Seventeen
years ago, when I moved to Maine, I engaged
in a strange, barely conscious virtual hobby
— I fixed things up. Driving past gap-toothed,
shabby houses, yards strewn with defunct cars
and blue tarps flapping like flags over rotting
building materials, I mentally tidied my environment.
I painted, weeded, removed rusty hulks, graveled
dirt drives and planted shrubberies. But try
as I might, I couldn’t make my new home
resemble the officer’s quarters and spanky
subdivisions where I’d been raised, even
in my mind’s eye. Sometimes, exhausted
with my brain’s insistent attempts to
neaten reality, I saw a flash of something I
had no frame of reference for: the beauty of
broken things; the possibilities inherent in
chaos and disorder.
Exactly when I stopped my
habit of passive gentrification and started
dragging home trash is difficult to pinpoint.
At nineteen, I’d still walk the length
of Congress Street from West end to Eastern
Promenade, sprucing things up. I filled dusty
shop fronts with clothing boutiques, coffee
houses and bookstores. I retouched trim, scrubbed
bricks and repaired masonry.
Slowly, though, my understanding
of what happens when the proverbial sow’s
ear becomes a silk purse was changing. A recession
was on, and, on my own, I quickly became acquainted
with the inner workings of what I’d learn
was termed genteel poverty: a poorness
in which imagination — bolstered by paperback
classics and a basic knowledge of art history
and musical theater — renders a bowl of
rice a Shanghai feast, a busted chair a sculpture.
I moved into a rooming house on Pine Street,
with a bunch of other artists, where, for $200
a month I slept in a chilly, decaying ballroom
with ornate moldings and a bay window overlooking
Longfellow Square.
It took several more years
before I fully realized that the very improvements
I’d so often sketched were linked to a
form of urban renewal in which — once
commerce reached a certain peak — artists
were driven like braces of roosting birds into
the open, where they flapped around, squawking
miserably about lack of studio space and impossible
rents. And a few more before it finally hit
home that Portland, my beloved little city,
that I’d so wished to see thrive, had
far surpassed my early armchair developer vision.
I found myself missing the gap-toothed, shabby
houses, thickets of sumac nested with broken
bottles and empty, windblown streets where it
was possible to live without living to work.
Heidi and I decided to spend
an afternoon in search of those places, digging
for evidence of a lost city, a flourishing arts
ghetto I was already in the process of eulogizing
(and of course, romanticizing). What we found
was a series of stunning vistas, some ironic
junk, and a mildewed copy of Editing theSmall City Daily, a bossy how-to published
in 1946 that seemed to brook no self-reflective
nonsense on the part of writers. Oddly, this
attitude felt as though it were the prevailing
sentiment not just of the bright, sunny September
day we chose, but of the city itself.
As we walk down India street
toward the waterfront, it occurs to me that
the truly fantastic thing about unmanicured,
overlooked urban spaces is that they provide
an environment for trespassing, scavenging and
climbing on stuff — places to be naughty.
Places where you don’t have to buy anything
to hang out. We hop over the tracks, poke around
in the rubble of retired engines and ragged
lumber, wade through some weeds and hoist ourselves
up on top of an old train car. Sailboats tack
around in the harbor, and a motorboat tows a
string of kayaks in, paddlers riding docilely
along like kids in a wagon.
In one of the open cars,
a decapitated Christmas elf leans curiously
over the rail, next to a box mashed full of
twinkable tree paraphernalia. Heidi and I laugh,
not just at the oddity of the scene, but at
the fact that the elf’s body posture reveals
an utter lack of concern for his headlessness.
She snaps a picture, and I run after the caboose
of moving train, trying to jump on just as it
comes to a stop.
We continue around East end
beach, hike up the grassy promenade and follow
Congress Street to North Street. Past an old
brick schoolhouse, we turn into a small public
park, pick our way across the patchy grass and
sit overlooking the city, with a clear view
of Back Bay, the Fore River, and everything
in between.
Heidi says she’s thinking
of moving away to Florida. Palm trees, alligators.
I’m surprised that
my first impulse is not to try and persuade
her otherwise.
“I’ll come
visit you,” I say. I remember how in the
past I’d been certain a large life required
a larger metropolis, how I’d wanted everything
and everyone I knew to be slightly other than
what they were, but without changing or moving
away. I think about trying to explain this to
Heidi, and then realize it’s nothing she
doesn’t already know.
For 10 years, I’ve
lived in the South Side, a small neighborhood
which, like Popeye’s Ice House, used to
stop “Where the Bridge ends, and the Good
Times Begin.” Though I tried to be sentimental
about the old Million Dollar Bridge to South
Portland, I joined the ranks of approving citizens
when the spooky, bumpy bridge was replaced by
Casco Bay Bridge’s elegant spans. Of course,
I wouldn’t admit it at first, having become
an outspoken opponent of all things fancy and
new.
Heidi and I cross over the
now not-so-new bridge, watch planes flying into
the jetport, and finally, walk down underneath.
A flat, bronzed hunk resembling a giant, lumpy
plaque catches my eye, and I wander over. Cast
from a clay sculpture made by a Mrs. Maureen
Regan’s fifth grade class, the piece:
“Commemorates the brief period of time
when the two bridges stood together, and pays
homage to the past while celebrating the future.”
“Christ,”
I say, feeling a little weepy and cinematic.
We park ourselves between
two monster concrete pilings, and chuck rocks
into the water, listening to the heavy industrial
hum from a tanker upriver. I open the sneezy
pages of Editing the Small City Daily,
land on page 173, and read the following: “EVERYONE
LIKES ASPARAGUS SALAD… Regardless of how
much valuable news a paper presents, it is more
readable if it contains a few bits that are
interesting rather than important. The pages
need to be lightened, humanized, by some mention
of persons and things of no consequence but
of high emotional quality.”
“Everyone likes
asparagus salad,” I say, pleased with
the nonsequitur.
Truly,
you have not plumbed the depths of pain and
misery until you’ve attended a drag race
with a whiskey hangover. I thought perhaps a
two-hour bus ride to dusty Mayan ruins with
a tequila hangover was the lowest I could go,
but I was wrong. The temple of human sacrifice
was capped by a snorkeling expedition in a big
lagoon I bobbed nauseously and screamed into
my mask each time I saw a fish.
The drag races, by comparison,
are merciless. Imagine it: hot sun, glare bouncing
off chrome, squealing tires, giant, buffeting
clouds of engine exhaust and smoke from burning
rubber. But following a night of Jim Beam in
jelly jars and more cigarettes than I care to
count, Heidi and I bravely rise at 8:30 in the
morning to meet our hot-roddin’ friend,
(I’ll call him Hank) for a greasy breakfast,
and a long drive up route 26 to Oxford Plains
Speedway for the 23rd Annual Show, Shine &
Drag.
I sleep on the way ? in what
is no doubt a very attractive open-mouthed posture
? and wake to the following sound:
“Oh God,”
I say to Heidi, who is shifting into first in
a weedy lot full of parked cars. She looks at
me with one eye half-closed in a wince.
“Mm-hmh. Guguguhnyh.”
Hank pulls up alongside,
in one of his four vehicles, this one a small
truck.
“We’ve
got to be strong,” I say. “We’re
on assignment.”
“Oh God,”
she says, leaning over to fetch her camera from
the backseat. “My eye.” She sits
up, one hand covering her left eye as though
she is taking an exam.
Hank joins us, lighting a
cigarette.
“What do you
wanna see first?” he says.
“Ummm,”
I say.
“Not ready for
the drag race,” Heidi says, and I nod.
“Okay,”
Hank says. “Let’s look at the cars.”
Hank’s dream is to
customize hot rods for a living. He grew up
coming to the racetrack on the weekends with
his dad, and watching his face as we approach
the racetrack, which is crowded with cars from
every era ? hoods up to show off their pristine
engines ? it’s easy to imagine him as
a kid, dwarfed by the sleek frames of a now-vintage
Chevy. We meander counter-clockwise around the
track, and Heidi admires an Impala, while I
flip through a book of photos placed on the
engine of a black Riviera, which is so sparkly
and retro-fitted it looks like a set from Metropolis
in miniature. The photos feature the car, in
its initial, un-loved state, with different
colored side panels and obvious rust, all the
way through the reconditioning process to her
current glory. In the background of most of
the pictures, a tiny, pre-fab house sits on
a flat square of concrete, unchanging.
I am incredibly thirsty.
“I’m reading
about miracles, and look who’s here,”
says a woman seated in a lawn chair somewhere
to the left of the Riviera. She rises to greet
a sheepish-looking teenager, maybe a nephew,
or grandson, who pulls out of her embrace after
a moment to move over toward his male relatives.
They ignore his approach, and his hands go into
his pockets to jingle change.
“Hey, look at
this,” Hank says, pulling me toward a
cluster of Mustangs. “That’s a Boss.”
“Whoa”
I say, comparing the meaner, muscle-ier lines
of the Boss 429 with a neighboring car. Hank
folds his skinny arms over his chest and meditates
on the car for a moment. I flash on my Dad’s
car from the mid ’70s, a pale green Mustang
upon whose black vinyl seats I scorched my butt
more than once. I can feel it coming back, something
I thought I’d kicked a couple of years
ago when I gave my ’74 Dodge Dart Swinger
away. Just gave her away.
I’ve got Hot Rod Fever.
Well, clearly, there is something
wrong, because my tongue is made of corrugated
cardboard and my head is pulsing like a four-way
stop.
“Oh, man,”
I say. Heidi is off snapping photographs, momentarily
distracted from her eye-hangover. “Take
me to the MOPAR.”
Rounding a curve in the track,
I describe my car to Hank: Slant-VI engine,
green with a white top, white vinyl bench seats
and the kind of slippery automatic steering
big old American cars used to have. “She
was a total sleeper,” I say. “Athena.
Not a hotrod, exactly, but a goddamn beautiful
car.”
Hank listens sympathetically.
“I wish I had
her back,” I say. “Just to go to
the beach in.”
A silver Corvette Stingray
catches Hank’s eye, then mine, then Heidi’s,
and along with several other people, we drift
over toward it. It is by far the sexiest car
on the track, so much sexier than my square
old Dodge that I forget my grief and stand gawking
while the owner and his wife climb in. Silence
pockets the area surrounding the Corvette, broken
by a guy who says to another guy: “They’re
just a buncha buffoons up there at the Home
Depot.”
We gawkers give him a dirty
look, lest his talking steal even one note of
that fine engine firing up.
The owner sits there, diddling
the controls, chatting with his wife, and I
see one watcher begin to tap his foot with impatience.
“Start it!” I whisper to Hank, and
he nods vehemently.
“He belonged
to one of those men things, you know,”
the Home Depot guy says. “All men, women
weren’t created equal ? some religious
thing. If he got home and dinner wasn’t
on the table…”
“If my wife got
home and dinner wasn’t on the table there’d
be hell to pay,” jokes one of his friends.
“Bhu-oo-ga-ka-ga-kah-ga-ka-growwmmh,”
goes the Stingray, and the Home Depot guy shuts
up. “Bhu-oo-ga-ka-ga-kah-ga-ka-growwmmh.”
It is a sound that starts somewhere around the
knees and rumbles satisfyingly upward.
“Ooh-hoo,”
I say.
“Yeah,”
Hank says.
Satisfied, we all walkon.
“Wanna see the
drag races?” Hank asks, and Heidi and
I look at each other.
“Yes,”
she says, stoutly.
“Yup,”
I say. “And let’s get some hot dogs.”
“Yes, hot dogs,”
Heidi says.
We cross over a field toward
the drag strip. Hank points out an SS that is
set up to drag, with huge fat rear tires, and
tiny front tires, and explains that the fat
tires are called slicks ? they make the car
go faster at the start, and the clouds of burning
rubber are from drivers doing brake stands and
spinning their tires against the pavement to
heat ’em up.
“Aah,”
I say, eyeballing the gusts of smoke rippling
behind the start line. Inside, a little voice
begins to chant: hot dogs, hot dogs, hot
dogs.
“Hey, they have
onion rings,” Heidi says and the little
voice adds this new piece of information to
the chant: hot dogs, onion rings, hot dogs,
onion rings. Coca Cola! Hot dogs, onion rings.
“We gotta get
some junk food,” I say, and we ask Hank
if he wants anything. He is already mesmerized
by the drag strip, and he says no, gathering
behind a throng of onlookers separated from
the 1/8 mile strip by a chainlink fence. A Jeep
Cherokee prepares to race a crazy-looking bug
of a car that Hank says is a rail car.
“Will he catch
’em will he catch ’em!” crows
the announcer.
The vehicles tear out of
my line of vision. This happens over and over
again: street cars vs. drag cars, trucks vs.
“sewing machines,” snowmobiles vs.
four-wheelers, until the onion rings and the
whiskey begin having a terrible bout in my stomach,
and Hank’s day at the races turns into
a day at the races with a couple of whiny shit-sacks.
“Urgh,”
I say, climbing into the driver’s seat.
Heidi stares glassily ahead. I try to tune the
radio in to 104.7 FM, “The Bone,”
with the thought that maybe Steve Perry can
save me, and get staticky George Thoroughgood
instead.
“Next time, we
drink whiskey after the drag races,” Heidi
says.
