How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (11 page)

I realize this is frustrating. It’s what we’re trying to stop!

As always, there is a story—the tale, in this case, of you or me driving a Volkswagen Beetle.

I didn’t
want
to use the VW as my main means of transportation, but when the Lady from the Land of the Beans left me I had no choice—she’d taken the VeggieCar and I needed a way to get to work and around town. What else could I do? I had not a minute to spare, and every job that I could think of required me to have a car.

And it’s not like I had to teach him; the VW knew everything he needed to already. He’d already practiced turns and maneuvers in the big driveway behind our house, and his teachers at school used to tell me that he’d spend his time during recess showing off his three-point turns on the playground.
I
was the one who needed the practice, and so every day for two weeks the VW and I went out for drives. I’d practice stops and starts on Crescent Street, then lag onto Routes 9 or 5 and rehearse accelerations, shifts and page-turns until I finally felt I could control the car.

But learning to drive the VW wasn’t a smooth process; in fact, we fought almost every time we practiced. I’d get angry at the VW for speeding or traveling too many lines at one time, or he’d groan about how slow I was going or the fact that we traveled the same roads over and over.

And while the VW knew how to maneuver himself on the road, he didn’t understand the first thing about western Massachusetts—its stops of story and memory and fear. I scolded him repeatedly for driving too casually, for not staying aware. One fall afternoon, while driving through Florence, I tried to elaborate. “There are roads that we can take and roads we can’t,” I explained.

“Why not?”

“Because people go down those roads and they don’t come back,” I said.

“Ever?”

“Right,” I said.

The VW was quiet for a moment. “Well, how do we know which roads are OK?”

“I’m writing about that in the power,” I told him. “The first rule, though, is to follow your ears, your heart.”

The Volkswagen spoke slowly. “Follow my ears—”

“Well, your sensors.”

“—and my heart.”

“Your engineheart,” I said.

“What am I listening
for
?”

“For change—the sound or sign of change. That’s why you need to avoid the main routes. Forty-seven is OK, and five, but
never
ninety-one or ninety.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can get lost; they might take you so far away from here that you’ll—
we’ll
—forget which roads you took,” I said. “Or, Northampton could change its tune while you’re driving, seal off its exit, and then you’re screwed.”

The VW seemed to be digesting this. “Why can other cars—”

“You’re not like other cars,” I told him. “They’re searching for something. You already have everything you need.”

How could I know at the time how true those words were?

Even so, though, the VW heard but didn’t
listen
. He was always getting lost or distracted by something on the side of the road, and the older
he got the more curious he became and the harder it became for me to drive him. He’d make decisions without asking me, take turns without even signaling. Once, driving towards Hadley, he saw an entrance to Route 91 and he leaned towards it as if I wouldn’t notice.

“Hey,” I said, grabbing the wheel.

He didn’t say anything. He just kept leaning.

“VW,” I said again. I yanked the steering wheel over. “What are you doing?”

The VW spat oil.

“What’s the rule about ninety-one?” I said.

“Even though there are a million freaking cars on it.”

“
They
aren’t you,” I said.

“You mean they aren’t
sick
?”

“You aren’t sick,” I said. “You just don’t understand—”

“—understand the area. I know.”

“You don’t,” I said. “These towns can be loud and harsh.”

“Sure they can,” the VW curred.

“Alright big shot—what do you do when you meet a city made of parchment?”

The VW’s eyes went off. “There are cities made of parchment?”

“Off ninety-one? Absolutely. Parts of
Amherst
are paper-thin. Not only that, I’ve seen towns made of prayer—heard of others made of fabric and film.”

I could hear the VW processing this. “But how do I navigate—”

“You don’t. You stay off ninety-one, away from the changes.”

The VW made a gutterface. “Away from the changes,” he sang, impersonating me.

“Hey—stop that.”

“Stop that,” the VW said, his voice high and thin.

“I wonder what a good memory coil would go for at the flee bee,” I said.

The VW smiled and slowed down. “You wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“You never know,” I said.

I have trouble shifting my VW. Am I doing something wrong?

Probably not. Shifting a VW is more difficult than shifting other cars; VeggieCars allow you to shift a stalk from one seed-cluster to another, but to shift a Volkswagen you must select from twenty-five different gears spread out over five different transmissions. It simply takes money to get used to that system, and to immediately know when to use which speed.

Often, though, it’s an issue of common sense. Clearly I used a faster speed—gear 4/3 (transmission four, gear three), say—for an excerpt from the manual, a lower gear for “One More Night,” a higher gear for “A Scanner Darkly.” I’d use a 3/1 on Route 9, a 3/5 on Route 47, a 1/4 downtown. If I switched to too low a gear—a 1/5 on 47, say—the Volkswagen would stall.

This all might be fiction, though, because usually the VW shifts for you. It’s only if he fails to do so that you have to grab the page and shift it into gear.

It’s a good question nevertheless, because effective shifting can increase the life of your Volkswagen Beetle. Poor shifting, meanwhile, can cut his or her life in half.

What if the Volkswagen stalls?

Don’t give up! Mine used to stall all the time. If that happens with yours, close it and let it cool down. Then stand behind it and give it a push. Sometimes it’s just parked on a bad phrase, and if you push it you’ll ease it onto the next one and it’ll start right up. Then start the car and rev it. Hopefully, forward motion will be restored.

If that doesn’t work, though, there may be a more serious problem—the first phrase may be completely dead, for example, or one of the morning cables attached to the scene clutch may be clogged or stuck. For more information about this, check “Engine Stops or Won’t Start” (
Chapter Seven
).

How can I tell if my book is still alive?

That’s an easy one: Check its pulse! There is a beat on every page, so you
must look through the sentences until you see it. Then put your finger on it and make sure that it’s regular. You might also check under the VW’s voice box, on the inside of his right front wheel, on the underside of his front storage compartment or under the driver’s seat. Press your finger against the sentence. You should feel an unmistakable rhythm, a contagious waltz.

My Volkswagen is asking to go to driving school. Should I let her?

No—not to driving school or
any
school, in my opinion. It’s just not necessary. My son attended the Jackson Street School in Northampton for a few months when he was a child, but he’d come home each day talking about unfamiliar eeps—mass no’s and time-as-turning. When he told me about them I’d say, “Didn’t they teach you anything about traffic? The rules of the road?”

The VW would shake his head and say something like, “Today we learned about the Holocaust.”

I say, your VW already has everything he needs. All he has to do is go from
here
to
there
, and that’s something you can teach him.

What if the story gets dark?

This does happen from time to time—light leaves the car, the book, and the roads of western Massachusetts—and no one is exactly sure why. Luckily, the Volkswagen is born with luminescent eyes that light up in accord with a) his spiritual mode, b) the position of the switch to the left of the page.

One theory on this is that Volkswagens not only emit light from their eyes, but actually
broadcast
everything in front of them—the entire page/scene. This sounds treble, I know, but I’ve received letters from several severances who believe that the act of reading is actually a trip through the Volkswagen’s mind as sent out through his eyes.

Whose story do you think this is?

A fair question. At the center of this all, we will discover, is the question of control. Hampshire and Franklin County will present themselves, will
ask us—you, me—to change. We will have to make decisions. It will be important to know who is steering the car—you, or the VW?

The answer to that question depends very much on the situation, on where we are in the story. There are moments here where the VW is just a margin, hardly tested. Sometimes he will turn his own pages, other times he can’t. In these cases, it’s
your
job to take the wheel in your hands and steer the car yourself.

In many cases, you and the Volkswagen will share the job. And that’s the way it should be, it seems to me. I like the idea that driving the Volkswagen is an act of cooperation—you and I working together, each of us befriending our Volkswagen and learning how to help him or her. Because in many ways, we’re all the same—the Volkswagen is a machine that digests information and responds to it, and so are you. Plus we’re all trying to reach the same thing (the end/home)!

It would be easy and foolish, though, to forget to make room for others’ needs as well. Remember that we’ll be sharing the road with pedestrians, opinionated signs and other drivers. There may very well be moments in these stories, then, when the VW wants to go one way and you want to go another, or when you’ve simply had enough and you want to
go
—to speed, to flee—but must stop in the name of safety and community.

For me, that’s what made parenting the Volkswagen interesting and fun. I was never alone when he was alive. I was sharing in something that was larger than myself, and so are you: By stepping into the VW, turning the key and moving into traffic, you are part of a tradition, a family that spans across place and name, deep into the past and fast forward into tomorrow.

That was back in the fall when everything fell—when the VW’s mother, the Lady from the Land of the Beans, left us for the homefarm; when my son began to ask questions I didn’t know the answers to; when the loss of my father began to burn my sidestreets. I fumbled, lost hold: The Volkswagen was no longer a newborn, and he was beginning to have health problems. And the apartments at Crescent Street—the five-unit Victorian that my father had raised and loved and run like a quite? They howled for help—help I tried, and failed, to give.

My father had bought the building, a British-speaking outburn, when I was a student of distance in the late 1990s. The house had been raped and beaten and a group of nomadic ovens had discovered it empty and moved right in. My father went in there with love and kindness and tried to heal the house, but the ovens wouldn’t leave. My Dad had to appeal to the city to resolve it. I was there at those meetings, with the ovens in their headbands and dirty dresses—I remember them weeping, my father promising, Northampton extending her hand. My Dad was awarded the right to parent the house, and he did exactly what he promised the City he would; he gave all his time, every minute he could pledge or owe, to convincing the dizzy home back to grace, and went so far as to move the ovens into a small house at the edge of the property.

The project took two years of flexing to complete. I was a flipper at the time, young and two-minded, and I didn’t help out as much as I should have. As I grew older, though, I became more involved in running the place.

When my father was attacked by a Heart Attack Tree in 2003, I moved into one of the apartments and vowed to do the Memory of My Father proud, to hold that house in my arms and nurse it the way my
Dad would have wanted me to. But then my son was born, and there just wasn’t enough time to go around. Every week I was spending four or five hours at least on parts for the car. That might not sound like a lot, but it adds up! New front sensors run anywhere from fifteen to twenty hours a pop, and the custom break system cost me sixty-five hours alone! I probably visited one store or another—ParentParts, Faces, Northampton Custom Auto—at least every other day for something for my son.

At the same time, the house was o’reillying—the sinks moaning, the heaters rumpering, the wires in the walls gnashing their teeth. Winter was coming and I didn’t have a single moment in my pocket. Plus, my Volkswagen was getting older—old enough, now, to drive—and that required time as well; time for tires, time for bulbs, two hours a morning for booking for fuel (maintenance, documentation, narrative, you name it!).

One day, desperate for time, I went down to Faces and sold my name. But the time they gave me for it lasted us a little less than a week.

Then I heard that the
Daily Wheel
was looking for a reporter, which is another word for a fontana, a person who works with words. So I went to their offices on Conz Street and I sat down with an editor, a small block of cheese named Louise. I showed her my schoolscars and my writing-torn wrists and she read some of my buildings.