1. Register
2. Login

Grand Prize
 Maintenance
 Joe Clark

I found the relic in the pocket of my old corduroy vest while directing a rehearsal in the tempera-and-pheromone-ridden auditorium of North Penn Junior High back in 1987. (How a junior high school managed to get not one but two full-time Theatre teachers I'll never know, but I do know how someone can bail out of a doctoral program in mid-thrust and end up teaching eighth-grade Drama under an "Emergency Certificate." Really. Ask me sometime.)

That morning, as I swaddled myself for outside bus duty 7:30 in the Pennsylvania winter, I had pulled the rarely-worn corduroy vest out of the closet. Now, in the warm darkness, waiting for the jittery adolescent techs to write down light cues, I was ruefully thinking that at least college instructors could smoke around their charges. My nicotine- deprived fingers crabbed around the vest's linty pockets and touched something small, like a flattened grain of rice or a stepped-on cold tablet. But metal.

I hauled it out and looked at it under the dim gooseneck lamp over the lightboard -- then nearly dropped it in surprise. It was a piece out of the driver's door lock of a VW bus.

A 1971 VW bus.

One that I didn't have any more.

A bus that I had pulled the lock cylinder out of -- stuck to the key -- one bitter cold January in Pennsylvania four years before, not long after I had first arrived there from a gene pool that had been steaming in the Florida sun for generations. I remembered holding up the key and watching the small springs and sliders oozing off in their gluey coating of grease. I remembered being shocked. Affronted. Was there no end to the cold? Was this Earth?

I had been Dr. Zhivago in Siberia.

I'd vowed then to get my frozen cracker ass back home somehow, no matter what it took. And yet here I was, 5 years later, listening to Dutchie kids spout Poe and being hit up for cigarettes by 13-year-old Schwenkfelders.

It was to die for.

The bus? My father found it when we lived in West Palm Beach, back in 1976. (Are you getting these dates? You might want to get a pencil.) White over chalk blue, but it was always the Blue Bus, a "Deluxe Station Wagon" with the extra brightwork. The middle seat was still unused and wrapped in plastic: the previous owner had bought to haul PVC patio furniture but had succumbed to a debilitation shortly thereafter and driven it only 13,000 miles in five years.

We added mild tint to the windows to cut down on the South Florida sun, first scissoring templates from brown paper, then cutting the film, then applying it while spraying distilled water from a squirt bottle and desperately trying to squeegeecide every last bubble before the film dried. One long weekend during a tropical depression, while the palm trees whipped themselves outside the garage, I helped my father and some friends install a DPD air-conditioning unit. As a self-styled expert Teenage Stereo Installer, I talked my way into adding a killer Audiovox AM/FM/8-Track unit with dual- cone door panel speakers so I could listen to Mike Oldfield on dates.

The Blue Bus was cool.

We drove it from Palm Beach County up through the Smokies once -- Mom and Dad, five kids, and a week's worth of camping gear. Going up the rock-lined switchbacks on 441 towards the gap between Maggie Valley and Cherokee, the bus never went fast enough to shift out of second gear, but it always kept moving. On shorter trips we even pulled a Coleman camper behind it.

Along with the ability to go fast, one lost the need to hurry.

Over the next couple of years the bus stayed with me, gaining a somewhat seedier reputation as a concert-goer's and road-tripper's home on wheels, especially among the all-too-goddam-fun-loving people I hung out with during the Lost Years. Parked outside the St. Pete auditorium in '78 with the sliding door open, waiting for a Tull show, I watched Captain Acid hawk his wares among the crowd and grinned at Ian Anderson wannabes hopping around on one foot. The bus became an island in that crowd, a haven for at least one nameless woman who wafted up and asked if she could "just sit here for a minute." Back out of sight. She was polite, uncommunicative; generous with her picnic supplies.

Those were looser days, when my dorm-rat friends and I would nobly and buzzingly cruise the dirt roads outside Gainesville for hours, looking for caves and swimming holes or just really cool live oaks. As we would drift along in the sugar sand, someone would invariably roll the big sliding door open and sit cross-legged on the floor, meditating at the big-screen TV show of the Florida scrub woods slipping past. Sliding away the same way we were pissing away time. But we had the time to piss away, O we did.

In 1980, I got the Bachelor's degree and got married -- two important milestones, the latter being the ultimate reason I would end up shivering in Pennsylvania two years later -- and as a wedding present my parents formally transferred ownership of the trusty and letusnotforget *air-conditioned* Blue Bus to me, an especial boon since the new bride and I were headed to a grad school gig in Tampa, considered hot even by Florida standards.

To my shame I confess my subsequent neglect. I hide behind the fact that I was a penurious and procrastinating graduate student -- a speech major, no less. And there were those 2000-mile slogs to visit the in-laws. Maintenance schedules were not adhered to; clearances grew larger; friction increased its pernicious work. So also with the marriage, but in both cases, terminal signs were a long time coming, especially if one took pains not to look for them!

The AC compressor went bad less than two months after we arrived in Tampa.

Let me tell you a story within a story:

In 1981 the old silver erector-set Sunshine Skyway bridge at the mouth of Tampa Bay was rammed by an errant ship, shaking chunks out of the southbound span and sending people -- men, women, children, maybe a pet or two -- plummeting to their deaths a short distance from Hernando de Soto's somewhat differently grisly landfall of 450 years previous.

The Skyway was actually two identical, two-lane bridges right next to each other, and the northbound span was unscathed. In a bit of morbid tourism a few of us took a break from pondering Sophists and Social Constructivism and drove down for a transit and a look-see. As we crossed the good span, the bus rocked in the wind whistling through the open metal-lattice roadbed far above the green water. Alongside us was the place of horror, a great vacant space bracketed by twisted girders on the sister span less than a hundred feet away.

This I saw and knew only from the corner of my eye as I battled the wheel and felt the breadth of the missing span in the pit of my stomach, a Peterbilt on my ass the whole white-knuckled way. The bridge was like people I'd known, their lives for a time parallel to mine, maybe even indistinguishable from mine if viewed from enough distance -- then something happens: a misguided freighter, a failure of will, a character flaw -- whatever -- and suddenly there's this great yawning space where that other life was. Maybe some twisted remnants, but you can only glance over quickly because all your attention's on your own road with that Truck behind you.

So anyway in '82 we packed everything into the bus and a U-Haul and I drove it from Tampa to Pennsylvania while the Mrs., her mother, and our new baby took the air route on a Fokker.

In Pennsylvania I was still poor, teaching kids from South Philly how to speak the King's English at Temple U and sort of working towards a doctorate. The Blue Bus suffered further neglect and was often an object of lengthy brooding and great despair. It was hard to start. I had nowhere to work on it in the winter. Salty roads began to take their toll. The heater was laughable. So it was in the winter of 1984 that I let the Mrs. talk me into a four-door Corolla sedan, with real heat and reclining seats and no sticky sliding door, no drafty seals, no worn-out 1600, and no frozen, gooey door locks that came apart when you tried to pull out the key. Oh, twist my arm...

---

...and it was in 1987 that I discovered the pieces of that door lock still in the pockets of that rarely worn (and apparently still less often washed) corduroy vest. As these things tend to happen -- like a chance meeting of former co-adulterers, now pale and haggard like the post-treatment people in Orwell's book -- not two weeks later I saw a familiar white-over-blue shape behind a garage not two miles from my house.

I stopped by there several times before I found anyone home. . The man said it had been sitting for at least two years. I couldn't believe it was the same bus. Some of the spare parts I had left in it were even still there. One hundred and fifty dollars! And like something out of a Woody Allen movie, I had it kicking over with a fresh battery and a few squirts of ether. I tottered it home, farting and shuddering and roaring (the bus, I mean) the whole way, against the better judgment of my wife. I really didn't know what to do with it. It was falling apart. I had three other VWs at the time, only one of which ran.

But I think I knew I was pulling out soon, and taking it with me. The thing I can't let go of is why and how that got to be more important to me than the marriage.

There's this dream I have, where the bus and I have escaped Big Brother and are fleeing across the Sunshine Skyway, but suddenly the bridge is falling away beneath us, the engine racing as the wheels spin in the air and the headlights sweep down across the pilings and onto the green Gulf water. I look up and see my ex standing on the untouched span -- grinning, I think. Below me the headlights illuminate red-crossed white sails, billowing, growing larger, until I can see the helmeted and cuirassed men on the deck. One of them looks up at me.

Recognition.