut into my fingers, and my father shouted imprecations. Decades later, he took one of my daughters out on a Sunfish on a nearby pond. The wind came up. We may not make it back, he said. She returned white-faced and never went sailing with him again. At her age, I did not have that prerogative.

When it came time for me to obtain my learner’s permit, my father announced that since he’d taught me to sail, he’d teach me to drive. My mother was the much better driver, but no matter. Rather than Port! Starboard! my father yelled Left! Right! On the empty black tarmac of the shopping plaza, I clutched the wheel of our old Ford Country Squire station wagon as if we were tacking into the breakers. Read More

Photograph courtesy of J. D. Daniels.

When I was seventeen, my father put me in charge of his black Nissan Hardbody pickup. Its driver’s-side brake light got smashed when I backed into a dumpster. I sealed it with red translucent lens-repair tape. (Can you say the word translucent if you are talking about your truck?)

My truck kept me out of the car-pool game, since it really seated only two. In the summertime I was happy to drive other kids around in the back on short jaunts from party to party, but nobody was going to ride sixteen miles one way from Fern Creek to our high school downtown in the back of a truck, on the Gene Snyder Freeway and I-65.

So I spent a lot of time in the cab of the truck by myself, smoking dope and listening to this or that cassette tape. At lunchtime, I’d walk out the side door of my high school to where I’d parked on Second Street by the art school annex, and Danielle and Allison and I would cozy up in the cab of my truck and roll one and do shotguns and listen to the Breeders. Sometime in 1992, John Scofield’s Grace Under Pressure got stuck in the tape player. When it comes to being trapped in a loop, you could do worse than to spend an hour with Bill Frisell, Charlie Haden, and Joey Baron. I’ve always been lucky. Sometimes I think I’m the luckiest man who ever lived.

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