My wife and I have an open marriage. She understands that I have certain automotive needs and I don’t ask questions about all the strange shoes she brings home. For me, sites like Ebay.Motors.com and Autotrader.com are like online porn you can talk about around the water cooler the next day. My kink is grandma cars. Cars only driven by little old ladies to church on Sundays. I love them in all shapes and sizes. Heck, I can get my freak on with your Daddy’s Oldsmobile as long as its got it going on in the low mileage department. Like new. Cherry. Mint as new money. That’s what I’m talking about.
One night on Autotrader I came across a promising 1998 BMW 5-series: only 17,179 miles…driven by an honest-to-god little old lady…in Florida…being sold by her son who was, frosting-on-the-cake, a mechanic. Baby, I was gone.
Picking up the car was a family event. My young son Sam has jurisdiction over the naming of all cars and pets and dubbed the car “Speedy” after Speedy Gonzales, his current cartoon character of choice. We were late getting on the road and by the time we got through New York City traffic and out to Kutztown, Pennsylvania where the mechanic son was storing Speedy in his garage, it was well after dark. Switching cars out in the middle of nowhere, under the cover of night, made me feel like we were fugitives, a family on the lam. I joked about this to my wife but she didn’t laugh. It was too close to the truth.
Death was chasing us. I know that sounds paranoid, but as the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. In one nine month period, from July 13th of 2004 to Easter Sunday, March 27th of 2005, our youngest son Ben nearly died because of birth complications, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, my mother had a heart attack and passed away, a freak illness claimed the life of another close friend and finally, after making my own personal Sophie’s Choice to put down one of our beloved dogs because I thought her too crotchety and aggressive for a house with a new baby, the other dog – the nice one – gave my son Sam an object lesson in why you let sleeping dogs lie in the form of a jagged two inch scar down the center of his face.
Getting Speedy came at the end of a shock and awe campaign my wife waged to take Sam’s mind off the dog bite. Grandparents were mobilized. There were multiple shopping sorties to FAO Shwarz and to a pet store for Jasper to pick out a new puppy. A signed baseball was requisitioned from his favorite major-league baseball player. Celebrities were recruited to attend his fourth birthday party. When my wife goes into mama-lion mode, you either get with the program or guess what, you just became one very dead gazelle.
On the way back to New York after picking up Speedy that night, I told Sam that Speedy was our getaway car, the fastest car in the world. To every car we passed, he would joyfully shout out “See ya!” I was grateful to hear him laugh again. I looked back in the rearview mirror. Sam has a dazzling this-kid-could-be-president-someday smile, but all I could see that night were the then-fresh stitches running down his nose like a crooked zipper. Our eyes met in the mirror. It takes the coordinated effort of thirteen separate muscles in your face to smile. For his sake, I did my best to pull it off.
In pictures taken in the wake of everything that happened, my wife and I have the thousand-yard-stare of young soldiers made old by combat. Post-traumatic stress is the gift that keeps on taking. Getting to the end of a crisis really just means making it to base camp for the long uphill climb to full recovery. I told myself that we were fine. We just needed a vacation, a chance to get away.
We staked all our hopes and prayers – not to mention several thousand dollars – on a month in the country. The idyllic vacation property we rented in Connecticut was, literally, something out of a magazine. But as beautiful as the pictures were, they just didn’t do justice to all of the lovely details which made our five acre farm retreat such a special place to take young children: the tree house equipped with clever, easy-to-leave-open trap doors, the inviting frog pond deep enough to drown in, the quaint potting shed chock-full of brightly colored insecticide containers and, my personal favorite, the steep colonial stairways tailor-made for the cleaving of toddler’s skulls.
My wife came to our vacation in a state of nervous exhaustion, just completely worn out from worry. But now, thanks to these wonderful amenities, she had a whole new lease on anxiety. She became like the Magyver of all Jewish mothers. She could take a few simple items – a paper clip, a glass of water, a toaster oven – and easily improvise half a dozen household accidents, each capable of wiping out our entire family.
I wanted us to be like the people you see on talk shows who emerge from adversity chock-full of carpe diem, ready to jog across America on one leg because they’re just so darn happy to be alive. Instead I lay awake nights wishing I was dead, blaming myself for Sam’s dog bite. The bite happened in our master bedroom. Training the dog off the bed was just one of those little things I never quite got around to doing. My insomnia gave me countless hours to ponder the question of what I had done with the five minutes a day it would have taken to prevent my son from being maimed. My wife kept me company on these long, sleepless nights surfing the web for what she must have done to give Ben the life-threatening pneumonia with which he had been born. Our nightly ménage-a-trois with guilt. It was easier to blame ourselves for everything than face the fact that these things, these terrible things, can and do just happen; that we live in a world where death can fall from a clear blue sky and there is nothing we can really do to completely protect our children.
If your family is falling apart emotionally, the very least you can do is handle it like a man: tell everyone that everything is fine, just fine – and then figure out some excuse for getting out of the house. That’s what real men do. My wife found the regularity with which we ran out of sunscreen during our month in the country simply astounding. And how was it possible that my runs to the store always took at least an hour even though town was less than five miles away? Well, you had to work at it.
My favorite route took Speedy and I far into the next county and all the way around Lake Waramug. The twisty country roads of rural Connecticut, especially when driving Speedy a healthy twenty miles per hour over the speed limit, gave me a much needed jolt of “farfegnugen.”
farfegnugen – n., a speed-induced euphoric state in which the driver of an automobile believes he/she is moving at a sufficient rate of speed to leave all troubles behind. Also see DENIAL.
In the year following our well-appointed train wreck of a vacation, I just tried to stay focused on the road ahead. I didn’t dare look in the rear view mirror because in it was only heartache and the warning that objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.
But everything was fine, just fine. Well, my wife was having just a few issues. Nothing to get excited about, just run-of-the-mill post-traumatic stress syndrome stuff: difficulty sleeping, panic attacks, agoraphobia, killer migraines, that sort of thing. But the kids were fine. I mean, Ben was having some language development delays because of his time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit but we were pretty sure there wasn’t any irreversible neurological damage. And yes, Sam’s nose scar was still very noticeable a year after the dog bite that was no biggy because who was lucky enough to know the best plastic surgeon in the city? That’s right, us. Why wait for puberty to make him self-conscious about his scar when we could have a crack medical team poke and prod him next Thursday at one o’clock?
Through all this, I was the calm center of the storm. A rock. Somebody has to wear the daddy pants. My wife accused me of practicing avoidance. I told her look, even if I knew what that was, with my crazy schedule – work, renovating our loft, teaching at the university, volunteering at the hospital, my new exercise regime – when would I have the time to practice anything? My wife also claimed that, despite the quality time we spent cuddling every night during the three or four hours I would wind down enough to sleep, despite my attentive nodding and smiling at all the appropriate places when she told me about her day, despite my giving her my shoulder to cry on, even when I was writing on my laptop or talking on the phone, that I still, somehow, wasn’t “there” enough for her. Women. Didn’t I have enough on my plate without her yelling and screaming about not knowing who I was anymore and our marriage falling apart or some damn thing?
Arguing became the new sex. We could get in on anywhere, anytime, even public places. Shouting matches in the street. Yeah, we became those people. Even though the only real explanation for what happened to us was the fine print about life not being fair, when bad things happen, you want someone, something, to blame. God wasn’t returning our calls, so we turned on each other.
I still loved my wife. I did. It was just that I would rather spend my time on Ebay. Ebay accepted me the way I was. All I needed to feel adequate was a credit card and a Paypal account.
EBAY LISTING #4620111528: LOW, LOW, LOW MILES – Amazing 1994 BMW 740i in Orient Blue Metallic over Parchment Leather. An absolutely impeccable example of a truly fine luxury car…
It was a one-owner car kept in a climate-controlled garage in Dallas for the CEO of a large corporation in case he ever felt like driving himself to the golf course when he was in town. Never driven in the snow. Never smoked in. Never crashed. Like new. Every car starts off new, like a baby, but only cars that the fates have smiled upon, to whom life has been truly kind, can remain like new, ever young, untouched by the ravages of time. Speedy wasn’t like new anymore – too many getaway trips that didn’t get us anywhere but someplace new and different to have the same old issues.
In light of that, it takes a real man to think that the answer for all our problems was buying a new car. I just so desperately needed something, anything, in our lives to feel like new again. I pictured us in the big blue Bimmer, happy again, driving up to New England to see the leaves change. The notion of marking the passing of time completely intoxicated me. There was a before to what happened to us but there had never really been an after. Time stopped for us when our child entered the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). We understood, vaguely, that somewhere out there, days were following nights just the way they used to, but not for us. In the NICU, clocks mean nothing. You stare for hours, and then days, without blinking, without daring to breathe, at the numbers on your baby’s vital signs monitor to see whether or not his time was up. That’s what time it is. Two years and many more traumas later, we were still waiting to exhale. The other shoe to drop. The next trip to the hospital…
* * *
The doctor told me Sam wouldn’t feel much pain. It would all be over in seconds.
And then he smiled.
I eyed the plastic surgeon warily. I didn’t have much experience with smiling doctors. He told me there was nothing to worry about. The “fraxel” laser treatment he was about to perform was just the laser equivalent of fine sandpaper, it would subtly smooth out Jasper’s scar while stimulating the growth of new skin. Fairly painless. No real side effects. It all sounded too good to be true.
I looked over at Sam. One nurse was playing with the blue surgical dye they used to mark the treatment area on his nose, dabbing some on her own nose to make him laugh while the other nurse tickled him to get him to hand over his Gameboy. They were about to point a laser at my son’s face – why weren’t they taking this seriously?
Then everything started moving very fast. The doctor and the nurses closed in, a wall of surgical green between me and my son. Cold sweat trickled down my spine. I had seen this all before. I flashed back to the night they stitched him up in the ER…the night they performed emergency surgery on Ben in the NICU…the night my mother died.
Sam cried out. I saw his limbs tense. And then it was all over.
They put a cold pack on Sam’s nose and he went back to winning the World Series on his Gameboy as if nothing had happened.
I was literally stunned. I had to hold onto the counter to steady myself and I couldn’t quite follow what the Doctor was saying, something about applying sunscreen…
“Get him on the table!”
The nurses whisked Jasper out of the room as they laid me down on the operating table and placed cold packs all over my body. I tried to protest that all this fuss wasn’t really necessary, that I was fine, just fine but my mouth wasn’t working right. What the hell happened to me?
I fainted. Or would have, had they not used the smelling salts to revive me. Fainted.
If it were actually physically possible to die from embarrassment, I would be pushing up daisies as we speak. The nurse reassured me that my reaction was normal; that many parents simply became overwhelmed by seeing their children in pain. She handed me a Kleenex.
That’s when I noticed I was crying. I broke down, in front the nurse, a stranger, in a way that I had never allowed myself to in front of my wife and children during the entirety of our crisis. I told myself they needed me to be strong for them. And I wasn’t wrong about that. But now that the crisis was over, my wife missed that sweet guy she’d fallen in love with, who could cry at movies and knew how to cuddle. And you know what? I missed him too.
About the same time Sam got the new treatment to help him deal with his scar, Ben got a new speech therapist to help him deal with his language development. My wife got a new neurologist to help her deal her migraine headaches and a new therapist to help her deal with the fact that there are things that happen in this life that just can’t be helped and, unfortunately, that’s just the deal. And me, well, I got a deal on a “like new” car.
The big blue Bimmer glistened in the sun like the paint was still wet. Mint as new money. The seller handed me the keys. I got in. The door closed with a deeply satisfying bank vault “WHUMP.” The leather seats were the color of honey and soft as a baby’s butt. Burled walnut and inlaid boxwood wrapped around you in the cabin like a nice, big, they-just-don’t-make-‘em-like-this-anymore hug. I turned the key. The throaty V-8 rumbled pleasantly to life like a sleepy giant humming a little Bavarian ditty about tearing down the Autobahn to grandmother’s house at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.
“What do you think?” the seller asked.
You had me at “CLICK HERE TO BUY IT NOW” was what I thought. I know, I know – no car is fast enough to leave your troubles behind and buying it really wasn’t the answer for anything. But I figured what the hell, life is short.
You can’t be afraid to live a little.