Driven, p.7
Driven, page 7
I told stories at boarding school almost as often as I wrote them. My shy ways left me isolated and lonely. I moved like a ballerina, read Rilke in my spare time, and spoke only in small and familiar groups where I could command attention by slipping in an off-color story about my family. Like the time my algebra study partner noticed one of the toilet bowl pictures lingering on my desktop.
She pointed at the Polaroid but did not touch it.
“Oh, yeah. My brother sent that.” I held up another photo in which my six-foot brother resembled both Sean Penn and Keanu Reeves. “This is him.”
“That’s your brother? He’s so hot. And he sent you that? ” She pointed again to the Polaroid.
I tried never to force a story, but when a door opened up, I’d step through it. I told her about one of Matthew’s escapades involving a convenience store, poop smeared under a car door handle, and a dead iguana.
“Oh my god,” she said when I got to the end. “Oh my god.” She could hardly stop laughing.
We finally cracked our algebra texts and my study partner paused to ask a last question. “So you guys are close?”
Her words stopped me. I did my best to keep my mouth from hanging open. Matthew and I were biologically closer to each other than any other beings on this planet, yet our connection felt as nebulous as the dark side of the moon. My stories were balm on a wound too close for me to see: that my brother’s answer to that question was no.
I became Matthew’s walking archive to forge that closeness, a Greek chorus of one. He was an unending narrative full of twists and turns I could never dream up on my own. So I told those stories everywhere, to everyone.
Like this. Like I’m telling you now.
During the summer connecting my junior year to my senior, my last in Indiana, I bought some brown-tinted car wax and polished up the Turd, hiding her dings and rust spots as best I could. Her brakes had worn out and Dad suggested I upgrade instead of fixing her. We were having a garage sale. In black marker I wrote the price on a piece of cardboard and below that a too-long list of details:
22–25 mpg in town, up to 35 on the highway
new stereo!
manual
power steering
new rear passenger’s wheel caliper
ok tires
comfortable seats
needs new front brake pads
best car ever
driven 20,000 miles in just one year!
In hindsight, it feels like I drove that car for an abbreviated lifetime. The slick brown plastic of the steering wheel underhand, the cigarette sculpture in the ashtray, the smell of vinyl and dust, all imprinted as deep in my brain as the scent of my mother’s hand lotion.
I sipped coffee at that garage sale for about an hour before a determined-looking man my Papaw’s age walked up to the the Turd, looked her over for less than a minute, and handed me five Ben Franklins—one hundred more than we’d paid for her—no questions asked.
“She’s a great car,” I said.
He nodded, friendly but not smiling.
I could tell he was the one who would keep her going for the long haul, and it made the goodbye a touch easier. He slid the front seat back, removed my cardboard love letter from the windshield, fired her up, and disappeared.
August 6, 2000
Nine shots in he starts calling people. He calls the girl from AA he hooked up with last winter who tried real hard to help. Tries still. She can hear the liquor in him but comes over anyway.
She drinks a Diet Coke, holds one of his hands, and her dark eyes turn sad over him.
Take Early, he says. He picks up the blue heeler and hugs the dog till he growls. He always liked you. Take him.
She will not take the dog. She pours him water, puts him to bed though it is only two, and says, There is nothing you can do you ever have to be ashamed of with me. I’ll call tomorrow. We’ll go to a meeting.
He calls Krista with the red pigtails, the one he should have married but then blew it up instead. She comes for a while, listens to that Lucinda Williams song he can’t get enough of, then tells him to ditch the shots and leaves for work.
He calls Deuce—one of his best friends from way back. He calls again, but there’s no answer. Deuce, he knows, is sick of his shit.
All day he calls Randy. Things can’t end without Randy. He calls over and over, leaving messages, doing shots in between.
He tries hard not to but can’t help thinking about his sister. She has this thing about her like a skittish dog, though he never could figure out what it was that hit her. She’s hard to coax out, but when you get close it’s the real deal. She’s fine, though. Independent. Grown and married. He’s kept every word she ever sent him.
He plays Lucinda again to drown out the Quiet.
I just stand with this glass in my hand feelin’ like nothing even matters.
Louder. Louder. Songs. Women. A truck.
Six
The Saab
Indiana, Michigan, and Montana: 1992–94
The weekend after the garage sale, Dad and I drove his new-to-him Porsche 944 northwest, toward the Illinois state line, in pursuit of an ’84 Saab 900. Dad had hoped I would adopt his Honda CRX, but the clutch was touchy and I hated the low-rider feel of it. So he sold the CRX and replaced it with his dream car—the same red Porsche that Jake Ryan drove in the movie Sixteen Candles. I didn’t care one lick for the Porsche, but the Saab intrigued me. It was a sedan-size hatchback—like some bastard offspring of the Turd and a Squareback.
I’d already landed a job bagging groceries for the summer at the Kroger. I’d also shaved my head and bought blue-tinted Sinéad O’Connor glasses. I got some strange looks from patrons, but everyone pretty much left me alone. I’d opted for grocery bagging instead of waiting tables again so that I would have the mental space to daydream, write poems, and become a proper misanthrope. A quirky import like the Saab seemed an ideal accessory for my artistic alienation.
Shortly after passing through the small town of Greencastle, we pulled down a dirt drive onto a farm. The owner was a divorced engineer and swore by the Saab’s design. He sold me on her quirks instantly: the hood opened backwards, the engine was installed backwards, and the front windshield was as large and round as a bay window, much like the seventies VW camper vans. The rear seats folded down to make a space long enough for sleeping, and the interior was a burgundy velour that reminded me of Mamaw and Papaw’s New Yorker. This was a Swedish vehicle, the owner explained, with valuable features for someone living up north, like the heated seats, which impressed me even though they no longer worked. Saab, he told me, had put out its first car just after World War II. The company, named using an acronym for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, or Swedish Airplane Corporation, had designed planes to defend Sweden’s sovereignty. Once the war ended, Saab started making cars.
Dad drove the Saab a mile or so away from the owner’s house and turned it over to me on a deserted dirt road. New to a stick shift, I let up the clutch and coasted successfully in first. I shifted into second, then third. By the time I followed Dad home that evening, I could shift seamlessly through all the gears.
In the Saab I traveled north and eventually west. Her engine hummed most happily at exactly seventy-three miles per hour—her sweet spot. The two years that I owned her I spent almost entirely in Montana and Michigan, so busy exercising my freedom that Matthew and I rarely saw each other. The one time we managed to connect happened by default, when I gave him a ride to our great-grandmother’s funeral.
Mary Cooper was my mother’s grandmother, the one who gave my parents some cash to buy a car for a wedding gift. Our generations were close in age, so Grandma Cooper was only in her seventies when we were young. She was the only grandmother we had who acted much like a grandmother. Mamaw was too busy getting shit done to think about nurturing, and Betty—our mother’s mother—focused so much on her own needs that she didn’t feel much like a grandmother either. Grandma Cooper—Betty’s mother—was the one who hosted Christmases, the one whose house we loved to stay in, the one I found sitting alone in her easy chair in the mornings, sipping coffee, and smiling like she’d been waiting for me. Not long after I left for Interlochen, Grandma Cooper suffered a stroke that left her half paralyzed. She never spoke again, never walked again, and during my senior year, she left her busted body behind for good.
I drove down from Interlochen in time for the viewing. The next day, Mom asked me to pick up Matthew in Vincennes, where he was in school for airplane mechanics, and bring him to the funeral. I’m not sure if he had the Volaré there or not, or if his license was suspended or not. Either way, his various arrests had put him off driving.
In his boarding house in Vincennes, he sat on his twin bed and gestured for me to take the chair.
“You like that car?” Matthew nodded his head toward the window.
“The hood opens backwards.”
He stared at me like I might be fucking with him.
“It’s Swedish,” I explained. I told him a bit about Saab’s aviation roots, struggling for connection between my car love and his vocation.
He laughed, propped an ankle on his knee, and rolled up his pant leg. Illegible letters circled his calf—a new tattoo. He had a rat on his chest already and some kind of totem up his spine.
He pulled a large flathead nail from his pocket, sparked a lighter, and heated the nail head over the flame.
“They had an open casket at the viewing,” I told him. Our great-grandmother had looked like a wax version of herself. It was the first time I’d seen a vacated body, and it made me think about the meat section of a supermarket. “They put too much makeup on her. Or not enough.”
Matthew looked up for a second. “Mom cry?”
“Yeah. Lots. Plus all the aunts.”
He shook his head back and forth. “That’s some fucked-up shit, right there.”
He seared his leg tattoo with the glowing head of the nail. As he winced, I smelled burnt hair and skin.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
He shrugged.
“Why are you burning it?”
“Don’t like it.”
He let up on the nail and breathed deeply, like an athlete recovering from a dead lift. Some self-destructive streak was growing in him, manifesting in excessive tattoos, stories spun as funny when the truth is they were dangerous and often offensive. He even made a point to say words like ain’t, dumbing-down his language on purpose for reasons I didn’t understand.
“I’m never gonna die like that. All those ventilators and shit. If they’d just let her go when she had her stroke. Held a pillow over her head or something. That’s what I’d want.” The flame from his lighter reflected in his irises as he spoke.
“I only visited her once,” I said. “She thought I was Aunt Lisa.” Her mouth had opened and closed as she stared at me, gulping in air like a landlocked fish.
“I went too, but I didn’t go in. Smelled like baby shit and bleach, even from the outside. Mom freaked out and I was like, ‘Mama, whatever’s in there ain’t Grandma. And wherever Grandma is, she doesn’t want me in there.’ But Mom just kept on. You know how she gets.”
He plunged the nail down again, next to the first spot. “If Dad ever dies I’ll prolly buy a motorcycle and ride all over the country. That’s what he wanted to do, but then got Mom pregnant.”
Though our father was recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, his eventual death had never occurred to me. The thought of it brought to mind a passage from a Katherine Anne Porter short story I read in middle school, in which María Concepción rends her clothes and growls at the sky.
Matthew went back to heating up the nail.
“I worry about Mom,” he said.
“What about Mom?” I asked. I couldn’t handle much more death talk.
“She drinks. A lot.” He plunged the nail down again and paused to inspect the string of burns.
It was the first time I heard him say it out loud, and it confirmed the reality no one acknowledged. Somewhere along the line we’d gone from the family with the mom everyone else wanted—the mom who tended every owwie and cooked all the food and took her daughter to every Broadway musical that came through Indy—to the family with the mom who started pouring Chardonnay at two, laughed too loud all evening long, and stumbled to bed by eight, drunk, without dinner.
“But I don’t worry about Mom dying,” Matthew said. “I worry more that she’ll live to be a hundred and never stop being pissed.” He smiled like he’d just delivered a punch line.
Matthew was right. Our mother spent most of her time in one of two modes: manic celebration and silent anger over unknown offenses. (It would take me years to figure out how to express my anger with words instead of averted eyes, loud sighs, and door slams.)
Matthew checked his look in a small mirror, slicked his hair back with some Royal Crown, and tucked his shirttails into his jeans—a first. We caught eyes in the mirror and he flashed me his best car-salesman grin. He’d changed so entirely with a single wink that I found no trace of myself left in his reflection.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Lanky and tall, he had to slide the passenger’s seat of the Saab back to fit his legs inside. He looked like a man wedged into a clown car, and I was proud as hell to give him a ride. I let him pick the music, and he popped in a Grateful Dead cassette—our little secret, I understood, as our grandmother’s funeral was no time for the Ramones or Suicidal Tendencies. I drove us down the small two-lane highways connecting Vincennes to the tiny town of Russellville (population 354) where our great-grandmother, Mary Cooper, had lived and died.
Other attempts to meet that year ended up a series of misfires. My entire family arrived for my graduation from Interlochen—a gathering so overwhelming that both Matthew and I would have run from it normally. Matthew drove up in the Volaré along with a friend from airplane mechanic school—a heavyset fella known simply as Roundman. For Matthew to drive this far required two things—the help of a friend, and a sincere desire to be there for me. I couldn’t wait to show my big brother off to my friends who’d heard so many stories about him.
The mother of a classmate rented a house at a nearby ski resort, which became the official graduation party site. I gave Matthew and Roundman directions and headed over in the Saab. The place was swanky. Though my friends were there, all of us dressed in flannel shirts and old jeans, many wealthier, fancier kids were there too. I talked for a bit with David from Mexico, whose mother, I’d heard, was a well-known telenovela actress. He told me that his father (a film producer) had talked Gabriel García Márquez into writing one of his college recommendation letters. I sipped from a Mickey’s forty-ouncer that outsized my head and kept waiting for Matthew to arrive. Finally Jesse, whose mother had rented the cabin, whistled to get everyone’s attention. (Jesse was the kind of guy who looked really small in person but modeled for Calvin Klein as a summer job.) He asked if anyone knew the two dudes sitting on a cooler on the porch. He said that kind of thing didn’t look good.
Outside I found Matthew and Roundman looking like they’d just pulled in from a Hells Angels rally. I couldn’t have been happier to see them, but Matthew refused to come inside. He could hardly look me in the eye, actually, and I felt guilty—the source of his discomfort. He gave me a Guinness and congratulated me, but he would not join the rich-kid party. I went back inside to try to lure some of my friends out and returned to find Matthew, Roundman, and the Volaré gone.
By the time I left Interlochen, I’d turned in a senior portfolio more than two hundred pages long. My biggest cheerleader, Delp, flipped through the manuscript I’d slid across his desk.
“You’ve done more work than any student I’ve had,” he said, catching my eye. “You know that?”
I looked away as I nodded, thrilled and embarrassed.
“Good. Now make sure you understand this: It’s all practice. All of it.” He shook my pages at me. “Every word. And you won’t know until you’re done writing when it’s more. So consider it all practice, and never stop practicing. Right? Stephenson?”
“Right.”
I knew what he was telling me, but I doubted myself capable of the kind of endurance I’d need to become a real writer. It could wait, I thought. I was a legal adult now with wheels of my own and a roll of graduation checks in my pocket.
In the fall of ’93, I drove the Saab west to start college in Missoula, Montana. Most of my Interlochen friends had chosen small liberal arts colleges like Bennington, Oberlin, or Sarah Lawrence. Others went on to Ivy League schools or prestigious conservatory programs. I’d spent most of my senior year reading Jim Harrison and Hemingway. Using the Jungian concept of synchronicity passed down to me by my father, I let a series of coincidences guide my college choice. After reading three books in a row that made positive mentions of Missoula (A River Runs Through It, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Harrison’s Legends of the Fall), I applied to the University of Montana. I filled out applications for some private schools as well: Reed in Portland, Sarah Lawrence, and a small school in Vermont called Marlboro, chosen mostly because it was named after a brand of cigarettes. When I visited Missoula to check out U of M, I fell into a deep, immediate love for this town—a love that has never left me.
That’s one true story I tell about how I came west, but there’s another story buried inside, rarely told but just as true.
Though I didn’t think twice about it back then, I’m certain I chose a less competitive college to stay connected to my Indiana roots. I eventually chose a graduate school in the same half-assed way—I missed the deadlines for the more prestigious places, applied to a random sampling of schools, and picked the least pretentious and most affordable option. I was willing to surpass the achievements of my family by going to college and grad school, but I would keep things real by not aiming too high. It’s what some call a case of imposter syndrome, only my fear was not so much that I’d be discovered a fraud. It was more an allergy to places that felt fancy. Whether it was a restaurant with cloth napkins or a school for the elite, those places didn’t feel like me any more than Mom’s new Civic had felt like the Us I’d grown up believing in. I thrived on frayed clothing, blue highways, rivers with boulders the size of Volkswagens stranded midstream, and an approachable set of low expectations. But put me in the spotlight and I’ll freeze.
