A Set Of Wheels Read online

  A Set Of Wheels

  Robert Thurston

  In memory of

  Joan Kathleen Thurston (1942-1980)

  And for

  Jason Gareth Thurston

  The absence of quotation marks seems to have been an artistic choice by the author. The paper copy didn't have any quotation marks and the text reads like it wasn't meant have them.

  Contents

  A Set Of Wheels

  Part I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part III

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part IV

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part V

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  copyright

  Part I

  — 1 —

  Got to have wheels. No other out, no other escape from this. Lincoln Rockwell X says he can get me a car. Only catch, I got to go to the ghetto for it. Some catch, a catch of nine-tails. I might get wheels all right, but I might drive out dead. Still—if I don’t do anything about it now, I’ll be wrinkled and greybearded when I can.

  The shit’s on the wall, Lincoln Rockwell X told me. And you can have it for the taking.

  It’s a good car? I asked him.

  He gave me his oh-you-sucker! grin.

  I sell what I can get. It’s my market nowadays. I take the money, you take the consequences. The shit’s on the wall, man. Many, many tickle. What you going to do?

  I don’t know, frankly.

  Well, frankly gets you no capital gains. I’ll see you around.

  No, wait!

  You buying?

  I’m thinking.

  You go ahead and think, but I’m not sticking around.

  But—

  I want slow, I can buy me a pet snail. When you’re through thinking, contact me. You know where to find me, man.

  He left. That was two hours ago. I’m still thinking.

  Hell.

  Shit.

  Got to have wheels, got to have, got to.

  I’ll never get a safedry license anyhow. You got to be the son of a safedry. They’ll shove you this crap about safedry’s high life expectancy, just to hide what’s true, that it’s all kissass games. My father’s screwed me royal. He’s a known traffic vile. I been turned down now seventeen times for a learner’s permit. Bureau clerks laugh among themselves when I come in.

  Got to have, got to.

  I want to have wheels, okay, I go to the ghetto. Today.

  * * * * *

  Dad’s come home. Used to be, he’d look in on me. Now he just heads straight for the kitchen and the altar where he keeps his bottles. He looks like hell these days, like he’s been studying winos from old movies. He’s got this crooked dazed grin, these sleepy dazed eyes, thrown away ragdoll hair. His body is shrinking. Looking at him, I see strange new anatomical curves and twists almost every day.

  I try sneaking off from the kitchen doorway. No good. He’s known I’m there all the time. Nothing much escapes his attention. Maybe he’s acting this wino part after all. Maybe he’s gone back to showbiz and he’s got this job playing a whacked-out wino. He’s just been preparing a role, watching other winos, pretending to be one of them just to get their moves down pat. Drinking special tea, made to look like wine by adding food coloring to water, then placing it in old bottles. Sure, he’s been practicing the role for five years.

  Hello son, he says. Son o’ mine.

  Sounds like his tongue’s swollen to three times its normal size, instead of its usual two.

  I love you, son.

  You’re aces with me too, pops.

  My old Andy Hardy/Leo Gorcey routine, he loves it.

  I saw your mommy today.

  His weak voice can’t support the kind of irony he’s trying to give it. He says irony was his forte on stage and in his one supporting part in a monster movie. He made me watch that movie once. All I remember is that, on our ancient television set, his hair looked like it was dyed lavender. He didn’t like me pointing that out. I learned a lot about actorish irony from him, some of it gets me exactly what I want. But no wonder he’s so whacko. Visiting my mother is the sort of blunder that started him on this five-year binge in the first place.

  How is mumsy? Haven’t seen her for weeks. She seems to’ve overcome her addiction to the telephone, too.

  She’s more beautiful than ever. She just returned from one of those Swiss beauty treatments. Harold sent her.

  Harold is the moderately well-to-do man that Mom is either keeping company with or married to. She sometimes pretends one, sometimes the other. Harold’s not so bad, only moderately well-to-do bad. Biggest thing I have against him, he won’t buy me a set of good wheels. He lets me drive his, though. That’s his liberal concession. But only on the safe dull streets of the guarded and patrolled neighborhood where he and Mom live. What little I know about driving—and it’s damn little since he won’t let his precious Pontiac go over 40 mph—I get from Harold. I got so tired of his screaming every time the speedometer needle hit 41 mph that I stopped paying duty visits, even turned down his offers to go out for a spin the last few times I did go there. Mom wants me to like Harold. He’s not so bad. She could do worse. With her track record, she’s lucky Harold ever wanted her.

  Mom went to Switzerland really? I say, figuring Dad to be on one of his more imaginative binges. I can’t picture Harold brushing the moths away from his wallet to provide the small fortune it costs to cross the old and oily Atlantic these days. Anyway, he’s got no power, no influence, so there’s no way he could wangle all those permits that’d allow Mom to leave the country and cross the Alps.

  Of course not to Switzerland really, Dad says. All I said was Swiss beauty treatment. You can get one downtown so long as you’re willing to lie in a coffin for two weeks.

  Oh, should have—how’s she look, Mom?

  I told you, beautiful. Don’t you ever listen? I love you, son.

  Gets so lately I hardly even notice his drunken jumps from one thought to another.

  Ah, I think you’re the bee’s knees, pops.

  Allow me to give you a piece of advice, fatherly wisdom, son.

  Oh, shit, here it comes! Even though I know he’s acquired about as much wisdom as there is sediment at the bottom of one of his wine bottles—which is to say, none, since there’s no sediment at the bottom of the kind of rotgut vintage he puts away—I say to him:

  Which is better than your mother who is all mouth.

  God, I wish I didn’t have to chuckle politely at cheap-shot lines like that. I’m itching to flee the kitchen, get out of the house, rendezous with Lincoln Rockwell X. Dad straightens himself up to full slouch and intones:

  As you travel through this life, brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole.

  Shit, he hasn’t been this blotto since—since when? Since the last time he dropped in on Mom.

  That verse was a part of my youth. Painted on a side wall of display window, bakery—my old neighborhood, my old
hometown, wherever that was. The bakery, whole town, demolished long ago. Nice little bakery, owned by a German family. Every Lent they made fastnacht keuchls. Flat doughnut, granulated sugar, sometimes powdered, hate powdered—

  What about the verse? I say. Have to interrupt dear old Dad when he starts wandering like that, especially when I got to get the hell out of here. Lincoln Rockwell X, as he so often says, lets no cooling gather around his heels.

  The verse. Used to see it almost every day, in my youth. Keep your eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole. I thought it must be all about doughnuts.

  Would you like me to pick up a dozen crullers while I’m out? Doughnuts they make now are glutinous poison. A jelly doughnut today is like red-colored vaseline enclosed in chewable rubber cement. But the doughnuts of my day—well, you’ll never know that, son. Your eyes are chrome. What was I saying? The doughnut. Finally I reached the age where I could appreciate homily. Let me live in a house by the side of the road, watch the race of men go by, the men who are good and the men who are bad—forgotten rest of it, I think.

  Maybe if it had been about pastry…

  Homily. Homely folk wisdom. Keep your eye on the doughnut, keep your eye on what is real, substantial, pragmatic. And not upon the hole—emptiness, sin, the insubstantial, the—

  You might not believe this, but I really figured that out when I first heard the verse.

  He recoils. I add a perfunctory pops, trying to put a smidgen of Andy Hardy into it, but it’s too late in the sentence. He’s hurt and I’m sorry, really sorry, and feeling sorry is what he wanted from me in the first place. And I’m sorry about that, too.

  Practicality of doughnut versus irrationality of hole, he says.

  His continuing on the subject is now defiant. Good solid Americana, pursue the American dream, it is achievable, it is as real as the doughnut. Optimism. That’s what built this country, optimism. Henry Ford, that great old Jewbaiting optimist. Fisk, Gould, Carnegie, all of them optimists. Rockefeller. All my schoolbooks told me they were optimists, farseeing men who believed in the potential of this country. Optimistically. Theodore Delano Roosevelt, optimist, warmonger, elephant-hunting cripple. Kept his eye on the doughnut, yessirree. Why—

  I’m not much interested in American history, pops.

  Yes, I recall your grades. But that’s okay. Now I don’t much believe in American history, son, or homily. My advice to you, forget the doughnut. Keep your eye upon the hole and not upon the doughnut. That’s my—the truth, shadowy and ragged. Do you understand what I am saying, son?

  I understand. Better than you could ever guess.

  Perhaps you do. I often think that odd intelligent things go on behind those chrome eyes.

  He seems to be nodding out. I edge back toward the door.

  Exactly like yours, your mother’s eyes, he mumbles. Hers… sterling silver, not chrome… all the same, isn’t it?

  The old bastard, he’s always got to add insults about mother. I charge out the door, not waiting to see if he’s asleep yet or not.

  * * * * *

  Busclerk, bastard, turns me down. Won’t even discuss with me. No seats available, he says. The buses are to be utilized by those whose trips have a useful purpose, he says. The old party line. Only bastards with jobs, with errands relating to jobs, with special cards affirming that the trip is a necessary one, sons of bitches who got an in with somebody and who know who the hell to pay off and can ride themselves without having to put up with bastard busclerks who know exactly how many free seats they got available and how much they’ll take from you to suddenly discover just where immediate seating exists. Well, I can’t give the bastard a cent. What money I got, I got to keep clear—to pay Lincoln Rockwell X, to get gas for the wheels he’s keeping for me. So I turn away from the bastard busclerk without even telling him where to get off.

  Have to walk crosstown. Terrific. I always enjoy sauntering along the sidewalks, feeling my shoulder muscles tighten at the gunning of each car coming up behind me. Not many cars out today. Three or four carloads of punk safedrys out cruising. They shout insults at me, but I remain detached, try to look like I’m just a safedry out slumming the sidewalks. Can’t offer to fight them because I’m alone. I tried partnering a few times, and running with gangs, but it never worked out. Only bastards ever wanted to partner with me were fuckers so dumb they embarrassed the hell out of me. Only gangs that’d have me had no guts and you were safer being alone as running with them. So I stay alone, pay no attention to the high-voiced bastard who quick rolls his window down (he’s probably got push-button controls, the stupid asshole), quick shouts lookit the dogshit on legs, and quick rolls the window back up again. Crummy bastards, they drive through the streets, their windows locked tight when they’re not throwing out challenges, when they’re not throwing out rocks, their bodies moving to tapedeck music we can’t hear through the soundproofing.

  At least it’s not night. At night, in areas like this which police cars avoid, they search us out and try to back us against walls with their fucking cars. They come up on the pavement after us. They’re positively scary, weird shadows moving behind tinted windshields, tightassed monsters out to joyride. When we can, we steal their license plates, which is not often but each time gives them hell to pay down at the bureau. Ah, I know they always get new licenses. Once a safedry, always a safedry. But at least we twist their guts with red tape. The license plates, we bend them out of shape and bury them in the ground.

  Street debris clings to my trousers. Dust flies into my eyes. I need something different. My whole life needs a kick in the balls. Work, when I can get it, is sleepwalking from desk to desk or being a zombie behind counters. Home is sneaking looks at my Dad sneaking drinks. Play is dodging the traps, play is bumping bodies to drumbeats you can’t hear. Sex is just bumping bodies. I can’t wait to get behind my own fucking steering wheel.

  The cops may crack me for illegal driving.

  But they got to catch me first.

  — 2 —

  Easy time slipping past the fuzz checkpoint—they are, after all, trained to supervise the passage of blackfolk in and out of the ghetto, a white complexion on the way in is same as invisible. Not so easy crawling across the natural barrier, the rubble of the blownup abandoned buildings. I walk through the sniper zone unscathed, though a distant shot keeps me alert. Lincoln Rockwell X told me to get to the corner before eleven and I’m just making it. He’s a demon for appointments. Like he says, you’re late and you’ve missed me.

  He’s at the corner, turning some business with some really disreputable looking types who have the words Don’t Shit Me Dude printed on their white tee-shirts. I stay out of their way till the dealing is done. Then Lincoln Rockwell X notices me. His eyes get wide and I get a sharp pain in the pit of my stomach—he’s going to do his darkie act with me, to entertain his associates.

  Well, Master Lee, he says (at least he doesn’t do the act in dialect, that’s some comfort). I am so pleased to see you. How may I serve you, Master Lee?

  The other blacks all put on these shiteating grins, picking up the routine with a bit more eagerness than I’d like, frankly.

  It’s time, I say. You said eleven.

  Well, indeed I did. How considerate of you to be so punctual. I am properly humble of the honor, sir.

  Can we go?

  I am almost whispering as I submit this request. After all, I'm quite familiar with Lincoln Rockwell X’s darkie act. We grew up together, him and me, both in the same ugly suburb—before the laws of the New Enlightenment forced him and his family out. We hung around a lot together, and he always got a terrific kick out of playing this darkie act. When we were kids the game was fun. See, I’d give him orders and he’d fulfill them, like bringing me imaginary mint juleps on a real tray or acting out rude passenger and shrewd porter on a train. He used to wear this old white labcoat we found on a junkpile. It was ripped at the pockets and smeared with what we hoped was blood.

  We had no
reason to believe that we wouldn’t grow up together all the way, playing our comradely game into our adult lives. We just never figured on history interfering—first the Grand Rapids Massacre, then all that combat shit out west. Then the South delighted at the new historical turns muscling in on it all. I cried when Lincoln Rockwell X had to leave our suburb with his family. Shit, my family was out of the place within two years ourselves, after Mother took off and Dad started his affair with the bottle.

  So now Lincoln Rockwell X had to have that damn special encoded card to function at all—and everybody with an ounce of intelligence complained about the regressive New Enlightenment laws and there were still skirmishes and here I am putting up with his darkie act on a streetcorner in his own turf and hating every fucking minute of it. He sees the pain in my eyes, calls the act off, takes me by the arm, bids farewell to the others, and we go off down the street.

  Tone down, Lee, he says, it’s only a couple blocks from here to the wheels.

  The blackfolk citizens of the territory stare at me but leave me alone.

  Only an idiot sneaks into their territory, he mutters, and they don’t think it’s Christian to maim idiots.

  I walk along with my tongue sticking out the corner of my mouth.

  * * * * *

  He leads me to wheels. It’s in the basement of an abandoned Afro-Methodist church. We have to maneuver around upended and broken pews. To get to the car we have to go down steps behind what’s left of an altar. We pass office doors with broken windows, shards of glass unsteady stalactites and stalagmites. You can only see junk inside the offices.