"We got Bo Didley playing & Leslie the announcer at the cash machine. The garage is rock'n and NO PARKING IN THE DAMN YARD!"
So she said on Facebook that Saturday morning. The day was bittersweet for her, but she'd face it with the courage of someone laughing so much, it would almost drive away all today's tears. She'd escaped to the back porch for coffee and a cigarette, and that's where I caught her. Slyly sitting back in her chair around the patio table. Her face, rosy in the gray morning, was cool as Kentucky Derby Days. Her kid sister, Amy, a younger forty-something, provided sweet comic relief.
Then they saw me.
She jumped up. We hugged. People tell me I give good hugs and I guess I do. Can anyone underestimate the power of a warm, tight hug in these days when we're just trying to get along?
"Oh Jeff, thanks for coming to the freaky damn backyard," Suzanne said.
She was wearing faded blue jeans with the pocket ripped on the left cheek of her ass. Purple K-State T-shirt (her alma mater), sleeves pulled up to the elbows, revealing the fiery serpentine tattoo on her left arm. (Some 50 years ago, her dad, a young ensign, got a tattoo, while in the Navy. Anchors aweigh.) Blonde hair tied back in a pony tail and jet dark glasses that made her look like a nerd even though back in school I always considered her one of the "cool kids." That was the pedestal people put her on, but you always caught the sense of resistance in every way she walked. In every damn thing she said. There's a photo (circa 1994) of her in khakis in some train, revealing a window to mountains in Germany. Mischief in the black pipe hanging from a corner of her mouth. Fun emanating from the beer stein in her hand.
Somewhere in the middle of life, I would discover that Suzanne was in many ways, a product of her parents' coolness.
When she'd posted to Facebook about the garage sale at her parents' house, she said it all with such fun, I knew I had to come. For as long as I'd known Suzanne -- since third grade, actually -- her parents had lived at 409 Akron, a red brick house in Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000 in the 1970s).
But they didn't live there anymore.
Suzanne's mother, Madelyn, went for a walk as she did every morning around 5 a.m. in their suburban neighborhood, and had a heart attack. She died right there on the sidewalk. An unexpected death.
With Madelyn gone, there was no one in the house to take of Keith anymore. For the past year and a half, her husband had become increasingly more forgetful and disoriented. The love notes, the drawings he was always making for his wife -- had become a thing of the past. He could no longer drive. For years, through the decades actually, he'd restored old cars. Suzanne and her sisters placed him in a home with a memory care unit. Her dad had Alzheimer's, my mom has it. Suzanne and I relate to each other.
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| Car show. Movie show |
"Come on inside," Suzanne said, motioning to the house. "It's kind of freaky and surreal right now."
I followed her in, past the now stark living room, into the kitchen, loaded with boxes. She introduced me to a woman -- I think it was an aunt from Colorado -- there were so many relatives at the house that day, it's hard to keep them straight.
Then she poured me a cup of coffee. It was a black hole sun-colored mug with a crude white cartoon drawing of a hot rod on it. "Cream or sugar?," she said. "Are you kidding?" I answered. "Black, no riff raff." I also chose a black doughnut from the box she offered me. Chocolate glazed. Coffee and doughnuts. Couldn't refuse.
I so wanted to come over and take for my treasures a piece of her family and heritage. At the same time I felt like an intruder. A vandal. I said as much, expressing my ambivalence.
"It's okay, Jeff," she said. "It's only stuff. I'd like to see you have some of it."
"That black jacket hanging up there looks about your size," the aunt from Colorado said. It was Keith's leather jacket.
"You can just have it," Suzanne told me. "You don't have to pay me anything."
But that didn't seem right to me. "I'll tell you what. You're asking $10 (which was a steal) for it. I'll give you five." So I handed her a five from my wallet and she placed it in the cash box.
Of course I had to go through the boxes of books. Most of them were stuff like How to Draw Cars. I didn't buy those. Felt I should leave them for some aspiring artist who might saunter in. Let that person connect with Keith's artistic genius. And the old Rodder's Journal mags. Let those go to a true car enthusiast. I'd just seize on some of the rock n' roll.
Everything we have here is on loan and we just pass through it, make it a part of ourselves until we check out and pass the cool vibes on to others, which will always include people we never knew in this life.
"I know it's weird, all these strangers going through your family's stuff," I said. "We had the estate sale at my grandpa's place when he was still alive. It paid for him to live in the nursing home."
"It's hard, but it's gotta be done," she said. (My God, it sounded like something I would say.) "Last night I was going through these old drawings my dad made. Some were for my mom. She had this big piece of his heart."
"I hope you're hanging on to those," I said.
"Oh absolutely, I'm going to have them framed."
"And I saw these detailed diagrams of ships in one of the boxes," I said.
"Oh my God, those gotta go to Jax," she said, referring to her son. After graduating from high school, he followed his granddad's lead, joining the Navy. He's currently stationed in Yokosuka, Japan and deployed on the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan. Eerily, his first station is where the old man was stationed when he was young.
"He vacillated back and forth on whether to join the Army or Navy," Suzanne said of her son. Her ex-husband had been in the Army. She was an Army wife stationed in Germany when the picture on the train was taken years ago.
Outside the window, I saw Suzanne's teenage daughter, Karah. (Like me, Suzanne has one boy, one girl.) She smiled at me, just as she had as she walked down the aisle with her family and noticed me sitting there at her grandmother's funeral.She was a wearing KU T-shirt and shorts -- flaunting sweet rebellion at her mom. Actually, I think Karah's going to turn out tougher than Suzanne. Like my daughter, who also has a sensitive older brother, she's a take-no-shit kind of girl, the type who mentally drop-kicked teenage boys at the high school with their indecent proposals involving camera phones. "Fuck you" -- and they were brought down. But she had a sweet smile. I told Suzanne so.
"She knows who you are," Suzanne said. "You 'oughta say hi. Maybe she knows your son from school."
Outside, along the splendid driveway, I caught the young woman's attention.
"Hi Karah, I'm Jeff, a friend of your mom's.
She shook my hand, smiled that smile. "It's nice to meet you."
"Would you happen to know my son, Max Guy? I know he's a couple of classes behind you."
"I don't really know him, but I've heard the name. I know he was Student of the Week last week?"
"Yes, thank you for mentioning that. I was quite proud. His mother and I have always tried to instill good citizenship in our kids as I'm sure your parents have with you and your brother."
A few feet away, the garage started rocking again. The early Rolling Stones' cover of Chuck Berry's "Carol." Cash box shakin' like a money maker should. A group of men, young and old, some smoking, some not, were rolling it up. Leslie -- 5"1" and 118 pound of dynamite -- was like a maestro. In his dementia, Keith had forgotten his oldest daughter's name and took to calling her "The Announcer." The gray garage looked for a second like something from Grease.
When Suzanne and Amy came out and saw me in the leather jacket, it was all real. There was a red pin on the jacket that read, "Rod and Custom magazine." I'm keeping that. Suzanne had another Marlboro Light. Three months earlier, she'd been on Facebook, talking about how she'd gone 21 days without a cigarette. With all the stress, she's taken it up again.
"This is just temporary," she said. "I'm gonna quit again."
"I hope so," I answered. "We'd like to have you around for a while."
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| The Bridge |
"Thank you so much for coming," she said, helping allay the guilty outsider feeling inside me. Then I realized my being there, whether I'd meant it that way or not, was really about two old friends facing the end of those lives that anchored us, our innocence long diminished, the fragility of our own mortality.
"Dad's not eating anymore," she said.
"I'm sorry. I wish it didn't have to be this way."
"He's turning off the lights and he's gonna do it his way."
In the garage, they were wrapping things up like a life. Impact wrench, air compressor, creeper, paint stripper, grinder, tin cutters...all the tools of auto mechanics and restoration. Being sold away (to live some more). The Announcer maintaining cool authority. She was back in town, having boarded a Boeing Jet plane from Philadelphia, PA.
They'd all be there to meet him. Just as they had for Madelyn. A caravan of classic cars lined the parking spaces outside the Methodist Church at her funeral. Keith was a founding member and past president of the Jett Classic Car Club. He wouldn't be forgotten. Some of his contemporaries are still around; some, yeah, they aren't living.
Three weeks later, Suzanne would be on Facebook again, summoning the ghost of her little brother Justin who died in a car accident when he was 21.
"Hey Justin, we know you can hear us. Get that Big Garage in the sky ready for Keith/Dad."
At last, the lights went out. The Big Garage in the Sky was open for business. The grease, soul, the rock n' roll, a revival. (Don't we all need some kind of revival today?) I think the old man's got a hold a' the keys. And he'll never have to clean the place or worry about door dings again.
"Road Runner" -- Bo Didley
