In Dad We Rust

If we want to figure out how to impart knowledge to a new generation, we have to get TikTok to rust. When there was analog, there was rust, everywhere, like water for chocolate. Hitting one’s formative years in the bright, dayglow pop of the 80s was nonetheless still a decade of living in the belly of a criminally repurposed Russian trawler, some eight hundred voyages beyond its projected lifespan. Everything rusted around you to an alarming degree. That period may well have seen an explosion of plastics and fiberglass sneak their way into our childhoods through Happy Meal boxes and Tupperware parties, but everything remotely adult about us was leftovers from the Vietnam era; not old enough to be classic, never new enough to avoid tetanus. You wanted a gas-powered lawn mower to help with your chores, but what you got was a guy fathering you solely through platitudes and the same rusty push mower that had sliced off his pinky toe in 1963. You wanted to sneak your giant, thirteen-breed, untrained, grocery-store-box dog into your bedroom at night to sleep under your covers and surprise your mother in the morning. Instead, you spent every afternoon with a greatly Danish mutant named Gorgonzola effortlessly laying you out, sweeping your legs at the speed of puppy chow, by clotheslining your ankles with the thick, oxidized horse chain that tethered his neck to a rustier iron screw-stake pierced to the Earth’s core. You couldn’t decide if you were going to blow their minds at the senior year science fair with a tornado in a box or your COBOL, deep space listening algorithm for S.E.T.I., but your folks associated any ideas newer than the moon landing with whorish, coked-up music videos and devil worship. So, it was back to the model volcano and that always meant old, rusty chicken wire.

Thusly, while random conclaves of men, most in denial about their own half-baked skills for troubleshooting carburetors or identifying flanges, spent their down-time putting ideas into my father’s already “progress-stopped-at-vinyl” head, my early motor vehicle destinies were being secretly set. Together they’d grumble about “inferior” Japanese cars and “thieves” in every American dealership. They’d nitpick at anecdotes about some distant third cousin who’d been thrown free from an out-of-control van that continued on over a cliff and then exploded, twice; just to offer a supposedly informed protest against the new seat belt laws. The distant advent of carpool lanes had been rumored and men like these were already organizing against them, sporting collective arguments like, “What’s next, rich cocksucker lanes?” Triangular vent windows were disappearing from auto design and threatening everybody’s addiction to unfiltered tobacco, most of whom had honed their lifelong jones’ by age ten and were now considering the comparatively viable option to never again get in a car with their families, rather than drive without smoking. Suddenly, there were two seats in the front of each car replacing the one, long deathtrap bingo spot in the center over which a person would straddle the manufacturer’s compliant trash pail in a poised position for dashboard head trauma and inter-windshield launch. But, you know, eliminating that was all somehow bad. Let’s just say that I wish I had a nickel for every time in my youth I saw a full-grown man take a sip of beer and then exclaim like he’d been kneed in the nuts, “Crumple zones! What the fuck is a crumple zone?!”

You take these concepts and you drill them into a man like my father, who blamed inflation on drug dealers and taxes on foreigners, and you come out with an overly-frugal, depression-born, Greatest Generation aficionado who would rather tell you about a G.I. taking a bath in his army helmet than pay more than forty cents for a cup of coffee…when the going rate was seventy-five. I didn’t have to reach driving age to know there was a lot of rust in my future.

Dad didn’t believe in buying new. That went for pretty much anything. If you think I’m exaggerating this part, you should fast forward to the scene in my living room that I’d later used in a college admissions essay, pretty much getting pitied into my chosen courses of study. It’s a quick scene wherein he and my mother argued for two straight hours over the “extra” six dollar cost of a mandatory Regents exam prep book I first needed for seventh-grade math. I’ve had a billion friends unpack that moment in my life to just as many different conclusions. Point is, he gave me the money for the book, but he never again slept with or nearly even spoke to my mother. That’s how serious these cost issues were to him. Hence, it should come as little surprise to learn that Dad found creative ways hold me off from getting a learner’s permit until age eighteen and to keep me broke enough never to add a low-riding TransAm or Eagle Talon purchase to his insurance. Three, 5 a.m. trips through questionable neighborhoods to ferry me to work, with the summer’s end prospect of doing the same everyday to get me to college, and we were on the hunt for an automobile of my own.

Dad has never set foot in a dealership. It would make him burst into flames like a vampire. He still wears that fact like a badge of courage. He also never took me to a used car lot, because, well, despite the discount, if anyone was more evil than a politician, it was a used car salesman; Ecclesiastes 13:10. You’d think that the next step down from there would be the only one left, the trick when you sheepishly go up to the abandoned department store parking lot to see that random sellers have lined up an array of lightly crashed muscle cars and station wagons alongside the highway. They’ll have adorned their dashboards with oversized oak tag and magic marker signs, labelling them for sale and writing out a phone number in block characters. Nope. We didn’t go there either. That would be playing right into their hands! You see, these people put their used cars near the highway, not to increase the odds of attracting a buyer, but to keep their home address a national security level secret from you. This was Long Island, New York. Never mind that we could peek at their address on the registration pasted to the windshield. Never mind that, if we bought the car, we were going to see the address on the transfer paperwork at the DMV. In my Dad’s head, if you were unwilling to sell your car from your own front lawn, you, my friend, had something to hide. Oh, the audaciousness of you! You were going to make us go home, and then call you, and then arrange to meet you back in the weedy, ghost-like W. T. Grants sidelot at twilight, where you’d further make us wait up to ten excruciating minutes for your own arrival, thereby purposely and connivingly putting us in a deficient negotiating position and allowing sundown to hide your wicked face. Besides, who are these crazy people who have money just lying about to spend on fancy orange oak tag from the only art store in a 50-mile radius? We know the same three sheets have been for sale at the local Genovese Drugs for nine years and all those discount sheets are white. My pater, Admiral Ackbar.

Dad had a unique purchasing strategy. We’d just drive and drive and drive, all back roads, every neighborhood, all summer, searching for cars on lawns with “regular” 8½ by 11 looseleaf paper signs only large enough to list a price and not even the words “for sale.” If he could spot the frenzied edges of a paper that had been pulled from a spiral notebook, that was somehow a bonus. You see, the second-hand car market at the time would’ve pegged most of these automobiles, even in poor condition, around an $1800 resale value. There were larger mark-ups at official lots and evil wizards out there with Kelly Blue Book spells, but that was the baseline and, to Dad, that was ridiculous. $1800 was save-a-baby-from-cancer money. $1800 was the total he paid for our house in 1963, clearly a more valuable decision than opting to reattach that year’s pinky toe. He claimed all summer he was looking for the best deal, but the truth, as I saw it, was that he couldn’t abide paying corporate level, Jerry Lewis Telethon money for a used car he was sure my teenage brain was going to wrap around a phone pole by Labor Day. Nope. The second-hand market was not our sweet spot. We were looking for fifth-hand, a low bar, its main provenance and selling feature perhaps being that it had never gotten used in a bank heist. Plus, you needed to be willing to take twenty-five bucks off the top if it had ever been at the bottom of a lake. It caught on fire once? That’s okay. The driver’s side door doesn’t open? There’s another door. Your aunt died in the back? The auto parts store has all three scents of air freshener and a new one shaped like a pineapple. I was rarely allowed out of his truck to see the cars up close, but, windows down, I could hear these grown-up conversations openly discussing the ages of duct tape that held on bumpers and lists of top ten reasons a college student shouldn’t need a muffler. Dad would spend enormous spans of time peering under their hoods, engines on, pretty much pretending he knew what he was looking at, so that the seller would become concerned and autonomously offer to drop the price.

If Dad got to both a price dropped in this way and a point in the negotiation when he felt I couldn’t throw his haggling savvy under the bus, I’d be invited out for a test drive. He’d stay behind to nickel and dime some more, to act as human collateral should I decide to hit the gas and make for Mexico on the lamb in a stolen AMC Pacer with three dollars and a churro dream. Yet, the test drive was not me testing the car. It was him signaling to me that he was getting the price he wanted. We were buying it. It was our interpersonal code prompting that I should neither say a word nor “make a face” at the tsunami of rust that started at the rear door undercarriage and had spread to form entire continents and beachheads clear up over the roof. And mind you, I’m not talking about post-pandemic era rust, the sort that changes a few decent metal items around your shed to a smooth, even, happenstance shade of caramel. I’m talking about tooth decay rust, riddled with holes and looking like shit-brown dried coral, a living entropy that snapped off the edges of a car like bark, daily. It came infected with flesh eating viruses and bad decisions. Rust on every one of these cars was worse than the next. Apart from the engines, transmissions, and a couple exposed coils jabbing you from the seats, I don’t think there were three ounces of actual remaining metal between them. Driving these behemoths was like watching a time lapse video of splits opening up all around you with unobstructed views of the sky and pavement, like termites devouring a boat you found yourself floating on down a river of lava. But, I was kind of desperate. And, in truth, for my area, for the time, and for kids my age, this was kind of the norm. Everybody had a trunk tied almost shut with a rope, a deep, breezy split up the middle of their windshield, one wheel that wasn’t quite round. I’d see old friends driving around with a dislodged front seat in their back seat or an old, and yes rusty, melon baller in place of their gear shift. I swear the unmatched, mal-fitting fender replacement industry must have been booming! I’ll just say it. Nobody had a grill. Nobody…had…a grill.

Just to illustrate, many years later, in college, a dear friend’s father had simultaneously purchased her a used Honda and this new device called a cellular phone that she was to keep in her glovebox for emergencies. They had lesser means than me and my Dad, but her car looked intact, nice even. It had working AC and was all a single color. All of her windows rolled down. The front two were even electric. I noted that it wasn’t her birthday or a holiday and I asked if her dad was rewarding her for some achievement I didn’t yet know about. She told me there was no occasion. It was just really important to her father that she was as safe as can be while out on the road. Here’s the kicker, I HAD NEVER HEARD OF THAT BEFORE! Not once had the concept made its way into my life. I told my friends, Bumperdrag, Dead-Shocks, and Invisihood about it and they had never heard of such a thing either. When I told the Phone Pole Bane brothers, they laughed and called me a liar through their wired jaws. Buying your kid a car with safety as the priority? How was that supposed to discourage them from going out and raising your insurance rates one ditch at time? Our minds were blown, like our tires, monthly. The concept was more foreign to us than a magic phone that could make a call from anywhere.

Back to Dad’s code, though. Clearly, I would have had no way to discern that this was Dad’s super-spy communication technique had I not detected a pattern, which, given that “test drive” equaled “purchase,” meant that he had to buy more than one car for me to catch wise. One might wonder exactly how many cars the man bought for me over time. For a person who comes off in my recollections sounding uncouth and uber-cheap, you’d be surprised.

I can joke about Dad all day, roasting his most sensitive, manly innards. But it took me several years to figure out, another two to prove, and an additional few months to get him to admit…those never-ending drives weren’t about finding used cars. They were about spending summers with me. Hard cash for cars that would soon die horrible, spontaneously transmission-ejecting deaths, mutually assured that we’d be shopping again. He continued, for years, to have me spend my money on other things, needed or not, so that when one car wound up as an art piece on his lawn before getting junked, we’d go out to look for another. The whole danger aspect was this oddly expressed father-son trust that I could handle whatever shape a surprise might take. In all, between the ones that he paid for outright, the ones he chipped in for, and the ones he loaned me money for (every cent of which I have since paid back), we went through this charade for five summers, six cars; not a single vehicle purchased newer than 12 years of age, with fewer miles than 210,000, or with the number of owners previous to me averaging any less than four. The MOST we ever paid for one of these rust buckets was $800, and that “high-end” investment was an outlier.

It is because my father chose to express his love in this way that I can fill your day with anecdotes about the cream-colored ’76 Volare sedan, my very first car in ’89, with AM-only radio, a gaping hole in the floor, and one tire replacement that no matter what you did, deflated about every third night. Hub caps used to come flying off the thing at only 15 miles an hour. Not one of those ever matched the others. The car idled at, like, 18 mph. The parking brake took an elephant to set and a Tasmanian devil to release. She had a decent turning radius, to the right, about half that to the left, when it wasn’t raining. Doors stuck. It had AC but was missing the switch to turn it on. Its body since makes me suspect that Jackson Pollock got his start in rust colors. Shock absorption was on par with bellyflopping, naked, onto cement, from a third story window. It didn’t start if the temperature dropped below 30, adding intrigue to the story about a winter’s day drive to school where, at an empty, icy intersection, I lightly touched my brakes after only having sped to about 10 from the previous stop behind me. At this moment my car also stalled. These two actions, coupled with the odd misalignment and alien weight distribution in my vehicle, resulted in me in my Volare, ever so slowly, sliding quietly through the red light, diagonally, like a turtle on a Slip ’N Slide. I looked every which way in a panic to spot oncoming cars, suddenly seeing to my left the police officer who would never take the chance to pull me over thereafter, because his perfectly running patrol car was likewise, but more embarrassingly, drifting through the intersection in diagonal parallel to my cheap old, $500, disintegrating Volare.

That car and I enjoyed eight months of adventures together until I drove 80 miles east of home to a little hotel in farm country. My girlfriend and I had our first ever sexual experience that night, away from the prying comments and questions of parents. It left us in a warm, daytime afterglow, right up until the point on the return trip that my Volare threw a rod, blasting it all the way through the engine block. We were by a cow pasture, 12 miles from the nearest business with a pay phone. Such a glow ends when you’re both hoofing it in 90-degree weather, too dumb to have packed extra underwear. I guess I should have hooked up with the friend whose father cared about her, so we’d have a cell phone.

A day later, my father didn’t seem all that angry about matters. I mean, he should have been. He personally called the cab company to make good on the $290 rural cab ride for which my broke, teenage ass had provided the driver a nifty I.O.U. on a Post-It note. That ate up any chance of paying toward a thousand-dollar tow. So, Dad got his buddy with a truck to PUSH him (I’ll write that again) PUSH him, in the Volare, in neutral, the remaining 55 miles home. Not easy given that it was all hilly, back roads so that onlookers to the stunt would be minimized, lesser chance of cops…more insurance ditches though. A moment of silence, please, for Volare sedan.

As the day ended, I asked him why he wasn’t madder. I mean, throughout the 80s he seemed mad at everything from Toyotas to schoolbooks. He just laughed. When I asked him what was so funny, he told me he hadn’t expected the car to last that long. Eight months was a gift. He’d secretly given it three. Out again we went to find another.

The next several summers saw me in a ’77 Volare station wagon, a ’79 Celica, an ’81 Tercel, and an early Ford Escort hatchback. The ridiculous problems they arrived with seemed almost interchangeable, car to car: sticky choke; cracked radiator; doors that dragged on the ground when you opened them; windows that wouldn’t roll up; windows that wouldn’t roll down; missing gas caps that cost more than we paid for the car; and one entire steering column that functioned, but was so loose the whole thing could be moved around like a joystick in a fighter jet. In a pinch, those quirks could also seem interchangeable with the insane problems later occurring during our vehicular adventures together: a torsion bar that snapped under the car’s own weight at a stoplight; imploding roof; cracked heads in the engine that left a trail of billowing smoke a mile back; a heater that stuck ON during a summer trip from New York to Boston; a cassette player that only ate cassettes; a headlight that suddenly pointed up; brake pads the mechanic had put on backwards; rear-ended by a guy asleep at the wheel; rear-ended by a rolling Gremlin with nobody in it at T.G.I. Fridays; mufflers dragging; mufflers detaching; mufflers twisting into odd directions and pretzels; four-hundred thousand flat tires; and the day when the only gear that worked to get up and across the Verrazano Bridge was first. Rust was their calling card, but adventure was their calling.

The last car to mention, the best car in that whole crestfallen, despondent “Detroit has peaked” series was car number two. While Volare sedan was being dismembered at a chop shop on the wrong side of the tracks, and the whole of the fifth-hand purchasing world was on pins and needles waiting for the price to come down on the Volare’s namesake station wagon out by Old Mill Road, Dad spotted its replacement some eighteen curvy blocks deep into the overly-wooded, Deliverance neighborhood we’d never thought to visit. I couldn’t believe he was even considering it. It was the oldest of the bunch, but somehow pristine and gleaming. There wasn’t a speck of rust on it. I thought he was teasing me. It must be a trick, a joke. Given the presence of so much dilapidation in my high school parking lot, it took a second look to even recognize that this was a car. Dad went and rang the doorbell. He and a gentleman much older than him came out, commencing to Dad’s normal routine. I think I heard a whisper about the guy’s wife passing and a giggle about a fire extinguisher. Six-hundred bucks and a three-minute test drive later, we were rolling out of there the proud new owners of a bright, hunting orange, 1975 Pinto station wagon.

Now, if you haven’t learned it yet from TikTok, Pinto was a model of automobile previously infamous, the nation over, for exploding into flame when somebody rear-ended you. There was a flaw in the design whereby long bolts affixing other parts of the car wound up pointed directly at the gas tank, like a bullet in a chamber waiting for a trigger to be pulled. For that reason, though later recalled and handled, everyone from my generation could spot them a mile away and avoided them like the plague. They were the punch line in a million jokes. We’d be made to pick them out on family car trips. Oh, but this one looked so dashingly new. Everything in it turned both on…and off…and worked in between. It was like God’s car. The doors closed plumb to their seams. Outdoor road noise was muffled, sounding like it had to get through layers of thick metal to reach you. The belts didn’t screech. The engine turned over with a single touch of the key. Was that rubber on the tires?

This was it. I didn’t care about the Pinto’s sketchy reputation. This was the car that was going to launch me into adulthood. This car demanded respect. This was the car that was going to allow me to reconcile with my girlfriend, in style, after her forced twelve-mile march from the Decepticon. I was going to heed my father’s words and just presume, at all times, that there was a loose wire in my teenage brain that drew me like a gravity well toward ditches and sink holes and phone poles and trees and sharks and pedestrians with baby carriages that hadn’t been used since pinky toe ’63. I was going to resist that urge, fight it. I would always be alert. I would always follow the speed limit. I would yield rights of way and privileges of way and happenstances of way. If I could, I would yield curds of whey. I would drive this car, beckoning ne’er a scratch, out everyday on a safety-first bender, polishing it every weekend and feeding it only the best gasoline for its comfort and longevity. I was going to learn about engines, and then massage them, learn about upholstery, and then never let anyone touch it. I was going to be immediately inducted into The Motor Vehicle Hall of Fame. And even with all those angels singing in mind, this car, when I thought about it, had an added bonus. I repeat, rustless, bright, hunting orange, possibly exploding, Pinto station wagon. If ever there was a car that screamed out “DON’T HIT ME!” this was the one. I’d be driving this car until I was ninety.

Two weeks later a drunk driver blew through two stop signs and a red light to total me. The father-son rust hunt began anew. Dad brought candy to the emergency room.

I’m not so obtuse as to go with that old generational stand-by, claiming that rust or even pointless hardship builds character, even in my comedic rear view. Rust doesn’t make you a better driver. Rust doesn’t make you a better person. Rust won’t save you from morons. Neither does it need to make some swooping, vengeful comeback into each little particular of contemporary society. But, at least in my case, with the many wanting trinkets rusting away around every corner of my teenage and young adult life; rust was a sly old clock that could be set, semi-dependably, to go off when time would be best spent in quality tasks with one’s child. I have daughters now. I can tell you, try as I might to make it, TikTok cannot offer that.