You're Not Doing It Right
Page 17
To her credit, she is not condescending and never gives any indication that she is onto my ruse. Or maybe my Car Guy performance worked. I bet it did. Especially the part after she showed me the engine and I said, “She’s a beaut.”
At the end of her spiel she asks if I’d like to take a test drive.
Yes I would.
She returns with the key. When I look around for a place to insert it, she tells me there is no keyhole. All I have to do is push a button on the dashboard labeled “Start,” just like the Batmobile. Cool. Does this car make me appear more like a superhero? I think perhaps it does. I look for a button labeled “Missiles” but find none.
I start her up and drive the family around for a few miles. The ride is enjoyable, spoiled only by Martha and me screaming “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” at the kids every ten seconds. They touch everything. Before we have pulled out of the parking lot the backseat windows are streaked with greasy kid-size palm prints. This is exactly why the Batmobile is a two-seater.
Martha asks how it drives.
“Very responsive,” I say. “Taut.”
What? Did I just say “taut”? I did. God, I hate myself. At a stoplight we switch positions so she can have a turn driving it, too. She stalls it out when the light turns green. Women.
When we get back to the dealership the saleswoman asks me what I think. I return to my Car Guy stance, murmuring something noncommittal. I tell her I’ll think about it and get back to her. But there’s no question in my mind: I am buying that car. How do I reconcile my conflicting emotions about the automobile? That’s easy: in any conflict between idealism and shininess, shininess wins.
Deciding to buy the car is like getting into a hot bath after deliberately subjecting myself to the cold for as long as I could stand it. For years, I have identified myself as somebody who lives outside the demands of commerce; I became that perpetually teenage artist dancing on taxicab roofs. But what I never realized until this moment is that, not only am I currently a demographic, I always was one. The iconoclast is as well defined a demographic as the yuppie and the soccer mom and the redneck. We are all demographics. Even guys like me who do everything in our power to self-identify as “different”; in fact, the BMW 328xi is specifically marketed to people who think of themselves in exactly this way.
Marketers have thought of everything. They knew I would want this car before I even knew. Which is to say, they know me better than I know myself. Some people might find that creepy. I find it comforting. Because not only do they know me, they like me. They like all of us here in the BMW showroom, all of us craving the aggressive, masculine, deeply meaningful lifestyle embodied by these handsome automobiles with their taut steering. They know us because their only mission in life is to satisfy these deep American cravings that resonate across the vastness of our culture like whale songs.
They are the people who create the itch and scratch of American life. And as much as I resisted it, I have to admit there was something kind of wonderful about succumbing to the temptation, of buying admittance to a club whose badge is the blue and white propeller hood ornament on our delicious Bavarian automobiles.
I’m not being hyperbolic here, either. Such societies literally exist. There are BMW car clubs all over the country. Look at this quote from the home page of the BMW Car Club of America:
You know that little flash of camaraderie that washes over you when you see a pair of BMW kidneys coming down the road? If you even know what that question means, you’re either already a member, or should be. You have to own a BMW to understand.
I love that phrase: “You’re either a member, or should be.” That’s exactly right. I should know that little flash of camaraderie, that wink of recognition between men like me: successful men, powerful men, men who kite-surf. No, I am not one of these men, but I should be. That is the wink, a wink that says: You and I know secrets that drivers of lesser cars will never know. I am not yet a member of this society, but I will be. All I have to do is press “Start.”
Back home, I call every BMW dealer within a fifty-mile radius to ask for their best deal. I tell them exactly how I want my new Beemer tricked out. Yes, I want heated seats and GPS. No, I don’t want the sport package because the online forums tell me it’s a rip-off, even for kite-surfers such as my future self. No, I don’t want Steptronic paddle shifters. All my shifting will be done the way God intended transmissions to be shifted, by hand.
After a dozen calls, I manage to get the price knocked down a few thousand dollars. Unfortunately, the best quote I get does not come from the place where I took the test drive. I feel bad about that because I liked the woman who helped me out, but I figure BMW salespeople are probably used to dealing with upwardly mobile businessmen such as myself so she understands that with guys like us, the dollar is king. It’s just business, baby.
I order my car. They tell me two months. To make the long wait for the car more tolerable, BMW has thoughtfully created a website where I can check the progress of my car from its assemblage by wood nymphs in the Bavarian forests, to its transatlantic voyage on the QE2, through its final transport to my dealership borne on the wings of angels.
Two months later, as promised, it arrives. Martha drives me to the dealership to pick it up.
“I’ll meet you at home,” she says.
Yes, good. Let us meet at home sometime in the future. Right now, I need some alone time with the car. I spend the first twenty minutes of our time together just admiring how good I look in it. My God, I am handsome in this car. I look very good in the rearview mirror, both side mirrors, and in the reflection I catch of myself through the windshield when I angle my head just so. If I tilt the electric heated seat all the way back, I see that I also look good in the sunroof. Picture a cowboy riding a bucking great white shark. That’s pretty much how I look.
On the drive home, I dawdle at stoplights, waiting for panties to be thrown at me through my open window. I rev the engine and crank the radio full volume. (“Full volume” for me means a little bit louder than background music because I have sensitive ears—also, I should note that I am listening to NPR.) I careen through narrow turns on the country roads near my home at speeds marginally higher than the posted speed limit. I am James Dean.
I love my new car. I park it in conspicuous places. I go to the car wash all the time. One time I buy and use an aerosol can of hubcap cleaner. When driving, I derive immense satisfaction from shifting into sixth gear, a gear unknown to my Beetle. I call it my “Fuck the police” gear.
With time, however, my excitement over the new car diminishes. The kids inject irretrievable food morsels into the rear seat folds, the creamy leather becomes stained from my blue jeans, the fuel consumption is a bit on the greedy side, I stop using sixth gear after a speeding ticket, and when I pass another BMW on the road, I do not feel that promised wink of camaraderie. Honestly, there are very few winks at all because I feel stupid winking at other guys.
I do not join the BMW Car Club of America.
Several thousand miles later, however, something wonderful happens. It’s a small thing. While I am driving one day, the built-in video monitor on my dashboard informs me the oil needs to be changed. I like the way it tells me this: “The oil needs to be changed,” not “You need to change the oil.” The distinction is subtle but important. The car knows I am incapable of changing the oil myself and does not judge me for it.
Car Guys used to accomplish such tasks themselves. When I was younger, I used to see them out on their driveways with assorted screwdrivers and drip pans. Every man was expected to know how to perform this little bit of mechanical alchemy. Needless to say, I never learned nor had any desire to learn. Now, though, my BMW’s oil tank (chamber? holder? cup?) is located in a spot inaccessible to mere mortals. It requires the steady hand of a certified professional. Or maybe a robot. Maybe even a certified professional robot.
Regardless, the car lets me know that it’s okay, preferable even, that I bring it into th
e shop. It’s okay that I don’t understand its inner workings. I don’t understand my wife’s fallopian tubes, either, yet we still managed to make two children just as beautiful as my old neighbor Bill’s daughters from so long ago. Even better, my kids don’t need braces. Their teeth are naturally perfect. So you can just go ahead and suck it, Bill.
My BMW loves me despite my ignorance. It does not care that I’m a flawed driver, that I often take turns too wide and occasionally stall out on steep hills when my foot and hand do not cooperate in the “ol’ clutch-n-shift,” which sounds like a euphemism for masturbation but is not.
The car likes me for who I am. Just a guy pretty much like millions of other guys. In fact, she tells me how much she likes me each time I push her little clitoral start button. Not with words, but with the smooth purr of her engine. You are just like everybody else, she tells me as we glide down the interstate, just like everybody else …
I find the thought oddly comforting. After years of fighting to distinguish myself, the idea that I don’t have to be unique feels as cozy to me as a blanket just out of the dryer. I don’t need to be different, don’t need to be better. The aspirational lifestyle turned out to be a lifestyle in which I am just another middle-aged dude, and I have to say, there are times when being just another middle-aged dude is fine by me. Yes BMW, we are all the same. Me, you, my old neighbor Bill, Dale, FKF, everybody. All of us speeding toward the same destinations, singing along to the same old songs on the radio, tumbling the same quiet thoughts over and over in our minds. None of us better than the other. All of us the same. Except that I have a nicer car.
CHAPTER 18
nibbles
A recent conversation in our house:
Martha says, “I want a cat.”
I say, “I don’t want a cat.”
Martha says, “The kids want a cat.”
“We want a cat!” the kids say.
“I do not want a cat,” I repeat, emphasizing the word I and utilizing my “royal decree” voice, a tone I reserve for those times when, as household patriarch, I exercise my right to end the conversation. The conversation does not end.
“But cats are cute,” says Martha.
“So are chimpanzees,” I say. “Are you also saying we should get a chimpanzee?”
“We want a chimpanzee!” say the kids.
A twenty-minute discussion follows about why we are not getting a chimpanzee. The matter of the cat, however, is still up for discussion.
I have nothing against cats per se. I just don’t want to add to the long list of living creatures already under my care. I am responsible for the well-being of several human beings, including a couple of kids in Bangladesh I send money to every month because Save the Children made me feel guilty. Plus, we have our dog, Lily, who is sweet and getting old and probably does not want some cat sleeping in her chair. Adding a cat to the mix would just gum up the works for everybody.
Also, I do not want to clean a litter box.
“You won’t have to,” Martha says. “I’ll do it.”
She is a liar.
I know she is a liar because she said the same thing the last time we brought a new pet home.
At age seven, Elijah announces that he wants a hamster. Everybody seems to think this is a terrific idea, except me, for all the same reasons I do not want a cat: extra work, I will not love it, etc. Plus, I suspect it will come to a bad end since small rodents tend not to live very long. When I was five, I awoke one morning to find my own guinea pig, Mork, lying on his side at the bottom of his cage, stiff as fiberboard. The same thing will happen with a hamster, inflicting unnecessary trauma on our young children.
This argument, like every argument I have ever made to my wife, fails.
I take Elijah to the local pet shop to buy a hamster. The selection is somewhat limited. They have two. One is brown with white. One is white with brown. We decide on the more brownish one because he seems spunkier. (We call the hamster “he” because we do not know how to determine the hamster’s gender, so I allow Elijah to assign it one.) Elijah already has the hamster’s name picked out: Nibbles, which I have to admit is a solid choice.
On our way out of the pet shop, I quietly ask the woman how long hamsters live.
“About three years,” she says.
Nibbles takes up residence at the top of Elijah’s dresser. He is a good hamster and seems to enjoy doing all the classic hamster things: running on his wheel, clambering through a plastic Habitrail, burrowing through cedar shavings, and of course, nibbling. One habit he has that would be amusing if it didn’t seem so desperate is clinging to the top of his aquarium by his teeth, clawing and chewing at the plastic liner, his little legs dangling in midair, until his body weight finally drags him back to the cage bottom, where he shakes himself off and then does it again. It is unclear to me whether this is an enjoyable diversion for him or if, like a Haitian boat person, he is willing to risk his life for freedom.
Elijah is a surprisingly good pet owner, often taking Nibbles out of his cage to play, putting him in the little plastic hamster ball we bought, or sometimes closing the bedroom door and just letting the hamster roam free. Elijah is a much better pet owner than I was at his age. I never played with Mork at all. Poor Mork.
Once a week or so, Nibbles’s cage needs to be cleaned. Elijah does his best to help, but aside from being an enthusiastic sprayer of Windex, he is useless. Which means that either Martha or I needs to do the hard work of dumping the moist wood liner into the garbage and scrubbing poo pellets from the corners. It’s an annoying, smelly process that takes about half an hour. Not a big deal, but Martha promised me she would do it. That was the deal before I agreed to get the hamster in the first place. I remind her of her promise.
“I never said that,” she says.
“Yes you did,” I respond.
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
It is a devastatingly effective response. I seem to remember Ronald Reagan saying something similar regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, and that guy is a goddamned American hero.
So there I am, week after week, hauling garbage bags filled with urine-soaked wood chips to the trash. Each time I do, I seethe with resentment at my lying wife. This goes on for eight months. Then Nibbles dies.
The kids are devastated, but Martha and I have been through this before. We had another dog before Lily, another yellow-white lab named Mattie. This was before kids, before marriage, when Martha and I were just trying out our roles as capable, loving adults. I’d been thinking about getting a dog for a long while, even before Martha moved in with me. I don’t know why. Companionship, I guess, and a lack of understanding of what a pain in the ass owning a dog in New York City would be.
In warm weather, animal rescue agencies set up adoption centers all over the city. I often found myself stopping to look at the dogs, feeling a peculiar heart tug, an emotion hovering halfway between longing and dread. After a while, I would tear myself away and continue about my day. This went on for more than a year.
But I couldn’t quite bring myself to pull the trigger and actually take one home. Wouldn’t it be too much work? What if I wanted to leave town for a week or two? I had many valid reasons not to bring home an animal. And yet, I kind of wanted a dog.
After Martha moved in with me, she encouraged me to adopt. Confronted with all of my reasons for not getting one, she responded with pretty straightforward logic about why I should: “If you want a dog, you should get a dog.” Outwitted again.
So one Saturday morning in the spring, we take the subway uptown to an animal shelter. Martha and I are both adamant that we should adopt a shelter dog. It feels like the morally correct thing to do, allowing me to play Oskar Schindler for a day.
When we arrive at the shelter, we are greeted by an affable young woman who has me fill out some forms and asks me a series of questions about my ability to care for a pet. Then she gets a little more personal: how much do I make? I give her an approximate figure. Sh
e asks to see a bank statement. I do not have a bank statement. It never occurred to me to bring a bank statement to the animal shelter because I did not think income verification would be part of the pet adoption process. For a human child perhaps, but not for an animal that would otherwise be put to death. I do happen to have an ATM statement crumpled in my pocket, which shows my current checking account balance. (Not to brag, but it is considerable. Okay, I am bragging.) I show it to the lady thinking, Surely, this will suffice.
It does not suffice.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“But this shows how much money I have.”
“It’s not a bank statement.”
“Yes, but it’s a statement from a bank.”
“But it may not be your statement from your bank.”
I show her that the last few numbers on my ATM card match the last few numbers on the statement. I offer to go to an ATM and procure another, identical statement. She can even come with me if she wants to make sure no pet adoption chicanery is taking place. No. Only an official bank statement will do. Is she kidding?
She is not kidding.
She tells me to come back when I have a proper bank statement. But I do not want to come back. Coming back means waiting until Monday, when my bank is open. I don’t want to wait. I don’t want a dog on Monday. I want a dog NOW! Surely, even Oskar Schindler never had to work as hard as this!
We leave, incensed. Fuck those shelter dogs. Let them die.
My only recourse is to find a pet store. Any pet store will do. I will march into the first one I find and bellow, “Show me your dogs!” I will select their most expensive specimen, fit it with a rhinestone-crusted collar, and buy every single stupid squeaky toy they have. Then I will march back to the animal shelter, where I will press my new dog’s face against the window and scream, “LOOK AT MY EXPENSIVE DOG!” to the hard-hearted woman within. Then I will run away.