Richard

I’m not yet 16 years old. All I have is a School Permit to drive.

Which means I can only legally transport myself to and from school. There’s some ambiguity about whether that includes school functions like sporting events I’m not directly participating in.

In my tight-knit Nebraska community, nobody cares much about the ambiguity as long as kids don’t abuse the privilege.

Not so in big city Yankton, South Dakota. If I want to fly the 1969 four-door Ford with it’s big 390 V8 across state lines, I need a pilot.

Fortunately, my friend Terry is more than 16. And it’s my good luck that he doesn’t have a car of his own.

A summer’s evening in Yankton, and Terry is behind the Ford’s steering wheel, tooling down the  street in front of the Dakota theater. Sitting to his right, I’m acting as co-pilot with the window down. Hal and Jack are in the back seat.

We’re cranking an 8-Track through the rear window Bose speakers, Get the Knack.

We’re on our way to a James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only.

Terry slows down at the intersection for a yellow light, and I see a familiar figure on the sidewalk, strolling toward the theater.

It’s a teacher from back in the tight-knit community. He’s walking with another fellow, chatting and laughing it up.

Waiting for the light, I turn down the stereo, then hang my head out the window. “Hey, hey!” I holler. “Hey, Mister Z_______!”

Mister Z stops in his tracks. So does his pal.

The light’s now turned red. The guys in the back see who I’m yelling at, and start a commotion of their own, calling out their open window.

“What’s up, Z? How’s it going?”

Nothing derogatory. Nothing to embarrass or insult. We all love Mister Z.

But we’re teenage boys, out on the town. And we crave attention.

And we get attention.

But not from our teacher.

Instead, it’s his companion who charges into the street, shaking his fist.

The guy’s like a cross between Burt Reynolds and Andre the Giant, bearing down on the Ford with a red face, ripped muscles and polyester slacks.

He’s at the car. He’s reaching through the back window.

Spit flies as he curses through clenched teeth.

“What’d you say, to me?”

I think he’s got a grip on Hal’s neck.

“I’m sick of you little shits, always in my face,” he says.

I fall away from the window. “Drive, Terry! Drive!” I say.

“Can’t!” Says Terry. “It’s a red light.”

Neil screams from the back. “Run the light!”

“You bastards,” says our attacker, swinging into a roundhouse kick that lands his zippered ankle boot into the rear door with a crunch.

At the sound of contact, Terry hits the gas, runs the light, and is a block down the street before taking a breath.

In a side street parking lot we stop. Breathe. Stare at each other.

Did what happen actually just happen? There are red marks on Hal’s neck.

I stumble out of the car.

There’s a dent in the side of the car.

What do we do now?

“Find a cop,” says Hal.

“Yeah, let’s find a cop!” Says Neil.

Terry shrugs.

I’m almost willing to let it all slide, but for two things.

First I’m going to have to explain the dent in the car to my dad. Second, my dad is on the school board. There’s no way I can protect Mister Z.

And really, why should I?

I agree with the guys in back. “Let’s find a cop.”

It takes us about fifteen minutes, but eventually we flag down a police cruiser. We show the officer the dent in the car, explain what happened.

“What did you boys do to provoke this guy?” He says.

“We called out to our teacher,” I say. “That’s it.”

“No profanity? No name calling?” The officer’s just making sure.

But the truth is, we didn’t do any of that.

Ten minutes later, we’re buying our tickets, walking into the theater with an usher who swings a mean flashlight. The policeman waits for us in the lobby.

Mister Z and his temperamental friend are in a back row.

We confront them. They’re embarrassed. Our teacher, doubly so. He introduces us.

Mister Z explains that his cousin has the same last name.

Cousin Z thinks we were yelling at him.

He’s lately had trouble with some young toughs in his neighborhood.

He honestly thought we were them, calling out his name. Harassing him. He apologizes.

Hal has his doubts. Neil’s not sure. Terry and I believe him.

The entire thing is a goofy mistake.

The next morning, Cousin Z calls my dad, apologizes again. He pays for the car door.

I think a lot about this night during the next three decades.

A lot.

What if Cousin Z would’ve had a gun? What if one of us would’ve had a gun?

What if Cousin Z had remained belligerent, unwilling to back down when confronted with his mistake?

What if I or my dad would’ve pressed the issue?

There are lessons here from both sides of the conflict.

Big picture lessons.

Lessons about jumping to conclusions and controlling your temper.

Lessons for young men about how to act in a world of strangers. How to communicate effectively.

Wherever he is today, I wish I could buy Cousin Z a beer, and thank him for those lessons.

It’s the year 2002.

We have a puppy. A baby basset hound named Moses.

We have a Steinway square grand piano that a friend of ours is restoring to full tonal functionality.

The case, with gleaming walnut finish, slumbers in the music room. The soundboard, heavy and unwieldy, waits on the dining room floor.

The keyboard and action undergoes a meticulous transformation. Our friend knows his craft and custom builds at least three hammers to laser-fine precision.

Gina hopes her antique treasure will sing again, even better than before.

All that wood looks tempting to the puppy who one day wanders into the workroom while we are out.

He’s bored. Feeling mischievous.

The action is at knee level on a low table. All those hammers and keys look like candy.

I don’t have to tell you what happens next.

When we get home, Moses is in big trouble.

In life, there are real tragedies. Disasters beyond the scale of comprehension.

This is not one of them.

But it’s close. For a few minutes, it’s explosively close.

You can feel the air heat up as Gina stomps toward the dog. You can smell the ozone burn.

Defiance in both sets of eyes.

Moses’ days are numbered.

I take bets with myself, trying to remember the number for the animal shelter.

It’s not the first time he’s done something like this. There was the potted plant. The pile of magazines.

The pillow incident.

But this time it’s different. This time, the dog ruined something of true merit—chewing up a symbol of status, of ego like a ten cent strip of rawhide.

The piano will now cost twice as much to restore. If it can be restored at all.

We don’t have a baby human yet. But this is one of our first lessons as parents.

Status and ego? That’s on you, the parent.

Relationship. Fumbling around with consequences to actions. Learning what’s appropriate and what’s not.

That’s what children—and puppies—are into.

Gina scoops Moses into her arms and gives him a rough hug.

He laps away her tears of anger.

He’s disciplined, but ultimately forgiven. And of course the piano is fixed.

For the rest of his life, and with no urging from us, he makes his bed underneath the fine tuned Steinway.

He’s got good taste in musical instruments.

And apparently it tasted good too.

The truck is just over four feet long and  little more than a foot wide, a red cab with a powder blue box made of tacked and glued quarter-inch plywood.

To me, it looks enormous. I couldn’t be more surprised if a diesel smoke belching Peterbilt shoved in the kitchen wall and rolled over the living room furniture.

Grandpa walks around the front bumper, a silver strip of bent aluminum and kicks the lawnmower tires. “It’s all yours,” he says, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. He points at the blue Nebraska plate nailed to the rear. “You’ll need to keep that license up over the years,” he warns.

Owning and operating your own big rig is a heavy responsibility.

Especially when you’re hauling around your toys. (1971)

Grandpa builds the truck on a whim. He sees the toy box plans in a magazine, thinks his five-year old grandson might like it, and knocks it out in a weekend. Grandma finds the white plastic furniture feet they use for headlights and adds a few more details. It’s her decision to not put hinges on the lid.

“It gives you one less thing to break,” she says.

The toy box stays in mint condition for a long time. Six or seven days.

Then comes the first stickers. A pair of Super-Bee racing decals one of dad’s buddies lets me have.

Then the Ski Devils Nest bumper sticker. The Wacky Package stickers. The monsters and the miscellaneous.

By the time I’m twelve, I’m keeping my comic books inside the box, and it’s hard to see the blue paint under the plaster of gum-backed paper. (1978)

Five years later, the inside is equally marred, but with oil paint. The truck has become a rolling art center. (1981)

To celebrates its twentieth anniversary I give my truck a detailed sanding and a fresh coat of paint. Its cherry red cab is brighter than ever. It’s box, now a thick sky blue.

The original license plate is reattached to the back. Inside our all my VHS video tapes. (1991)

Twelve years later, it’s showing its age.

The truck gets handed down to my son, Wyatt— a new generation! Newly christened Great-Grandpa Prosch decides on a complete restoration of his original handiwork.

Icehouse-brand beer in hand, he’s in charge of the project from his place on the couch. Directing the bodywork, ordering a new set of wheels.

For some reason he decides to jack up the rear-end. “I always wanted to build a hot-rod,” he shrugs.

Wyatt’s room is yellow and blue and green. So the truck gets a paint job to match.

Within a year, it hosts its first sticker of the new century (2004).

It holds wooden train track and Thomas toy engines, HO-Scale railroad cars and N-Scale buildings and trees (2007).

Electronic equipment, a crystal radio, and a couple model airplanes (2013).

Today we clean the box out yet again, and Wyatt thinks about what should go inside.

“Should we strip the decals? Give it a new paint job?”

“Nah,” he shakes his head. “One day my kid will want to use it. I’ll wait and see what colors he wants. Maybe put a racing stripe down the side or something.”

Looking forward to being a grandpa, I smile. “I always wanted to build a hot rod,” I say. (20??).

 

I’m in a flat aluminum jon boat, a mile or so east of South Carolina’s intracoastal waterway.

With a stranger who’s steering the two of us out to sea.

Neither of us wear life jackets.

“We’re on our way,” he says.

He leans over and points straight ahead, his arm outstretched toward the foggy gray horizon.

“Where?” I say.

“France,” he says.

It’s his boat. His motor.

I now realize how easy it would be for him to bump me off if he had even the simplest of motives.

“Oh, Rich? Yes, it was horrible! He fell out and got swept away.”

I’m not as scared as I might’ve been ten years before. Since then, I’ve learned to swim. In fact, I excel at it.

As the wind picks up, the ocean tide swell, steel gray waves hammer at the floor of the boat like battering rams.

I realize that if I fell out, it wouldn’t make any difference if I can swim or not.

It started out as a lark.

Gina and I are friends with a young couple in our upstate home town. One of them has parents who own property on the Isle of Palms. We hit it off with John and Barb and are invited down for a weekend with them.

We drink wine and craft beer.

Barb introduces Gina to her library of books. John turns me on to old jazz, including The Hollywood Saxophone Quartet.

At some point on Saturday, John asks if I’d like to ride out and look at the crab traps he has set in the waterway.

Why not?

Slipping through the harbor, John’s little boat is dwarfed by the multi-million dollar yachts. Boats the size of small towns. Speedsters that look like spaceships. Personal water-craft skimming the surface like Indianapolis race cars.

But the faithful jon boat putters among them, sure of itself, as am I.

Confident that I’m living an incredibly cool life visiting incredibly cool people in an incredibly cool place.

And then John has to be a smart ass and drive me out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean just to prove a point.

“Sharks out here,” he says. “Jellyfish. All sorts of nasty.”

Which, more or less, describes my stomach as the waves toss us around.

The look on John’s face is gleeful and smug. He’s enjoying the ride more than me.

Whether by accident or design, he’s scaring the hell out of me. But I put on the stoic mask of my German heritage and shrug. “How far to the Bermuda Triangle?” I ask.

I realize then that I have no idea who this guy is. I’ve only been in his presence a total of maybe two days.

I don’t know anything about him, really.

If something bad happens, I don’t deserve it. But I didn’t do anything to prevent it, either.

I’m starting to feel like one of those crabs we looked at, caught fast.

So, I swallow my pride, glance at my watch and say (as casually as I can), “Maybe we better head back inland? The girls will be waiting.”

John laughs and nods and turns us around.

And just for an instant, I catch a glimpse of relief on his face.

Now that our undeclared game of chicken is done, I see how close I came to winning.

Or losing.

I see what kind of guy John is.

And we never stay with them again.