Life, on the Line (3 page)

Throughout my parents' separation and divorce, my mom shielded me from the issues surrounding my dad's drinking. I didn't know quite what was going on, I only knew that they still talked, that the restaurant still existed, and that my dad wasn't around the house. In fact, I never saw him during the times he wasn't living in the house. He visited rarely. He was either in or out, and when he was out he simply vanished.

 

Nearly a year later my father returned. Suddenly he was back, and we didn't talk about the time away from each other. And for my part, I was just happy he had come home. As quietly as my parents divorced, they reconciled and were quickly remarried.

Everything became remarkably normal again.

 

In the spring of 1988, when I was fourteen, my dad asked me what kind of car I wanted when I turned sixteen. He loved cars, and he wanted me to love them too.

“A fast one,” I said.

My dad had the idea of buying an old muscle car and restoring it with me. I couldn't have been more excited. I read about cars often and had a fairly good knowledge of the different makes from building 1:24-scale plastic models with my dad. He would guide me through the building process, but I was in charge of figuring out the instructions and doing the assembly. A dozen of these projects were lined up on my dresser, and you could see the progression of build-quality from early childhood on. The first one was the “General Lee” from the TV show
The Dukes of Hazzard.
It had crooked decals and thick, drippy paint. The roll cage looked like it was melted because of the thick globs of glue that hung off of it.

Eager to find the first real car that I would build with my dad, I would ride my bike every week down to the Speedy Q gas station to pick up an
Auto Trader.
After searching for a few months we settled on a 1970 Pontiac GTO that was about a two-hour drive away in Flint, Michigan. My dad called the owner, who had a pole barn full of old muscle cars, and they haggled out a price of $1,400.

The GTO was not really a car at this point. It was disassembled and in about fifty boxes, but the guy promised my dad that all the parts were there. Sight unseen, we arranged for a flatbed wrecker to follow us to Flint to pick up the car, and Uncle Norm came along for the ride.

Just before we got there my dad looked at me and said, “Now don't be disappointed when you see it, Grant. Remember, this thing is not even going to look like a car. It's in a million pieces and the back fender is smashed in. I promise you, we are going to make this thing look like new, but it's going to take real time and effort.”

As we hopped out of the pickup truck the owner of the pieces came out of his house and greeted us with a firm handshake. As we walked back to the barn he looked at me and said, “So, son. Is this going to be your car?”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“You know what kind of car it is?”

“Yes, sir, I do. It's a Goat. This one should have a ‘YS' stamped 400, right?” That referred to the code on the engine block with a 400-cubic-inch, 350-horsepower automatic. Over the past week I had read everything I could find on Goats and was trying to act smart.

“Well, I guess you do know then! You're a lucky kid, but I hope you're good with a wrench, too.”

“I think we'll be fine,” my dad said as he shot me a wink.

We shoved the front fenders inside the empty chassis shell and the flatbed started to pull the car up the platform. We loaded the doors, boxes of parts, and bags of unknown stuff into the back of the pickup and headed home to St. Clair.

My dad knew that this would be a fantastic life lesson on organization, hard work, and persistence. You want a great car? Build one.

At first my motivation waned. The car didn't look like anything I wanted to drive, and it was difficult for me to visualize the end result. It was also really hard work to build it.

The first step was restoring the frame to its original condition and that meant the miserable task of sandblasting years of rust, grease, and tar from the skeleton. I would suit up in a thick ski-coat with gloves, put the hood up, and drop a shield in front of my face so the sand wouldn't get in my eyes or rip off my skin. As the sand whizzed out of the nozzle it would bounce off the frame and scatter everywhere—down my shirt, and in my pants and my hair. I would shower twice after finishing but still find sand behind my ears the next day in school.

My dad sensed when my motivation wavered and kept me interested by letting me choose cosmetic improvements: a chrome air filter, metal-braided plug wires, and eventually the wheels. He gave me books and encouraged me to learn about everything we were doing. Before work began we talked about what we hoped to accomplish that day, and he'd hand me the giant builder's manual to look up the procedures. We then carefully grouped, labeled, and boxed up all the loose parts in the order they would be needed.

It was a lot like organizing a kitchen.

The deeper we got into the project, the more it grew. I don't think my dad realized how involved it would become. We converted the garage into a miniature body shop and my dad took crash courses on painting, bodywork, and welding. Before long we had giant air compressors, a host of specialty tools, and were as adept at talking the lingo as mechanics.

For Christmas my parents got me a complete Alpine sound system for the half-built car: equalizer, six-disc CD changer, and radio. I opened the presents in rapid succession and the signature black and green boxes piled up. I was shocked that the biggest of the bunch read ROCKFORD FOSGATE.

“Wow! You guys got me Rockford Fosgate subwoofers? Unbelievable! But where is the box?” I asked, referring to the enclosure for speakers.

“You're going to build the box, Grant.”

“Build it? Build the box?”

None of the prefabs would fit level in the trunk—they were all made for flat trunks. My dad thought that if we studied the way the boxes work, we could make one that was louder—and cooler—than anything we could buy.

At the two-year mark we were nearly done. We took the entire body off the frame and disassembled the main pieces, painted and cleaned each one, and put them back together. My dad painted the body bright red, the original color, and I helped him stretch and glue down the black vinyl top. We bought reproduction material for the seats, brand-new premolded carpet for the floor, and had the dashboard and rubber bumper sent out to be re-dipped so that they'd look like new. Then, at last, we bolted on the oversize centerline wheels.

On my sixteenth birthday we stood in front of the car and my dad dropped the keys into my hand. We looked at a show-quality 1970 GTO that my dad and I had built together.

“Let's go for a ride.”

 

I was making dinner at home one evening in 1995, chatting with my mom and waiting for my dad to return from his weekly golf league outing when I heard the phone ring, watched my mom answer, and could tell immediately that something was wrong.

“That was the golf course. They want me to come get your dad.”

“What? Why?”

“Apparently he's too drunk to drive.”

I offered to go, but my mom refused. Instead, I rode with her. Anticipating his reaction, especially when he saw me, I suggested we make sure he was somehow unable to jump in his truck and drive off. When we reached the course, I popped the hood of his truck and pulled all of the wires from the spark plugs and the distributor. I knew from building the GTO that each plug wire aligns with a specific plug on the cap to ensure the engine fires in succession. Once the order is lost it would take him an hour to get the plugs synchronized—when he was sober, that is. I closed the hood, and we walked inside to retrieve my dad.

He insisted, of course, that he was fine as he stumbled out of the club toward the truck. Instead of fighting him, I motioned to my mom to let him get in and turn the key.

The truck sat there silently as he turned the ignition. He figured out what I'd done and shot me a look with a raised eyebrow and faint smile before he got angry. I suspect he appreciated the cleverness for a moment; he had no choice but to surrender to the backseat of my mom's car.

The fifteen-minute ride was painful.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” my mom lectured. “Is that want you want? To have your son see you like this?”

My father sat there in silence, his head bobbing up and down a bit with the bumps in the road, not saying a word or reacting in any way. It was as if she didn't exist.

I just shook my head, still trying to process what I was now bearing witness to.

When we arrived home, I went upstairs to my room and immediately put on my headphones. I knew that an argument would start when my dad sobered up enough to process everything, and I didn't want to hear it. A few minutes went by and suddenly my mom opened my bedroom door.

“He snuck out, Grant. I think he's on your mountain bike.”

“What! Jesus . . .”

“I hid all the keys thinking he would try to take a car or a dirt bike. So I guess he took your bicycle.”

I rolled out of the driveway and turned left down the pothole-riddled dirt road that was the route back to his truck. I figured he would go there and try to fix it. I had driven about three miles when I saw some movement in a ditch about 100 yards ahead of me. I slowed down and was pulling up when I realized it was him. There was Dad, crawling out of the ditch, covered in mud, carrying the bike in one hand.

I got out of the car and walked up to him. “What the hell are you doing, Dad? You stole my fucking bike? Really?”

“I think I hurt my shoulder,” he said without expression. He dropped the bike, and his right hand reached across to his left shoulder. He started to lift his shirt up but couldn't move his left arm.

I walked him over in front of the car so we could use the headlights to look more closely.

When he lifted his hand away from the area I saw a protrusion lifting his shirt like a tent pole.

We wrestled his shirt halfway off to find his collarbone fighting to break through his skin. “We have to get you to the hospital.”

“No, Grant. I'm fine.”

“Fine? You have a goddamn bone sticking out of your shoulder!”

“I'll go tomorrow.”

For all of my childhood right through my teen years, in part because of my mother's tenacious protection of me and her ability to shield and conceal my father's growing debauchery and drinking, I was able to pretend that everything was fine. He was my dad, and an amazing one much of the time.

Most kids get to go to work with their dad once a year. For them it's a cool experience to head to their dad's office and imagine themselves in his shoes, grown up and in a position of power and responsibility. I got to work alongside my dad my whole life. I understood early the sacrifices that were made for our success.

There was a wild irony that came with our relationship. We spent real quality time together hunting, fishing, building the GTO, playing T-ball, and going to karate. He showed me how to ride a motorcycle and throw a football. Then he would simply disappear for a day, a week, or even a year. The time would go by and we would not speak at all.

When he would return home, as he inevitably did, nothing was said. I chose to pretend everything was fine because I so desperately wanted it to be fine. I wanted him to come back to my hockey games, to go fishing by the river, and to cook together at the restaurant.

But he slipped in and out of our lives with increasing frequency. As I grew older I learned about the DWIs, the jail time, and the adultery.

That day in the ditch was my shot at confronting who my father had become. It was the reason I insisted on going to the golf course with my mother—I needed to see him in that state that I had only wondered about, that my mother dealt with her whole life while trying desperately to hide it from me. When I found him in the ditch with a broken collarbone he couldn't even feel, I thought it might embarrass him enough that he might quit drinking, quit leaving.

But more than that I just wanted so badly to know why. So I took the opportunity to ask him—why he couldn't take more responsibility, why he couldn't stop.

With surprising tenderness my dad admitted to his addiction and his inability to control it. He spoke of the hold it had on him and how he had worried that I would fall into the same destructive habits. But ultimately, he believed I'd be stronger than he was.

And so that night, on the hood of the car with a bone piercing through his shoulder, we had a real conversation. I asked him where his addiction came from, when it started, and whether he thought it was genetic—his father had had similar issues—or whether it was brought on by the social upheaval of the sixties. I asked him pointedly about the affairs I suspected him of having and his twenty-five-year relationship with my mother.

I asked him if he would ever quit drinking. I asked him if he even wanted to quit.

We talked for an hour, then we drove home, and he slept all night in the recliner in the living room.

My mother took him to the hospital the next morning.

I
was an average student at best. I got good grades in the classes that I found compelling and challenging, like architectural drafting, art, and mechanical drawing. But the core curriculum classes of English, math, and science were across-the-board C's and D's. I was more interested in the restaurant than I was in school.

My parents wanted me to learn every aspect of the business. Despite my experience throughout my childhood in my grandmother's restaurant and at the Depot, when I hit middle-school age my parents made me start over. Now I was a real worker and was relied upon. At twelve I was back to being a dishwasher, but this time as an actual employee. I was allowed to do some basic food prep, and when I was thirteen, I had moved up to making and buttering toast.