Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time
Page 20
Dear Night Shift Manager at the Sheridan Garage,
Sorry for taking the key out of the engine of my car after you jumped the battery.
This was on July 12, 2010, after a series of events that left me frazzled but also counting my lucky stars. My wife, Emily, and I were driving home from a weekend at her parents’ place upstate. Our five-year-old son was asleep in the backseat. Around ten o’clock, somewhere on the Taconic Parkway in Westchester, an orange light reading “ABS” appeared on the dashboard display. I had no idea what this meant. (A message from god to start working out?) But when I pointed it out to Emily, she guessed it stood for antilock braking system. I don’t know how she knew this—Emily grew up in New York City and doesn’t drive—but she was right. Still, neither of us knew what we should do about it. The car seemed to be driving fine, so I figured I’d just look into it after we got home.
A little while later, after the Taconic had turned into the Sprain, I noticed that all the other dashboard lights seemed to be dimming. At least, I thought this was the case. I wasn’t sure. I wondered whether it was just that they looked dimmer in comparison to the brighter orange ABS light that was new to the scene. I was still wondering about this as the Sprain turned into the Bronx River Parkway and when the little red picture of the battery lit up. Also, we seemed to be losing our headlights. But again, it was hard to be sure because of the brake lights on the car ahead of us.
“This is bad,” I said to Emily. But I couldn’t figure out why the battery would be dying while the car was driving. I thought that just happened when you left the car parked overnight with the lights on. I don’t know very much about how cars work. In fact, I know so little about how cars work that I’d be sympathetic to the argument that I should not ever drive one again. Well, at least, that’s how I felt at the end of that night.
“I guess we need a new battery?” I said. But we still didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how long it took for a battery to die after the warning light went on. “I hope we make it home.” I turned off the radio and the air-conditioning. There were lots of other cars around us, driving fast on the confusing sprawl of highways and bridges and exits and merges that circles the city. The shoulder looked thin and uninviting, especially with the kid in the backseat.
It turns out it doesn’t take very long for the battery to die after the warning light goes on. We got off the parkway at the 177th Street exit and went under the Cross Bronx onto the Sheridan Expressway. And then the engine started slowing down. I pressed hard on the gas pedal and the car started herky-jerking. We were in the middle lane. Cars zoomed past on either side of us. I pushed the button for the hazard lights, but they didn’t go on.
I said, “Fuck,” and asked Emily to unroll her window to signal to the cars around us. Her window rolled down three inches and stopped. “It won’t go down,” she said.
The worst part of our night came when I saw in the rearview mirror that there was an eighteen-wheeler truck merging onto the road behind us. Merging into the right lane, where I was at the time trying to aim the lurching, sputtering, largely invisible, electronically sealed death box that contained my family. I held my breath and let it pass and then cut off another car to turn into the right lane. Then, thank god, we found ourselves on an exit ramp. It was an upward incline, which was not great. But it was straight, which was great, because I now noticed that the steering wheel was resisting my turning it.
The best part of our night came when Emily saw a sign for the Sheridan Garage across the street from the top of the ramp. I pulled into the parking lot and felt the steering wheel freeze into a locked position just as we rolled through the open door and under the fluorescent lights. “Wow.” I stopped the car and turned to Emily. “That was really lucky!”
This is perhaps where the worst part of your night began. You work at the Sheridan Garage. And after I got out of my car and knocked on the frosted-glass kiosk there, it was you who opened the door and stepped out to greet me.
You were nothing but nice. But we had trouble communicating because you don’t speak very much English and I don’t speak very much Spanish. At first, you thought I just wanted to park my car at the garage. But I was able to express the truth of the situation by pointing to the car and saying, “Battery,” and making a knife out of fingers and drawing it across my throat. You perked up and said the word jump and called out, “JoJo!” and some words in Spanish. I smiled and shrugged. Could it be that all the car needed was to have its battery jumped? Seemed unlikely. But what did I know? I wished I could have admitted to you my level of ignorance about cars from the outset.
JoJo, a younger man in a blue polo shirt, appeared from the back of the garage pulling a dolly. On the dolly was a milk crate that held a car battery with jumper cables attached. You asked me to open the hood and I did, and you connected the cables and told me to start the car, and I tried to but it wouldn’t start. You talked to JoJo and unconnected the cables and reconnected them in a few different places, one of which resulted in sparks and, apparently, a shock to your hand. But after some more discussion with JoJo and a couple more tries, the car finally started up. You smiled proudly and gave me a conclusive nod. JoJo unconnected the cables and put them back into the milk crate and carted the jumper battery away. But the car didn’t sound so good, and I saw that the ABS light and the little red battery were once again lit up on the dashboard. I got out of the car and brought this to your attention. You got into the driver’s seat and inspected the dashboard and revved the engine, which sputtered. “No good,” you said. “Yeah,” I said.
You said something in Spanish and I shrugged. You said a word that sounded like alternator and got out of the car and pointed to a part of the engine that Internet research has since told me is called the alternator. “Oh,” I said, nodding stupidly. “That’s it.” We then spent a couple minutes coming to the understanding that there was a mechanic who worked at the garage who could fix the car and that I would come pick it up on Tuesday morning. You went back into the kiosk to call a taxi for us, and Emily went to wake up the kid. I got back into the car and took the keys out of the ignition so I could open the trunk to get our bags. This was a mistake.
You stuck your head back out of the kiosk when you heard the engine stop running. “No,” you said, looking at me standing next to the car with the keys in my hand. “No off!”
“Oooh,” I said, realizing that you would need to move the car out of the entranceway to the garage.
“No off! Aye, papi, no off!” You shook your head sadly and started walking to the back of the garage. “JoJo!”
Sorry about that.
Dear Asa,
Sorry for letting you get lost in Prospect Park.
It was only for ten minutes. Nothing too terrible. But certainly no fun for anyone involved. You are my son, and this happened when you were five years old.
We had taken the train into Brooklyn on a Sunday and walked to Prospect Park with our friends Dave and Magda and their boys, Max, Zach, and Haig. We’d brought a small vinegar-and-baking-soda-fueled rocket that Dave had bought, and you guys were all very excited to try it out—running and jumping and picking up sticks, as boys will do in a park. You were the youngest but keeping up with the others just fine, and it felt like a very standard level of chaos as we turned off the path and into the great lawn to find a place to sit down and spread out a blanket at an open enough spot to make a launching pad. I don’t know if you had raced ahead for a moment or dawdled behind, but you didn’t turn with us, and we’d gotten out into the center of the grass before realizing that none of us, parents or the other boys, knew where you were.
I was calm for the first couple minutes. I went back to the path and retraced our steps to the pedestrian tunnel we’d come through, where a group of stoner teenagers were playing four square. You weren’t there, so I went back to the lawn. It was crowded, a sea of taller bodies to wander among. How far could you have gotten? How long before you’d realize we weren’t nearby?
Would you remember the advice we’d given you, to stop walking in such a situation, to stay put and wait till we found you? I didn’t know. I passed your mother, who had gone searching in another direction. “Fuck,” she said, frowning and not joking while neither of us stopped. “We lost our kid.”
I headed off on another angle through the lawn; she returned to the original path we’d come on and took it farther into the park. By the time I wound up back at the tunnel for a second time, my heart was beating hard in my chest. I envisioned you wandering into the darkness by yourself. I envisioned worse: a stranger snatching you, a large hand clamping over your small mouth.
I was consciously reminding myself not to panic, repeating the specific words in my head, Don’t panic, don’t panic, when I doubled back a second time. I saw Dave and Magda from a distance. They were standing where we’d first stopped, still scanning the crowd. I saw their boys running around, looking for you, trying to help. I felt my shoulders tightening as I walked. I couldn’t go fast enough, couldn’t cover enough ground. At what point do I start running? At what point do I start shouting your name? At what point should I call the cops? I felt dizzy for a second and told myself again to stay calm.
Parenthood is such a paradox. At the age of five, you were a lot like most five-year-old boys, which is to say, a constant stream of whining for ice cream, proclamations of your own superpowers, and scatological jokes that were not as funny to me as they were to you. You were high in pitch, volume, and energy, and desirous, to put it very mildly, of attention. There were plenty of times when your mother and I would have paid money for ten minutes of not being able to hear or see you. I think about those times, and then I think about the empty space I felt in my stomach that Sunday, how my heartbeat quickened and respiration became more difficult with every minute that we couldn’t find you, and nothing in the world made any sense.
I know it won’t ever end, either. I think about what I put my parents through when I was a teenager. What you’ll surely put me through when you’re a teenager.
It’s a particular sort of guilt, a very strong strain, that comes from fucking up in terms of taking care of your kid. When I try to put my futile words to the experience of seeing you for the first time, laid out on the silver tray of the scale in the delivery room, moments after you were born, they pretty quickly come to the idea of protection. Right after the mind-blowing realization that you, this small breathing creature with eyelids and fingers, were in fact made out of parts of me, and the weird, almost physical feeling of connection that rose in my chest because of that, came the similarly mind-blowing understanding that I would step in front of a bus to push you out of the way. That I would choose to die so that you could live. I am a pretty self-centered person. I would maybe like to think that I would be willing to make such a sacrifice for your mom; or my sister, Debby; or say, a boatful of other people’s children; or, in some sort of sci-fi scenario like Bruce Willis in Armageddon, the future of mankind itself. But I’d never really known the feeling before. The sureness of it, the without a moment’s thought. I felt a compulsion, a brand-new gnawing inside, to put myself between you and danger. Even there, with the doctors standing next to me in the sterile confines of the delivery room, I checked the scale for sharp edges.
So a lapse in this regard, out of stupidity or absentmindedness, guilt almost doesn’t describe it. It’s more like a feeling of essential worthlessness: I have one job to do on this planet really, one simple mandate that comes before everything else, and I can’t even get that right.
Finally, thank god, before I set off searching the whole of Prospect Park, before I broke into a trot or started screaming for help, my friend Dave waved across the field and gave me a thumbs-up. Zach, his middle son, was running toward him, shouting the news. Your mom had found you. You had indeed followed the path farther, a hundred yards or so past where we’d turned. You were near a big tree, walking in small circles and crying when she saw you. She had picked you up by the time I got there. Your face was all red and splotchy, and you still hadn’t caught your breath.
I took you out of your mom’s arms and hugged you tighter than usual. “We were so worried,” I said, trying not to let you hear my voice crack. “We didn’t know where you were.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks go to Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, who started my favorite website, The Awl, three years ago and let me write for it. Many of the apologies in this book were first published on The Awl. Choire and Balk are both excellent writers and editors, and I have learned a lot from them.
Here are other people who have taught me things about writing that I think ended up in this book: Elizabeth Wardell, Emma Betta, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Danyel Smith, Carter Harris.
I make some fun out of my less-than-valedictory collegiate record in this book, but I would like to thank Professor Larry Vogel and his colleagues in the Connecticut College Philosophy Department: Kristin Pfefferkorn-Forbath, Lester Reiss, Melvin Woody. They taught me things about thinking that I think ended up in this book.
Ann and James Raimes, and Matt Szenher and Lucy Raimes provided me with good, quiet places to write parts of this book.
Kate Lee helped me turn a website column into a book and then sold it to Helen Atsma at Grand Central Publishing. Helen edited the book, and it is much, much better than it would have been otherwise. Kirsten Reach, Carolyn Kurek, and Heather Schroder provided invaluable assistance in making the book a book, too. Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski helped sell it to you.
My friend Sara Vilkomerson introduced me to Choire and The Awl.
Emily Raimes and Asa Raimes Bry are the innermost core of my heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAVE BRY has written for Vibe, XXL magazine, Spin, The Awl, and True/Slant. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
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Contents
Welcome
Dedication
Junior High
High School
College
New York
Adulthood
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
Copyright
The names and identifying aspects of some characters in this book have been changed.
Copyright © 2013 by Dave Bry
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Some of these essays first appeared in modified form on the website The Awl (www.theawl.com).
A modified version of “Dear Asa” was previously published by the True/Slant blog network under the title “Death & Parenting.”
“Born In the 50’s”
Music and Lyrics by Sting
© 1978 G.M. Sumner
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Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
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First e-book Edition: March 2013
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ISBN 978-1-4555-0917-1