Q & A — Lists & Fragments of Memory, aka Olio, Part 2
Q. What are you trying to accomplish with this?
A. Don’t know yet. Some boundaries of experience perhaps. Maybe a multi-sensory map of my life. Next question.
Q. Then let’s start simple. You have repeatedly labeled yourself a “Jersey Motorhead.” Might sound like a simplistic pose to some, false modesty given other facts of your life.
A. Not that. It’s rather the deep essence of me. Jersey is the permeating smell of salt, the ocean, the river marshes, the tomato trucks lined up on Broad Street in Bridgeton, reeking of rank-sweet earth. The motor is a contradictory thing. Not natural. Man in the driver’s seat. The driver is always alone against the imminent possibility of catastrophe, depending on invisible decisions he will have to make for life or death, possibly within moments. At some deep level of my mind I am always navigating between the life-death equilibrium of the eternal marshland and the life-death equilibrium of my own power over the machine. Nothing in my life escapes this fundamental mix of sensation and mind and body.
Q. We’ll get back to this, believe me. So: What vehicles have you actually owned in your lifetime?
A. First, when I was 14, I bought a 1956 Dodge pickup truck for $100 of the money I’d made cutting lawns. It was lavender and had blown rings. My dad tried to return it to the crook who had sold it to me. Fisticuffs were avoided. So my dad helped me brush paint it BRG (British Racing Green), introduced me to the magic of STP, and let me drive it on miles of dirt roads in the farmland where we lived. Next, after the Dodge burned in a field hayfire, my grandmother gave me her 1954 Mercury, and I hit 60 mph on those same dirt roads. Then I went away again to school and came home with a diploma and $600 for a beat 1968 Triumph Spitfire it took a close family mechanic to save with a crankshaft fix. The Spitfire got stolen my first semester in college, and then came a succession of unmourned vehicles — an MGB that died on the Schuylkill Expressway, a buyback from my dad of a V-8 Chevy Monza he couldn’t sell because, as I learned, it burned out clutches every 500 miles — after which I graduated to a Honda 360 motorcycle, and then a Dodge slant-six pickup, until a crazy friend introduced me to a Chrysler Newport convertible lying fallow in a field. It wasn’t until years later that the friend conceded the convertible tops on old American cars always worked. After that it’s workmanlike: Dodge Speedwagon, Chrysler Cordoba (Stolen), Chrysler Córdoba, 280Z Datsun, 5.0 liter Mustang, Toyota MR2, Porsche 300 Turbo, Dodge 1996 Dakota pickup, and 2002 MR2, which I still own. Enough?
Q. You make it sound oftentimes that you grew up with all the appurtenances of White Privilege. Your vehicle list doesn’t sound like that. What am I missing?
A. Like most, you don’t know what the appurtenances of White Privilege are and how they are obtained. Ask a more precise question about vehicles if you are able.🎱
Q. Okay. What vehicles have you driven or ridden in over this same period of time?
A. Ah. Finally, a good question… (‘R’ will designate Ridden in; everything else is piloted)… This is a very very long list just excerpted here, more important than family trees, vast fortunes, educational credentials, and even geography. What privileged Motorheads find to drive: 1980 blueprinted Trans Am, 350HP Chrysler 300, Boston Whalers 13’ and 16’ (125hp, 55 knots), Jaguar XK120 and 140, XKE, 427 Cobra(R), Square Corvair, 1927 Bugatti Type 27, Rolls Royce Phantom (R), !910 Maxwell, 1929 Hispano Suiza (skiff-bodied, R), White bus to Atlantic City, and all the dross, including WWII Jeep trailing DDT sprayer, Dodge Powerwagon, and Ford, Macmillan and John Deere tractors, PLUS airboat, 38’ sport fishermen cruiser, 60’ custom built yacht through the inland waterway, and lowly garden tractors amped to the full. Several Cessnas (R), once one hired to take us to dinner at Smith College.
Q. Do you ride horses?
A. Yes. Not well but when young, Western and English. Even jumped a little. Also rode in a horse-driven sleigh at Christmastime and in one summer an Amish cart at age 8; he had a pack of Winstons at his side. Life ain’t fer gerbils, eh?
Q. So, is your life all just about you, the great racer and writer? Spoiled hanger-on or bigger thinker?
A. No. And yes, of course. The writer in me won over the driver. The writer is always split. He is, if he is any good, both a participant and an observer. Never lost the desire to win, but separated it in time from the desire to win alone. I came to want to win for an idea. Why I kept exploring new ideas and trying to translate them into terms others could understand.
Q. Let me be more specific. Have you ever done anything “good” that makes you glow, apart from the mind work of writing and consulting?
A. Monica.
Q. Why Monica?
A. She made me feel responsible for the first time. She reminded me of me. Broke through the wall of me. She lost somebody very young. A car and a tree and a death that could have been me, or her, or anyone worthwhile. I had always been so lucky about cars and trees and things. I wanted, for the first time, to feel like I was more than just a writer, but a person. So I cooked, I made her dinner, I actually talked to her. Does it sound like I was autistic before? Maybe I was.
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