father son | Literature and Libation

Forgotten Friday: The Ghost in the Machine

November 21, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Clutch in, shift up. Clutch out, accelerator down. Knuckles white on black leather, beats keeping pace with revs. A tiger growls under metal cover, and gravity asserts its dominance.

Despite our advances in robotics and AI, I’ll always argue that a car is the closet we have come to creating life. Loyal, dependable, but reliant on our attention and love, a car is a mechanized pet, an ever present comforting companion. I know not all people are “car people” but everyone who has ever really driven, felt their synapses fire along with every zing of the spark plugs, knows the power and freedom that comes from piloting what is in essence, a controlled explosion bolted to four pieces of rubber.

My Friday nights in high school weren’t typical; when others were roaring rallies at football games or bases-deep mid-movie make-out, I drove. Down narrow back roads lining the Potomac, too fast, too hard, eking every inch out of every corner, leaving my mark in streaks of black and rubbery squeals through quiet Maryland nights. Never did I feel as alive, as invincible, as physically vulnerable and on the edge of everything, than when I dropped into second and swung hard around a hairpin somewhere off of River Road.

I grew up with tales of street races, of my dad tearing through Knutsford and Sale in his Triumph Dolomite Sprint, of him jumping a bridge near his house and throwing a con-rod through the side of the engine he tuned and babied for months and months. The stories, sweet and sour, seemed like memories of loves lost; partly excitement at pushing the car and himself to their literal limits, partly melancholy remembrance of those who came and went before their time. It was hard to say where the line cut through my dad’s adoration. To him they were maintained machines; tools, steel, and oil. But they were also lubricated lust; romantic, beautiful, mobile art. A car was not conveyance. It was confidence and conviviality, courage and companionship.

He taught me everything I know about vehicles, showed me that nuts and bolts were bones and joints, pistons were heart valves, that exhaust was a voice and headlights eyes. He taught me the mechanical specifics – the how and why of car repair – but indirectly instilled in me a sense of awe in understanding (and as a result control over) a force much bigger and stronger than myself. I love cars because my dad loved them. I drive because my dad drove. Our genes are a gearbox.

I drove my previous car for ten years and one hundred and twenty three thousand miles. My dad helped me put the down payment on the ’04 Mini Cooper S, smiling proudly while also giving me the obligatory parental, “your payments better be on time” look. He’d been pleased that I’d taken to Minis; he’d rebuilt and driven two in 1970s England, a Mini Clubman, and a Mini van. It was officially my car, but my dad spoke to it too, and whenever he took that driver’s seat from me, I could feel it bowing to his authority, like a wild horse to a worthy rider.

I eventually had to sell it, though. Cars, much like people, don’t always age gracefully, and by the time my friend was pushing eleven, arthritis had claimed him suspension, and his skin, despite years of anti-aging treatments, betrayed the cracks and wrinkles of old age. I didn’t cry, but my chest definitely tightened as I signed his body away to the Carmax funeral home. I knew I couldn’t afford to keep him forever, but as I stood in that little office, reviewing my title, I had a momentary notion to run, slide into the seat, drive until neither of us had anything left. I wrapped my arms around the black and glass as best I could before the staff drove him back behind the building, frozen, for a second, by the idea that I had just given up this piece of my life that had been a constant for a decade.

It wasn’t the car itself. Sure, I loved the black and chrome, and the comfort of knowing every inch of the car perfectly, intimately. But that’s not what swirled the acid in my stomach, not what forced that tell-tale surge of regret.

It was the memories.

Taking my future wife to lunch the first day we met. My dad riding shotgun as we cruised to the beach. Nights of DC rush hour, weekends on open endless roads. Pushing 90 MPH in tears, the day I got the call. The hours and hours and miles and miles that separated 18 year old me from 28 year old me. The life in the clutch, in the shifter, in the leather seats, and rear view mirrors. The ghost of my passing life living in that machine.

I worried that I’d lose all that, the what that made my who.

But the ghost lives on, moved from one machine to the next. In the decadence of the new car smell I can feel the old car’s spirit; in the few hundred miles feel a hundred thousand memories. When I connect to the new car, I can feel my dad’s arm through mine on the wheel, see my wife in the seat next to me, revel in everything he taught me manifesting anew, for a whole new set of adventures fueled by those I left behind.

Clutch in, shift up. Clutch out, accelerator down. Knuckles white on black leather, beats keeping pace with revs. A ghost haunts the steel frame, and memory asserts its dominance.

Hey, Chief – An Essay for, about, and to my Father

December 16, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I wrote this essay as a way to try to stay afloat in the bitter maelstrom of emotions I’ve been drowning in since losing my father. I’m honored that Tin House would consider it high enough quality for their site.

Without further pomp:

Hey, Chief | Tin House

Session #82: Beery Yarns

December 6, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Steve at Beers I’ve Known is playing host for the 82nd Session, with the topic: Beery Yarns

If you took some sharp scissors to the 28-year-old quilt of my experience, you’d expose hundreds of thousands of potential stories, all dangling from the patchwork cloth as loose threads. Pulling any of them would start me rambling about some ephemeral flash, filling in the fuzziest details as I see fit.

There are many beer-soaked threads woven into the story of my life. Pretty much any random yank of a story string from my college years will include beer (of questionable quality). A lot from high school will, too. Even some of my youngest memories, when I wasn’t even near appropriate drinking age, could be tangentially tied to beer, either by fatherly proxy or stolen sips in a household that revered instead of reviled the drink.

But in most of those stories, beer was merely a catalyst. A fermented means to an intoxicated end. There are few, until very recently, where beer was the focus, the bar the locus, the enjoyment the onus. But there is one that I still remember vividly. That hasn’t been partially lost to the throbbing regrets of a hangover, or faded too much from the cumulative effects of time.

The story of the first public pint I ever shared with my dad.

While I never got confirmation, I’m pretty sure my father drank a beer in every single Hooters in the contiguous United States. What had started as a hilarious American novelty to a British expat evolved into a habitual attachment. Everywhere we went, we sought out a Hooters. We eschewed decent restaurants for trans fats and orange and white. We drove out of our way just to tick off another town, another state, on the “yep, we’ve been to that Hooters” list.

But despite its specific buxom charm, Hooters constantly annoyed my dad because they wouldn’t serve beer to minors. As he was product of the English pub scene in the 70’s and 80’s, America’s odd puritanical approach to alcohol – and specifically the twenty-one-year-old drinking age law – would set my dad off, sending him into a tangent about how demonizing alcohol eventually leads to abuse of the same, ala the “preacher’s daughter” rule.

He didn’t get it. If a father was there with his son, to guide him (and drive him) what was the harm in a single pint with lunch? Apparently everything, said every American bartender, ever. Still he tried, ordering two beers for himself, trying to slide one to me in a not-so-subtle way, only to get busted by the waitress a few minutes later. We never got kicked out of a bar – he always managed to weasel out of it with his smile and accent – but in our quest to share a pint before I was 21, we certainly ruffled a lot of owl feathers.

It took breaking our Hooters tradition to finally clink father and son glasses. He and I traveled sans mom and sister a lot in pursuit of my young soccer career, so we often found ourselves puttering around unfamiliar locales, pre-Google Maps and other wanderlust supporting applications. Sometimes, we didn’t have hours to track down the nearest avian sanctuary, and instead had to opt for accommodations closer to the hotel.

At the Disney Cup International in Orlando, Florida, trying to weigh the risk of food poisoning from hole-in-the-wall Mexican food and the nearby AppleBees, my dad bought us tickets to the early show at Medieval Times. It wasn’t wholly unexpected for him to do even more unexpected things like this on impulse, and my love of swords and sorcery meant no objection from me. We lined up with the flip flops and cargo shorts of the all-inclusive-package-holders, talking about the goal I’d scored earlier that afternoon as the shadows of the perfectly pruned palms got longer and longer.

Pre-show, in the middle of the main hall and the crowd of vacationer conviviality, hundreds of people swarmed like an agitated hive of drunken wasps. Kids begged parents for plastic crowns, husbands begged wives for impractical swords, wives begged bartenders for large glasses of white wine. Staff, dressed in cheesy facsimile of period attire, guided people to their seats with about as much order and organization as a teenage boy’s bedroom.

My father disappeared into the crowd as I basked in the reflections of gas lamps bouncing off highly polished suits of armor. He returned soon, holding two “golden” goblets, both nearly overflowing with a creamy white head. Boddingtons. He held one out to me while he sipped the head on his to prevent a tragic spill.

So it was there, in the gaudy panache of the anachronistic recreation of a castle, that we finally shared a pint. No cozy tavernesque atmosphere, no friendly neighborhood barkeep, just screaming children overdosing on Disney, their exasperated, sun-burned parents, and enough novelty to put ACME to shame.

And I’ll always remember it. It wasn’t about the where, but the why. It marked a moment where we were equals, able to experience things as two men, not just a father and his boy. It was the culmination to our quest, and we drank deeply from those knock off holy grails. It was in its own way my personal British Bar Mitzvah, the moment I became a man in my father’s eyes, which were, really, the only eyes that ever mattered.

Yep, still have it.