A Legacy Project

They could hear me, of course. For some reason back then that thought never occurred to me. My parents slept with their bedroom windows open for fresh summer night air, also to hear the owls in the woods across Scott Road. That’s what they said. But they must have been listening for me some of those late nights. I’d drive up River Road at 1:00, 2:00, 2:30 a.m., driving a very safe 25 mph, sometimes half drunk, sometimes half high on a joint I’d smoked earlier in the night with the boys in town. Sometimes both. Half and half made a whole, a person wholly dangerous to himself. I’d turn left onto Scott Road, then right onto Delaney drive, downshifting my rumble-enhanced VW. If they heard me, they didn’t let on. They must have heard the back door open and then click shut. He’s home. Still in one piece.  

As soon as I graduated from high school, June 1970, I bought a new car, a VW bug. My dad knew a guy named Clare Yoder who worked as a salesman at the VW lot down in Midland. He was, my dad said, a good church-going man. Clare and I shook hands across his showroom desk, and the car was mine. And the bank’s. I made payments, $60 a month, on my loan from Freeland State Bank, writing checks in my Freeland State Bank checking account. A month after I started driving it, I had a special muffler put on the car’s exhaust system. And larger tires mounted on the back. The car looked a little more muscular, despite the fact that it was yellow and could have served as a model for a cake decoration. The new muffler made the 40 hp engine louder. When I took it through the gears, my VW sounded like a real sports car. So given that enhancement, those nights when I was driving up River Road at 25 mph, my parents would have been able to hear me even better, the low rumble of the engine in third gear, the rise and fall of rpm’s when I down-shifted and accelerated.

There were signs. The new car smell was soon replaced by the smell of smoke. I smoked cigarettes at the time, too. But I wonder now if my dad, when he had to move the car, didn’t think it smelled like a dope den. What’s that odd smell? He might have asked. But he didn’t. He probably didn’t want to know. I was coming to work on time. I was making my car payments. I’d decided, at the last minute that summer, to go to the local community college, where my brother went. He and I talked.  We were both dabbling in substances. We knew the risks. We were dabbling. It was a fad. Was it? 

And we were headed toward . . . what? A fall? A crash? A reckoning?

Midsummer, I installed an 8-track tape deck in the VW and drove up north, windows down, the system playing Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” as loud as I could stand it.