She chose me, this blonde Texan who slips away from her raucous posse, chaperones disappeared like tumbleweed in the perfumed air. She chose me— I stood on the beach trying to come up with something, anything, to keep her from leaving. Light from the Hotel Carlton shimmers in still water.
She stays.
A week before, I’d never flown, never been west of Jersey, certainly never lay under a striped canopy on a chaise lounge in Cannes with a woman so firm and sinuous she feels like a replicant. She studies classical piano in a “cow town. She’s applying to The Julliard School. I nod but can't appreciate the audacity of her ambition. (Two percent of the pianists who apply are accepted.) I sense steel underpinning her softness, a furious determination to escape whatever stingy destiny awaits in Texas.
At 22, I have no dreams, no goals, only an amorphous need to live a different life. I don’t even know Columbia’s J-School, my future alma mater, exists. When I describe Gowanus, she doesn’t judge my Brooklyn accent. A 20-year-old who literally grew up on Fort Worth’s “Fortune Road” finds Italian men charming, romantic, exotic—Vivaldi...Verdi...Vinny? This happy misappropriation repeats when I move to Georgia.
Years later, at bar, party, or press conference, I realize that the stranger staring at me “across a crowded room,” and the blinding heat that gaze triggers, has happened before: to both of us. By then, I’ve spent years mourning what might have been.
We promise to write.
I’ve not written a word since Sister Mary Malachy pummeled me for plagiarism—in front of Jean W— a sin I neither understood, nor committed. Now, energized by some potent alchemy, I write. I know nothing of the world. I live in a snow globe on a poisoned canal in a forgotten corner of Brooklyn. Nothing of books, music, poetry, art. I do know cars. Particularly one old car:
“At night, the battleship grey Ford looms atop the gas station’s outdoor lift like a leviathan..."
Ignoring my father’s warnings, I buy it from a leering, gap-tooth punk in the Sunoco station on 4th Ave. and Prospect, squandering my scholarship money, taking two jobs, one a night gig in a liquor store on Williamsburg’s riotous Roebling Street, stoking Joe’s lightning-quick fury.
***
The monster engine roars, rattling houses on Carroll Street. I grin idiotically. A minute later, it spews oil, antifreeze, sizzling bits of shrapnel, like vomit in The Exorcist. By midnight, my father is chasing me down the steps of the Union Street subway station, garrison belt whirling. A few days later, I’m tearing the Chrysler hemi engine apart, using borrowed tools from Honey Christiano in a weedy lot on Nevins Street. I bag and tag each bit like a medical specimen. Its beating heart, an “Iskenderian” racing camshaft, is beyond repair. Replacing it will cost more than the $400 I paid for the car.
I write Ed Iskenderian, a legendary West Coast hot-rodder whose name I know from drag racing magazines, imagining an Armenian Santa in coveralls surrounded by wrench-wielding elves as the Beach Boys harmonize in the background. I tell “Ed” my story, but like the Ancient Mariner I can’t stop, page after page in longhand slowly makes its way from Brooklyn to Gardena, California. Someone reads it and is moved. A month later, a new camshaft arrives—free of charge.
Such manly men, these Californians.
Years later, I apply to Columbia. I have no journalism experience, no elite college diploma; neither academic honors, nor high-powered recommendations. I teach English to aspiring auto mechanics in the school that expelled my father. The final section is a 500-word personal essay. I write 5,000 words, my life story. Someone—I imagine a desk piled with clamoring applications—takes the time to read mine.
I’m accepted.
***
I write on legal pads, crumpled pages carpeting the floor like daffodils. She never writes back. I discover a poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Chicano/Apache teaching himself to read in prison, surviving by crafting love letters for murderous men. Baca holds the Yale chair once filled by Allen Ginsberg. His desolate life in Albuquerque’s South Valley is vastly different from Gowanus, and yet familiar:
“Each day my hands hurt for something to have,
and a voice in me yearned to sing...
I wished I had had a chance to be a little boy,
and wished a girl had loved me,
and wished I had a family-but these
were silver inlaid pieces of another man's life...”
***
Months later, her letter arrives, a torrent of words bursting outside the pale blue envelope. Her promises gush like wildcat wells. She’s visiting an aunt in Virginia. I’ve never been to Washington, D.C. I drive straight through in a blue Alfa Romeo with a whining transmission.
We collide, clawing at each other in a pine-paneled motel room.
When we talk, the prize is still out of reach. She’s waiting to hear from Julliard, giving recitals, working menial jobs, volunteering. At graduation, she’s not voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” but “Most Promising Secretary.”
I’m teaching junior high in Bensonhurst. Giggling 7th graders slip me notes on ice cream soda stationery, and the bald principal, hating my mustache and longish hair, plots my exit.
