Tomorrow some people from Catholic Charities are coming to tow away the beautiful BMW 740iL that my father bought in Germany at the turn of the century. Like the vast majority of American males he was until then a car enthusiast who had never owned a nice car. He didn’t suffer from that—fancy automobiles were, to his mind, a waste of money. But he seemed to suffer greatly from a surprise that hits most men when they retire—the sudden curtailment of occasions for asserting control over situations, standing out as a man of distinction, showing oneself a person to be reckoned with.
Buying the fastest, grandest, most handsome car on the road did the trick. My father drove it for a decade and a half and kept it shipshape for most of that time. But by the time he died in 2015 it was aging—dribbling oil everywhere it went, flashing airbag lights, losing power steering at odd moments and costing him a ton of money. It fell to me to dispose of the jalopy after his funeral. But I was in no shape to. It was full of his compact discs (mostly female country singers), the golf pencils he had taken notes with, his notes, his compact umbrellas neatly held down with bungee cords in the trunk, boxes of Good & Plenty.
What a wreck I was in those weeks, passing days in his house, tidying up his affairs, visiting friends, driving his car slowly around my hometown, loading it up with the most stoical and heartbreaking used CDs I could find at the Mystery Train record shop. Out went Iris DeMent singing “Mama’s Opry.” In came Harry Nilsson’s “Turn on Your Radio” and Dave Davies’s “Strangers.”
I thought a lot about my father as I drove. He had taught me to drive in our ancient Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, starting about two years before I was eligible to get my license—not because I was that slow a learner but because he wanted to impress on my 14-year-old mind that parental law trumps government law. (It’s a philosophy I have inherited from him and tried to impart to my children, and it is probably fortunate none of us has ever seen it put to the test.) He hollered at me for driving too far to the right. As a beginning driver, of course, I did: Driving a yard too far to the right might cost you a mirror, but driving a yard too far to the left might cost you your life. I was right.
But I wasn’t always. One spring night about five years later I totaled the Vista Cruiser returning to town along a stretch of road called Dead Man’s Curve. (Probably every town has one.) I would have been fine had the road not been covered in sand from the preceding winter. The wheels found no purchase as I turned. The car just continued laterally, the wheels spinning as if they were on ball-bearings, until a telephone pole sheared off the whole right rear quarter-panel. A close call. My father was too relieved to be angry.
When, decades later, after my father’s death, the time came to return to Washington, I drove his grand BMW cautiously down the Eastern seaboard—and, instead of taking it to the scrapyard, took it to a bunch of mechanics in Maryland I had chosen for their probity. They replaced the belts. They went deep into the engine and dammed the leak. They found a passenger door to replace the one that was rusting off its hinges. What it cost I won’t repeat. It is a disgrace to a man trying to raise a family on a writer’s salary. It not only got the car back on the road—for the past 30 months or so, it has mostly driven like a new car.
But when I brought it into the shop for an oil change before Christmas, I got bad news. The 740iL was in the state that the dissolute jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke was said to have been in at the time of his death in 1931—it was “dying of everything.” The oil leaks and the belt problems were back. My mechanic friend explained that, ideally, cars cost 8 cents a mile in repairs. If it cost 10 cents a mile, that was a worry, but it was up to the owner. If a person really loved his car, he might want to keep driving it when it started costing 12 or 14 cents a mile. My BMW, he explained—and here he pulled out the papers—was costing me $1.74. It was time to put an end to my crazy attempts to summon the past. That can wait until I retire.
