THE YELLOW ROADSTER
Now available as an Audio Story read by Michael Tucker
Back in the days when my father was still trying to get on the good side of my mother, he promised he’d come for her one evening in a yellow roadster and take her on a spin she’d never forget. Or so goes the family lore. Well, the years passed and my dad’s boasts turned as dry as his dreams. Our mom, it seems, was hard to please, although he did manage to get her attention long enough to produce two sons – the first being my brother, Ed and then four years later another, which was me. By the time we were old enough to catch what was going on, our mom and dad were pretty much done with each other. She had a thing for tearing him down in front of us. I guess she thought it lifted her up. Ed and I watched the daily flattening of his spirit, the relentless dulling of his desires and we learned what it is to be a man. My dad worked in a department store for forty-two years in exchange for a pension that wasn’t quite as cushy as he thought it was going to be. I remember him in those couple of years of retirement before he died. He would shake his head, trying to figure out what just happened to him.
But there was an August evening years before that when he showed a bit of flash we didn’t know he had. I was sixteen at the time and Ed was twenty and damned if our Dad didn’t drive up in that yellow roadster. My guess is that he’d snuck off to the Chevy showroom, thinking it was time to trade in his nine-year-old Ford Tudor – Tudor meaning not the royal family of England but the number of doors the thing had. It was a piece-of-shit clunker of a car. Maybe it had an AM radio; that was it. Windshield wipers. I think he was on his way to trade it in for the cheapest model of the Chevy line, a DelRay probably, stripped down to the nubbin, and then he spotted the Impala convertible in the center ring of the showroom. This was 1958, so no one had ever seen one of these babies before. Her top was down, of course. She was spot-lit like a pop star and simonized to an otherworldly sheen -- yellow on the outside, emerald green interior, whitewall tires with the black part shined so bright you could see your grin. The color’s what made him look twice; that yellow stirred up thoughts of the roadster from his courting days. It was yellow like a banana – but the inside, not the peel. Creamy yellow. The Impala was certainly the motivating factor because my dad wasn’t thinking about thrilling my mother any more at this point.
It was early evening when he drove up to the house and honked the horn until we all came out on the porch. With the top down she was like an aircraft carrier pulling into port, I swear to God. You wouldn’t believe how big that thing was. She had fins in the back shaped like the horns of an impala, which we learned was an African goat – a very fast goat, I think.
My mother hopped up on her broom as soon as she got over the initial shock. Her face was purple and she called him every word for stupid you could think of, but my dad didn’t seem to care much.
“I told you I’d buy you a yellow roadster and here it is. Who wants a ride?”
Well. There was a tiny park across the street from our house. Not really a park; more like a traffic roundabout with some grass seed thrown down. The three of us – Dad behind the wheel, looking a little like Tyrone Power with his suit coat off and his tie loosened, Ed riding shotgun and me in the back -- drove around it four times until my mother left the porch and slammed the screen door as hard as both her hands could slam it. Then my dad took off for Route 40 to see if we could get it up to sixty.
“A mile a minute,” Ed shouted back to me over the wind. “We’re gonna be going a mile a minute!”
I tried to digest that, to put it into its proper mathematical perspective, but with the wind and the excitement I couldn’t focus. I knew it was fast, though. My dad could add columns of figures in his head and get them right every time. Once, down at the fur department at The Hochschild-Kohn Department Store he let Miss Haas, his main salesgirl, add up the weekly sales on the adding machine while he did it in his head and they came up with the exact same number. Maybe if he had been as good at making money as he was at counting it he would have made out better with my mother, who knows? Ed was good at numbers, too. He was studying to be a CPA, so he had the gift. They were both on the tall side of the family, as well.
They had their arms resting on their respective doors, elbows out in the wind when the roadster achieved sixty and I watched them share a smile. It was a great thing to see. The smile was about how great it is to be a man, I think. My dad’s had a whiff of regret, like he knew that we had watched him eat so much shit over the years he couldn’t really lay claim to being triumphant. But it was still a pretty damned good smile – triumphant with an explanation. Ed’s had no such disclaimer. He was on his way and he knew it. He’d be making more than our dad within a year.
Ed was working half-days for a CPA in College Park and taking some summer school courses to graduate early. I had a summer job at the Music Fair, a giant tent where they brought in Broadway musicals every two weeks. My job was to put on an all-black outfit and run furniture up and down the aisles during the scene changes.
Ed and I shared a car that we bought for seventy-five dollars -- a 1949 VW Beetle -- and worth every penny. A simpler machine has never been. It had fewer moving parts than a lawn mower. Every morning Ed would drive it to College Park. The minute he arrived back in the evening – without the motor ever turning off – I jumped in and headed for my job, which was a lot more than just scene changing, by the way. One show – Damn Yankees -- I had the job of picking up the star at her rented farmhouse and driving her to work every evening. I’m not mentioning any names but she was a famously sexy dancer-turned-actress and she had legs that went all the way up. She knew what she did to me and got a kick out of it. Sometimes she called me into her dressing room when she was in her bra and panties and asked if I could fetch her a coffee. She knew what she did to me.
How I managed to wrap the yellow Impala convertible around a concrete railroad bridge is really the topic of this story, however. A rainy night. Ed was obviously delayed on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway and I had to pick up my star from her farmhouse so that she’d be on time for the show, which, as you know, must go on. On my knees to my Dad, I begged for the Impala. He smiled and made some comment about not wanting to let down Julie – okay, it was Julie Newmar -- and then he handed me the keys. Off I went, driving a little faster than I should because Julie was waiting for me. The road had little lakes; I hydroplaned; the bridge stopped me. End of story.
Except for Uncle Lee. It’s really an Uncle Lee story. Every family, I guess, has a guy – or it could be a woman -- that everybody knows is a little off. Or maybe more than a little. We had Uncle Lee. He was married to Aunt Lil, who had almost been a spinster until Lee came along. Aunt Lil was smart and she knew Lee was her last shot at paradise. They never had any kids. I think Aunt Lil knew that he would have been a terrible thing to inflict on children.
Uncle Lee was a tickler. Every time we went over there for dinner he’d attack us. I’m talking about when we were little, of course. I’d fall to the floor trying to escape but he was relentless. “Hey, little mutt, what are you laughing about?” It was always little mutt. And it hurt. I mean it was really painful. Every fucking time we saw him.
And at dinner the line was, “You don’t eat it, I’m gonna eat it.” Even if we were eating just fine – “You don’t eat that brisket, I’m gonna eat it, little mutt.” Eat this, Uncle Lee.
Anyway, he was a lawyer – a very unsuccessful lawyer. He went to the office; he came home; but I don’t think too much was going on in between. Aunt Lil was a teacher and a reading specialist in the public schools and she brought home the bacon. I’d heard my parents talking about how Uncle Lee’s only clientele were from the black community. They of course didn’t use the expression, “The black community”. They used the commonly heard Yiddish word that I’m not even going to write down here because it has such a nasty connotation to me.
So, when I had to appear at the courthouse in Reisterstown, Maryland for a hearing about my accident with the Impala and the bridge, my father agreed to let Uncle Lee represent me. The summons never said that I needed a lawyer but Uncle Lee got wind of it and latched on like a tick. Similar to Clarence Darrow, he had a nose for the big cases.
He came over the week before and we sat around our dining room table. He gave me a long lecture about client-attorney privilege – I had no idea what he was talking about – and then he instructed me to plead guilty when the judge asks me. I didn’t get it. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just had an accident.
“Listen to me, mutt. You say, ‘Your Honor, I am guilty.’ And you tell him how sorry you are, understand? I’m your lawyer and I know the law.”
“Do what he says, Michael,” yelled my mother from the kitchen. She and Aunt Lil were in there wringing their hands, like this was some great shame I’d brought down on the family. Like I besmirched our good name in the Halls of Justice or something. I hit one little bridge.
“You’ll plead guilty like Uncle Lee says,” yelled my mother again.
I didn’t get it.
When the big day came I got dressed up in the suit I wore to Bar Mitzvahs and went to court with Uncle Lee. My father was there and Ed. My mother stayed home, thank God. We sat down on one of the benches and waited while the Judge had a long conference with the State Trooper who had been on the scene of the accident. I remembered him. He was a nice guy as I remember.
The judge looked at the pictures that the Trooper had taken and asked him about the rain. He said he remembered that night and that it had been a strong rain. Then he asked the Trooper if I had been speeding and the Trooper said he didn’t think so – there were no tire marks or anything. And then he asked if I had been drunk and everybody chuckled over that.
“As far as I can see, young fellah, there’s no misdemeanor here. It was a bad night.”
“Your Honor.” It was Uncle Lee.
“Who are you?”
“Leon Jablow, your honor. I represent the defendant.”
“He doesn’t need a … “
“My client would like to plead guilty, your Honor.” And he pulled me up by my arm and shook me. “Go on, tell him. Just like I said.”
“Sit down, both of you,” said the judge.
“Your honor,” said Uncle Lee again, with a bit of a whine.
“Mr. Jablow, is that right?”
“Yes, your honor. Attorney at Law.”
“I’m gonna have to ask you to stop speaking now.”
“My client would like to plead guilty, your honor.”
I wanted to tell the judge that all he had to do say was “Shut up, Lee,” – snapped out the way Aunt Lil did all the time. It was quite effective. But the judge scowled instead and waved a warning finger at Uncle Lee, who quickly sat down and bowed his head. The judge studied him for a moment and took in the whole picture.
“Mr. Jablow, take your client home. I imagine he’s already caught some hell from his parents about mashing up that nice car. He doesn’t need any more from me. Or from you. Take him home.”
Actually I rode home with Ed and my dad in our VW, the Impala being at the shop. Ed drove and my dad rode shotgun. I was in the back. They were laughing about Uncle Lee and how the judge put him in his place.
“Why’d he do that?” I asked. “He was trying to get me sent up for life.”
“Michael,” said my dad, “You know the word schmuck? You know what it means?”
I told him I did.
“Your Uncle Lee is a schmuck.”
And another brick in the great wall of life slipped into place.