The Car Ads

 

Jill and I want to buy a car, the first for us since Alex was about 2. I found our last car on a street in Queens on one Mother’s Day with a smashed rear window and a raped dashboard where they’d yanked the radio.

 

Last time I bought a car I thumbed classifieds that left my fingertips inked. I wound up with a dark blue Ford Taurus the automatic transmission of which ground itself to silvery dust on a freeway one afternoon while Jill happened to be behind the wheel. Jill picked the next used car based on what to this day I regard as common sense that I’m happy I married: low miles.

 

Now she wants a car so we can strap the guys into the backseat and press the accelerator and just go. We read the ads on Craigslist (which didn’t exist last time):

 

“2008 KIA SPECTRA MANUAL 68K MILES LIKE NEW LOOOOOOOOOOOOKKKKKKKKKKKKKK - $4999 … PERFECT CAR; 67K MILES.......POWER WINDOWS, LOCKS, KEYLESS ENTRY; NON-SMOKER … MANUAL TRANSMISSION … AFTERMARKET EXHAUST … MAKES A NICE SOUND … RUNS NEW- NEVER IN ACCIDENT. NO ISSUES AT ALL.” Makes a nice sound? Once upon a time I did, too.

 

And another ad: $2800. Manual 5 Speed. 149K mileage. Mew water pump and timing belt just installed. New brakes. Price is Firm $2800.

 

So Jill – she’s the one who actually wants to buy a car, which I think I mentioned  – harps at me via email. I know nothing about cars – I moved to New York City so I wouldn’t have to know squat about cars. But my old friend Tom up near Boston knows cars. He used to fiddle and clank around with the cars I owned a lifetime ago in Ithaca. God, he could lift her up on the, well, lift and twist something around and around and cut new groves that those nuts that go on when you get a flat tire.

 

I question him about owning a car now. He says plan on paying five or 10 grand for car that will fit our purposes. He recommends Kias or Hyundais (crap when I shopped last for wheels). I tell him that we have been using Zipcar, where you rent by the hour and Zipcar even pays for the gas. “Oooooo,” Tom groans, letting out the relief of not having to deal with the fullness of the tank.

 

After a few days of looking I’m already sick of car ads, and get giggy with them in email.

 

HEY!!!!!!!!!

 

BUY THIS CAR!!!

 

BUY THIS FRACKIN' CAR!!!! $7,800, cash only. In tens.

 

RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

RE-BUILT EVERYTHING!!!!!! NEVER TOTALED!!!!!! NEVER WRECKED!!!!! NEVER SET ON FIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

 

2 billion miles, but one owner (a Klingon). BUY THIS CAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

(... why aren't you calling? ...)

 

“This posting has been flagged for removal,” CraigsList says about one of our hottest prospects. This ad mentioned “rebuilt title.” Tom, reading that, said he wanted to know what a “rebuilt title” was. Stolen? Totaled?

 

“Sorry,” Tom emails back, “no time to react. I gotta go buy that car. Anybody lend me a few tens?”

 

2 NEW TIRES!! NEVER HIT WITH A PHOTON TORPEDO!!!!!! RUNS LIKE NEW!!!!!!!!!!! NON-SMOKER!!!!!"

 

Jill emails that since we’ve been shopping online for a car “suddenly all my ads are about buying cars. Every single one. BUY THIS CAR RIGHT NOW BEFORE THE KRONOS HIGH COUNCIL LEARNS WHAT'S HAPPENED (... clean interior ...) 

 

“LOL,” emails Jill.

 

If you're laughing, you can't call. Why aren't you calling? Search me. I thought I lived in New York so I wouldn’t have to go through this. I wish I had new brakes.

Bedtime

 

Alex will be 15 next month and he goes to bed at 9:30. I wish he could go to bed later, but with Alex there’s this window. If he’s up until 10:15, he’s up until 11. And he’s up at five.

 

I can live with that. Marines get up at five. I had an aunt who got up at five: She worked the day shift at what we in Bangor, Maine, in the mid-1970s called “The Hospital” and had to be there at seven. She went to bed at nine.

 

“Alex,” I say to him, “head down now.”

 

Alex’s brother Ned is 12 and already we’re hearing stories about how when he’s at an overnight at a friend’s or at summer camp he stays up until the wee hours. Once we (i.e., Uncle Rob) drove Ned back to camp in the middle of the night; Ned later reported that he arrived at the camp in the middle of the night and at about seven the next morning headed to a water park in New Jersey. So that’s Ned at his age.

 

I try to settle Alex as Jill, out in the dining room, tries to grab a few minutes online before she goes to bed. “Alex, head down.”

 

I get on Ned’s bed. Ned doesn’t use his bed anymore; he sleeps in our bedroom these days. We’re not happy about that.

 

The whirr of the air conditioner is loud, because I think Alex broke it by running it in February. I would try to stop him, but when I’d come in the morning there it would be on “A/C.” He only knows that the click of the knob and the whirr seems to help him sleep. “Alex,” I told him in February, “don’t do this or you’ll break it!”

 

“Fan,” he says, “fan fan!” He holds his arm up toward the window. “Fan!”

Ned’s bed has new sheets on it (haven’t changed them in four weeks) and they’re cool and crisp, but I turn the A/C to Fan on these nights that are still cool get my ass in there. “Are you happy now, Alex? Go to sleep?”

 

No. “Giraffe!” Alex says. He means a plastic animal that we bought him once. “Giraffe!”

 

“All right, Alex, lay down and put your head down !”

 

He doesn’t: I see his black form wriggle from his bed and throw open the bright light of the door. He’s black in the light of the hallway as he heads out into where Jill is trying to grab a couple of minutes online.

 

I have to get up. “Alex. Come back.” Sometimes he does. Sometimes he gets back into bed on his own, and I in the dark I stab buttons on the outdated stereo in what used to be their room and hope that whatever I press makes him go to sleep. 

iProblem

The Nationals

First it was brownies. Then corn-on-the-cob. Then blueberries. Watermelon – and when I knifed it up and presented it to Alex in pieces in the bowl, he tried to slide it back together into a whole watermelon. That was cute and useless at the same time.

 

For a while there was chicken, deep-fried from places like Popeyes or McD’s. Once he tore into the Popeyes Tenders and found that they’d just come out of the fryer. “Careful, honey,” the lady behind the counter said. Sometimes at home we baked frozen in-the-box nuggets. Still Alex would maul them, other times leaving nothing but tan crumbs in the bottom the shallow dark-blue plastic bowl that seems to have become his in the moments of feeding. “How does he do it?” an old friend asked me once, watching Alex, “on no food?”

 

Fuck if I know. Jill got him to eat brownies in a Queens diner when he was a toddler. Later we smashed a blueberry or two across his front teeth. Strawberries too, I think. I forget. I’ve begun to forget. A lifetime later, Jill got him to nibble corn-on-the-cob at a Manhattan Street fair.

 

I saw her doing this with him and moved to help when she said, “Leave us alone. We’re doing fine. Get’im when he’s hungry.”

 

Month by month, Alex’s dinner evolved into three Hebrew Nationals fried for a few minutes in a crappy little tin pan we’re ruining with Hebrew Nationals. I dumped the slices into the blue plastic bowl. I slice the hot dogs into pieces about three-quarters of an inch wide. Any more or less and you’re just fooling yourself. “Alex, hot dogs.” Months on months he took the plastic bowl of sliced Hebrew Nationals in his fine fingers. Then one night he didn’t.

 

Then another night he didn’t. “Alex, don’t you want hot dogs?” Even tonight:

 

“Alex, hot dogs?”

 

“Noooooo!”

 

“Alex, hot dogs?”

 

“Nooo! That’s o-KAY!”

 

I’d feed him something better: I’ll give $500 cash to the person who gets him to eat a steak, baked potato and salad. But it was hot dogs. Hot dogs. I sent Hebrew Nationals (and God they are good – have you tasted them?) to him night after night.

 

“Nooooooooo.”

 

Nooooooooo. And he’s supposed to live on .. what? Alex’s reb-hab nurse notices this; every Thursday and Friday evening the blue plastic bowl comes back to her.

 

One Thursday, she tries chicken from the Chinese joint around the corner. “Try it,” the nurse says to him, “Good boy! Chew! Very good!”

 

“Chew, chew,” Jill says. “You’re eating it!”.

 

Later I ask Jill the secret. “I would say the trick with Alex is getting him when he’s hungry.” Jill looks at him. “Alex, all right? All right.”

 

Alone

 

Anne, our neighbor, has dropped by. She’s a smart lady who has set up a number of good situations for herself and her daughter. Her daughter is one smart person; she goes to a private school –paid for with scholarship – with the kids of Tom Hanks. How about that? If I had to pick one person to help with a parenting situation, Anne would be awful close to the top of the list.

 

She turns to me in our kitchen one night when both of the boys are home. “You can’t leave him alone at any time, can you? I mean, she got older and I could leave her alone. But you can never leave Alex alone, can you?”

 

No. Maybe it was six months ago (maybe a thousand years ago) that the phone rang at 4 a.m. It was a neighbor telling us that Alex had entered her apartment and turned on all the lights. Another neighbor – enormously successful professional man – found Alex in his apartment at about 4 in the afternoon and offered to help me escort my son back to my home. Another neighbor I caught early one Sunday morning phoning the security guard of our building and saying, “Yes, there’s a strange autistic boy in my apartment.” Pretty sure he’s gone into Anne’s place, too, and the place down the hall and the place up a few floors.

 

“Heard our door rattling at 3 a.m.,” one of the best friends we may ever have said once. She lives up on the 12^th floor. “Thought it was the wind.” Just the other morning Jill and I got into the elevator with a neighbor and her dog. The dog seemed sweet. So did the lady, especially when she went for all the gentleness you can muster when something like this has happened to you and said, “I just wanted to say that your son came into our apartment the other day. My husband was asleep on the couch and nothing happened but-”

 

You could tell she was angry and sorry and felt a pain in her heart that she had to mention this. “-I thought I would mention it.” Jill and I thanked her. Does she have a little daughter? I wonder. Alex has a mustache and sort of a beard now. I’m afraid to leave home for more than a day because I wonder if Jill can handle him physically. A mother is supposed to handle a son, of course, sometimes for much of his life, but not physically.

 

Sometimes Jill says they’ll understand. Sometimes she says “fuck’em.” I wish I agreed with either statement.

 

Even if he doesn’t bolt on any given morning, I still have to roll out when I hear Alex rustling in our bedroom for his iPad. He generally starts the day by rocking in his bed. Some mornings, by way of a gift, I guess, I don’t hear the rocking at all. Some mornings, almost the time the alarm was going to go off anyway. Some mornings, 5:30.

 

Then he charges into our bedroom where the iPad has been charging overnight because he depletes it day after day, believe me. He fires syllables over our heads. Jill’s the one with the tough full-time job right now and I don’t him to wake her up. “Alex, quiet!” Pad pad pad he goes, one by one igniting each light in the house.

 

“So why,” an intelligent reader might ask at this point, “don’t you just charge the iPad in the living room, let Alex know that, and let him get up at dawn and sit on the couch and start the day with his private entertainment while you sleep?” Great idea. And it worked until that 4 a.m. phone call. After that call, I’m just scared of the dark.