The Red Car
Ray Timmins
“I’m sick of being stuck all the time without a car . . . and hate having to ride the fucking bus to school everyday,” John said, looking directly in my eyes with a deathly serious look. “And what’s up with that fucking bus driver bitch staring at us like we’re assholes every time we get off the bus, anyway? I’m gonna talk to my parents about getting a car.”I knew exactly what he was talking about. We really needed a car. Often, we would talk about the places we would go if we had a car, like the Keys. We could cruise down US1 till we hit the Keys and camp on the land his dad kept his bee hives on and in the morning we could head down to Key West and visit Ernest Hemingway’s house and see the six-toed cats. Then go to the beach and soak up the sheer thrill of being alive and far away from home, free from our parents and daily responsibilities, the breeze from the ocean whipping and inspiring us while we stared down the horizon watching that line disappear as the day turned to night. And if things got too weird or we longed for our families, we could cruise on home and be there in no time at all. And whenever we got pissed or it seemed like everyone was taking us wrong we could hop into the old car and speed away to Mexico, drink ourselves silly and dance with the señoritas.
On impulse, we could escape to the beach at night and talk while the waves rolled in, crashing up against the jetty, the moon glowing in the corner of our eye. My parents wouldn’t even allow me to practice driving in their car so I was looking forward to John getting a car just as much as he was. We were a team up against an invisible legion of authority that had been holding us back since grade school. We had been friends for a few years since we met in Junior High. We shared a superior sense about ourselves that turned into a bitter sense of humor that seemed to entertain others. Kids in school loved to hear us rant and tell them the way things really were—they thought we were funny and we enjoyed entertaining them. John and I respected each other’s opinions and intelligence though we figured no one else really had a clue about about anything like we did. And they probably didn’t.
It was a Saturday afternoon. The night before, John had borrowed his mom’s Cadillac and we sped down I95 at top speed alongside another baby-blue de Ville driven by some other teen-aged dude and what we figured was either his sister or girlfriend. Judging from the way he was speeding and showing off, it was probably the latter, or just some date he was trying to impress. We raced from North Miami all the way down to downtown Miami where John decided to finally to end the mad contest by pulling off at the Biscayne Boulevard exit. We drove back to North Miami at a more tolerable speed and headed straight for Haulover Beach—but not before we stopped at the Vietnamese market to get some alcohol.
John spoke Mandarin fairly well for a white boy. He’d been studying it intensely for about three years. I wasn’t sure at the time why the Vietnamese owners spoke Chinese but I learned later on that there were many Vietnamese citizens of Chinese origin who had settled there but who had retained their language and culture, just as they had when these families had emigrated to the US. At the time though, John’s Chinese and goodwill was able to get us wine coolers to take the beach and drink and share conversations and forget about the rest of the world for a little while. Which was a good thing.
“Ni hao ma?” John started as soon as we entered the darkly lit store with the scent of Oriental herbs and spices filling the air.
“Oh, John . . . ni hao ma?” the little Asian dude behind the register sang, smiling and waving his hand for John to come closer and speak with him. John did. They talked for a few minutes, John droning on in his broken Chinese, struggling with many phrases I could tell, but the man behind the register smiled and put the words together, responding in turn. I began getting impatient, just wanting John to shut the hell up so we could get our alcohol and get a move on, but the exchange was remarkable I thought even though I really had no clue what they were talking about. I stared around at all the alien products and let my mind get caught up in the exotic nature of the goods sold there and tried connecting them to similar fare offered in the average American markets. Though many things remained a mystery, the aesthetics and the colors delighted me and kept me distracted until John paid and we were on our way to get wasted and talk about the Chinese twins we’d been hounding with our innocent yet foolish affections and attention since the ninth grade and tie it all together into our teenage philosophical conclusions for the night with the moon balancing just above our heads and the waves crashing in as they did, as a rhythm to our meandering thoughts trying to make sense of the world we had no choice of being born into.
Oftentimes I felt alienated when he would start blabbering in Chinese to a server in a Chinese restaurant or we ran into someone who spoke French and he’d rattle on and on but I suppose it had more to do with the fact that I wasn’t able to join in because I hadn’t devoted much effort into learning these languages and was unable to contribute my thoughts.
Finally, John and I were picking out the two four-packs that we would need for our midnight beach excursion.
“This looks good,” I said.
“Anything but peach,” John said with his nose upturned. “Peach really sucks!”
“No shit,” I nodded.
The road was clear and we played the tunes loud. That night we opted for classic rock, as we usually did. Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, Hey Jude by the Beatles. Some Van Halen (with David Lee Roth, of course) and even over to the soft rock station for Chicago and their pure mushy sentimentality. We talked about the twins we were in love with, or believed we were in love with. We spoke of them in a sarcastically macho manner to keep it light. For example, I might say: “Ya know, I saw her walking through the hall today and I said hello and I could tell by the way she said hi back and walked down the hall that she totally wanted me right then and there."
“She just doesn’t know it yet,” John would joke back and he would go on to tell a similarly absurd observation he’d made about her sister that same day. All in good humor though, we realized they didn’t want to have anything to do with us other than being our friends. But that was OK, we’d joke, they just didn’t know us well enough yet.
“I’m telling you, man, all we need to do is get that car and the babes will be all over us!” John said, that sarcastic sneer again.
“Fuck yeah!” I smiled, “All the chicks will dig us, man.”
“Almost at the beach, dude.”
I nodded and smiled: “Cool.”
We parked his mom’s car and made our way across the midnight sand to the rocks where we then walked out far enough to be close to the crashing waves and feel the sea spray on our faces. The moon was full that night. John handed me a berry wine cooler and took one out for himself and we sat on a smooth rock in the jetty looking out to the sea. There was a ship on the horizon and some blinking lights from radio towers far in the distance. A speedboat flew by and made the waves rough for a minute but then the water calmed down and was still again with just an occasional wave smacking the rocks in front of us.
“You know, the French have two different ways of referring to the ocean. When they say, “la mer” they mean it in a more . . . poetic sense. Like how the water looks now, how beautiful it looks and dark and mysterious. Right now it looks like more than just an ocean,” John said, taking a huge sip of his wine cooler.
“It looks so boundless,” I said. “It’s more like a god or a living thing than just a body of water.”
“It carries so much more meaning than just the word ocean can give.”
“The sea is a more poetic word, used in English.”
“Yeah, kinda like that.”
“Yeah.”
We were silent for a moment staring out at the water while we finished our drinks. He threw his empty bottle, it crashed against the rocks and I did the same. We reached for another.
After a couple hours, four wine coolers apiece and an exhausting conversation about God, the government, Freedom and Love and everything in between, John and I made our way to the car and drove home. I spent the night on his floor and we talked for another hour or so before falling asleep.
That Saturday night John talked to his dad about getting a car and his dad said that they couldn’t afford to buy him one. After thinking a moment he remembered that his sister had an old Impala sitting in her yard that nobody seemed to want. Not concerned with cosmetics, John and I thought it would be a good idea to see if we could get her running somehow. We figured the following morning would be a good time.
Sunday morning John and I walked to his aunt’s house, which was just a few blocks from his house. We were determined to get that car started, on way or another. His dad had told us that there was nothing really wrong with the car except that it was old and neglected and hadn’t been started up for a while. This gave John and I the initial encouragement we needed to get the car started. Our bleeding hearts for the inanimate, I suppose.
We could see the big red beast from down the street. It was, indeed, pretty old. And it was filthy. When we got closer we could see that grass had grown into the engine, showing that it had not moved from that spot in months. John got the keys from his aunt and he tried starting her up.
John got in the driver seat and I sat in the passenger side: “Here we go, dude,” he said, putting the key in the ignition. He turned it and there was no roar of the engine like we were expecting, but the air conditioning came on.
“Cool,” he laughed, “at least we have air-conditioning!”
“Yeah, I suppose that’s a good start.”
“Ah . . . the gas gauge. Look,” John said, pointing at the dash. It was on empty “No problem, dude. There’s a can of gas in the shed. He jumped out of the car and ran to the shed. He came out with a five-gallon tank.”
“How are we gonna pour the gas in the tank with no funnel?” I said.
“Shit!”
We leaned on the car and thought.
“Here, try this,” I said, picking up a section of newspaper from the back seat of the red car.
“Good idea, dude,” and he rolled up a section of the newspaper into a cone and stuck the tapered end into the car’s tank. Most of the gas poured all over his hands and onto the grass but eventually there was enough gas to start the car.
“Holy shit, dude, look: an eight-track player with a digital display!”
“I wonder if it works.”
“Let’s put some more gas in her then go to Red White & Blue and buy an eight-track tape and test it out.”
John threw the red car in reverse and backed out onto the street. We left a large patch of yellowed, moist grass in the middle of the yard where the red car had been. The car hesitated getting to the light, black smoke billowing from beneath the hood, but picked up and got smoother the farther we drove. We filled up the tank and put some oil in her and raced down to the thrift store to get an eight track tape for the red car. It was Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.
We got back in the car and I popped the tape in. The music started. John looked at me and said, “Our new car, Ray-man.”
I turned up the volume and we sped off toward the beach. The place where all our dreams began.
