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My father worked weekends at a friend’s auto body shop on Route 7. He also worked as a landscaper, bookie, and bartender in Great Barrington, where we lived. After my parents’ divorce, I didn’t see my father much, not that we ever spent quality time together before his hasty departure.
My mother, for reasons unclear to me at the time, arranged for me to spend the day with my father at the shop. When she dropped me off that morning, it was awkward from the start. He seemed surprised to see me, being preoccupied when I strolled in with the busy goings-on at the body shop, but he greeted me with his ubiquitous “Hello, hello” reception he gave everyone, and then he was off again scurrying about the place.
The pungent smell of spray paint propellant permeated my nostrils and cooled the back of my throat. Dark, dusty, workbenches with various tools were strewn haphazardly around the perimeter of the garage. I followed him around asking questions–a nervous habit of mine that is triggered by awkward silences–not knowing where to begin or what to do or say to him.
My father brought me over to the workbench area. “Do you want to be a big help to me?” he asked, and without waiting for my reply instructed, “What you can do is sort out this box.”
There was a dilapidated cardboard box chock-full of assorted screws, nuts, bolts, and nails. This was something I knew I could accomplish. Not only was I an orderly kid who liked organizing things, the idea that I could be a “big help” to my father made me want to give more gusto to the task.
I fished some used Styrofoam coffee cups out of the trash and started, separating and sorting; nuts in one, bolts in another, and so on. In a short amount of time, my cups began to fill, as my fingers became tinted with a gray tinge at the tips and acquired a sharp metallic smell like old pennies.
I was enraptured in my rapid progress when one of the men in the shop announced that they had to paint a car that they’d just taped and papered. I had to interrupt my work and vacate the room. My father said there was “soda in the frig” if I wanted one, so I went into the back room. To my surprise, there was a pin-up of a naked woman spreading her legs, taped to the refrigerator door. She was making a face like she had just swallowed a bug or some sour milk–open-mouthed, her nose wrinkled up, and sticking out her tongue.
It was the first time I’d seen anything like this. I was intrigued, fascinated, and a bit appalled by the poster. I studied it for some time, amazed, horrified, and after a while, a bit ashamed. I quickly yanked the door open, grabbed the first can of Shasta I could see, and forced myself out the door without looking back, worried that they might realize I’d been gone too long, come looking for me, and catch me back there with her.
Sipping soda, I wandered aimlessly about inspecting the other rooms–the storage room, an office, a small bathroom–when I noticed my father putting on his jacket. I ran quickly to him, and when I came into his sight, he had an odd, almost startled look on his face, similar to the one he had when I had first arrived. “Lunchtime!” he genially announced.
Carpooling with some of his fellow workers, we drove down Route 7 to The Shed, a restaurant in Sheffield. I had a Coke and hotdog on a toasted buttered bun with ketchup, while the others had a couple of beers, burgers, and cigarettes.
When we got back to the shop, I hurriedly ran over and continued my sorting job–no doubt jacked up by all the second-hand cigarette smoke I’d inhaled–working a bit faster than before to make up for the time I’d missed, and furiously trying to finish before I had to go home. I wanted my father to be proud of the meticulous, thorough job I had done for him.
When I put the final metal pieces into their respective cups, I stepped back and admired my work, thinking, “Gosh, Dad is going to flip when he sees this.” I went over to get him, but he was busy under a car. “Not now,” was his curt reply.
Bored and impatient, I casually sauntered into the spray room, a small cabinet cluttered with various spray paint cans. There was a multi-colored, coated little shelf, where they must have tested various paints. I grabbed the paint gun and squeezed the trigger, spraying a mist of green that echoed through the small closet. I set it down quick and quiet, thinking they were going to come running and yelling, and tiptoed out and into the nearby office.
Sitting down in the big armchair, I leaned back, bobbling a bit until by and by, my boredom got the best of me. I began snooping through the desk drawers. I wasn’t seeing anything that interesting–various papers, pencils, a ruler, a few poker chips–when suddenly a deck of cards caught my eye. I figured I’d start a game of solitaire, maybe “Klondike,” “One-handed,” or one of the other variations my father had taught me years ago.
I poured the cards out of the pack into my palm, and I realized they were not ordinary playing cards. Each card had a different naked woman on it–all 52 of them, some were playing games like volleyball, some posing and making faces, and some private parts close up. The image on one card confused me, and though I flipped the card over a number of times, I still couldn’t figure out which way was up. Bewildered, baffled, and a bit disturbed by what I saw, I gently slipped them back in the pack, placed it back in the position I’d found it, and closed the drawer.
It had gotten dark outside all of the sudden, so I went back to my father and he exclaimed it was “Miller time,” that I should “go wait in the truck,” and that he’d “be right out.” I went out and sat in the truck cab impatiently awaiting his arrival when my thoughts wandered back through the day I’d had and I remembered that I hadn’t had a chance to show my father my amazing sorting job. I quickly bounced out of the truck and back inside.
The guys were all cleaning up from all the day’s jobs. When I came in, my father was tossing tools into various places on the workbench when he noticed the line of cups where I had left them. I hid quietly watching him, waiting for his reaction to my handy work. To my shock and dismay, he grabbed each cup and with quick jerky movements, poured its contents back into the big box they had come from, and then casually tossed the cups back in the garbage one by one. He dropped the box onto the ground and kicked it under the workbench.
I felt a strange pain inside my body, mixed with a sharp numbness. I crept back out into the cab of the truck and lied down on the cool vinyl seat, feeling some new, tangible sense of understanding and awareness, which quickly became the prologue to my nodding off to sleep.
I was awakened when my father opened his door, again delivering his signature “Hello, hello” salutation as he set his open Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in the space between us on the seat. As we pulled out of the shop, he awkwardly stammered, “So…did you have fun today?” I half-nodded and mumbled an indifferent “yeah.”
The rest of the ride was set in deafening silence, broken only by his periodic sips of beer, the day’s events bouncing around my mind and filling the cab of the truck until the pieces came together in a new awareness. We arrived at the house and pulled into the driveway, I opened the door and stepped out, even before he had come to a complete stop. As I walked up the steps, I heard his jovial, “See ya later, alligator,” a parting phrase I recall he often used when I was little and not yet into my double-digits. He backed up and pulled away, without looking back or even noticing my obligatory half-wave or my absent response of “in a while, crocodile.”
As the truck lights disappeared into the darkness and the diminuendo of the rattling muffler pipe faded off into the distance, I felt a distinct dizziness as if the world as I’d known it was no longer spinning in the same orbit. Though I couldn’t put my finger on what is was or define it in words, I knew at that moment some part of me was left behind in the shop, it would be some time before I’d see him again, and this would be our last outing together.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images