11
Sal’s Auto is one of two car repair joints in Johnston. The cement building with enormous maroon garage doors housed many of the town’s lifelong mechanics. Most days if you came by, there’d be a group of greased up smoking car junkies cracking beers and running their mouths about their cars, wives, and hardships; spouting their general observations on the all too complex changing world around them. The shop is run by Sal and his two twin boys Lenny and Steve and they’re all here today. Sal has wispy black and white hair that runs thin off the top giving way to a wide bald patch on his crown, but the rest of it runs thick as ever down his sides and back giving him a sage-like appearance. With a cigarette in his mouth, he takes off his Sal’s Auto baseball cap and scratches at his bare scalp. He’s got a long black beard and I think he aims to keep growing it all the way past his plump stomach and down to his feet, which, given his stature, aren’t so far away. With oil-stained hands and disappearing finger nails he hikes his belt up and gets to talking to me about all things political.
He’s saying something about Reagan but I’m still sweating and growing more uncomfortable by the second, distracted and watching his boys fucking around in the back of the shop with what looks like a rusted old nail gun. Lenny and Steve. A couple of low rolling balloons without much air. They were town bullies growing up, real mean and stunted. Look at them now. They stumble around and mess with one another like toddlers and they’re a couple years older than me. All at once I feel a wave of empathy for Sal here, poor guy could never wax political with his sons if he wanted to. From cradle to the grave they’d gape at the world, not intellectual enough to be curious about a single damn thing. Not one clear direction in their helium heads, not one. God, I’m in a foul mood. Watching them threaten to pierce one another with nails gets me real sour about this place all of a sudden, and I start thinking about Prince’s longing to travel west, far away from auto shops like these.
“When you last see your old man?” Sal snaps me out of it.
“Forever. You know that.”
“Well, I don’t know. Just hopin.”
Sal curls the outer right edge of his lip and cheek in a wistful, sad sort of expression. Sal and my dad used to make a nice go of it together back in the day, and I can tell Sal still has a lot of love for him. If I had more information, I’d give it, but I don’t, so instead I just sit here and shrug and feel even more irritated than before. Any mention of my father will do that to me even on the good days. Right now, he’s about the last thing I want to think about. The fact that Sal, or anyone else for that matter, spent any time at all missing him makes the skin on my neck crawl.
“They’re still fuckin around, huh?” Sal turns and looks at his pair of playful idiots. He pulls on his beard like he’s wringing it out for water. He grunts some sort of disappointed admittance before bringing up a story about a lady who came by earlier in the day wearing the shortest summer shorts you ever saw. I close my eyes and nearly walk out of the shop just to burn on the sidewalk again.
Johnston men, especially the older ones, get one thought of sex and they turn into slobbering animals. Most of them were just lonesome and incapable of expressing the longing in their chests. Instead of being honest about it all, they choose to dress up their vulnerability in busty clothes and chuckle and get gross.
Sometimes they remind me of this dog I saw at a picnic lunch as a kid. My parents had taken me camping, and a group of their friends and their kids were eating with us right near a wide serene lake in the middle of the woods. Someone had brought their big old boxer along. It had a blue collar and a hungry salivating mouth just watching us eat our hotdogs and chips. Its tongue ran wild with thirst as it watched my father drink his beer. In the middle of a mouthful, I remember one of the girls there shrieking and turning away from the dog. My eyes went down to the boxer and I saw his small red erection protruding from his lower half as he just dumb open-mouth gaped at the girl and all of her food. Drooling all over with absolutely no honor.
“Ain’t nothing but a red rocket,” my father said.
Anyway, some men in Johnston remind me of that boxer from way back at that one ruined summer picnic. I mean, you should see the look in Sal’s eye as he tells me about a short-shorted broad who stopped by looking for a spare part.
“Showstopper, I’m tellin ya, the rack on her.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Her husband was probably out in the field somewhere killing himself hauling feed or tilling while Sal’s little red erection was pulsing all over the place telling me the story and making me feel nauseated and a bit fraudulent for not telling him how he should speak about women. None of it matters that much to me right now though because my fuckin head hurts so bad. Sal sits down on the bench next to me.
“Anyway, other than that, nothing new.” He lets out one of these elongated sighs of relief, the kind you earn through finished labor. Only a real middle of nowhere workman can sigh quite like that. I take out a Marlboro, “You mind?”
“Course not,” and he takes one as well. My father and his friends smoked Marlboros, all my life.
We light the cigarettes and in beautiful silence, finally my soul starts to rest. From time to time, we look out to our world through the open garageshop door as nobody passes and nothing happens anywhere. Stillness in the summer streets of Johnston. There are a few elm trees in the distance, dancing slowly in the wind and a couple of American Robins flutter around looking for worms, but other than that, things are still. Perfect in serenity. Sal eventually softly breaks the reverie.
“Ain’t seen your pops in damn near”—he wrings down his beard again as he thinks deeply—“shit, five? Has it been five years? Shit well, yeah five or so.”
And the way he says it, imbued with the heavy heartbreak of an old man, nearly kills me. That kind of thing could really make me weep if I wasn’t careful. I never feel more depressed than when a grown old man looks back on his life with such sadness, nostalgic about a time long passed and aware that it all went by too fast, with not enough boom. Sal talks about my father like a lost lover.
“Last time I saw him, he was ridin up with that maroon, busted Ford, remember that piece of shit? Course you do. Boy he came ‘round all wound up and red, ha ha ha. He says, ‘Sal, I’m in a world-a-hurt, need her fixed by sundown.’ Sundown, he says. Ha ha ha. And we did it for him. We sure did.”
God, I tell ya, I really can’t stand anybody talking about my father with such fondness. The cracks in my heart threaten to break open through the mortar of years gone by. Out of respect for Sal and his own weary tarred soul, I just nod and stay silent. I stare down at my hands and wonder about rage and revenge and if that disease will ever seep from my blood. Sal goes, “Well, if you ever hear from him tell him ole Sal’s got a cold one ready.”
“Alright, Sal. I will.”