Bob Goes to Live Under Mary Kay’s Pink Cadillac

In the early seventies, as the arcs of our postgraduate expectations seemed to be losing loft and conviction and the music seemed to be playing somewhat slower and the need to find a seat before it stopped had occurred to most, although not all, and everyone had already lived with everyone else for a time, it seemed, and the whole idea of domicile and self-reliance made for reluctant conversation—in this sad, departing summer of our lives, my friend the poet Robert Trammell lived for a while with me and my mom. My mom, an old freethinker herself, enjoyed my arty, pseudobohemian friends, and Bob, perhaps the artiest and most deeply pseudobohemian of us all, fit in quite happily, picking through her rather strange selection of books and watching bad TV in the evenings, though Kung Fu was pretty good. We really got into that Kung Fu test of enlightenment and reaction time, sometimes well into the night out on the patio, drinking our way toward the true way, snatching pebbles from each other’s open hand. It was during this time that Bob—responding, perhaps, to these simple domesticities—conceived that it would be a most amazing and important and poetic thing were he to go and make his home beneath the big pink Cadillac we’d noticed always parked in the drive of the house, not far away, of a wealthy cosmetics manufacturer.

He sort of basked in this idea for a while. We’d joke about it. Marvel at the justice of it—his becoming something like a moral visitation, like gout, the painful consequence of opulence and excess. Or, a little more dramatically, the Phantom of the Opera or the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the dark imponderable at the center of our loftiest affections. He began to imagine what he’d actually need: a few small tools, the means to siphon from the gas tank (for the camp stove) and the radiator (should there be some workable filtration system—failing that, a means for gathering rainwater or an expansion of the protocol to allow an occasional visit to the faucet or the pool while on those requisite excursions undertaken in the small despairing hours when the world is fast asleep and there is none to watch the slow, precise detaching of himself, the separation of the shadow from the mechanism, something like the soul released to drift across the lawn into the plantings for a while and maybe even into the dreams of she who sleeps above in splendor under fragrant moonlight-colored layers of anti-aging cream).

He would need lightweight, dark-colored, water-repellent clothing. Maybe a jacket for the colder months. A flashlight and a radio. A picture of his Scandinavian girlfriend—in a little oval frame perhaps, with a magnet on the back. A pen, a notebook. Bungee cords and marijuana. He would probably need to consult one of those Chilton automotive guides devoted to that particular year and model. He would have to make a study, as would anyone preparing for an extended stay in some exotic country. As did Dracula, of course, before embarking on his fearful journey west. As did Thoreau, don’t you imagine. Take your time and figure it out, devote yourself to the idea, and then, when it’s right—you might want to wait for a storm, a terrible night with lightning scattering all across the city, rushing, twisting wind and bending trees and window-rattling thunder all night long—then you go in, in the middle of that, insert yourself as if the moment had developed from within the actual process of the storm.

And there you are. It seems impossible at first. But then you feel around and touch the blackened surfaces, inhale the dark eternity of this, the mix of fluids spilled and burned. The lightning flashing off wet concrete gives you glimpses of the structure so obscure in its reality, like the history of the underclass, ungraspable except by slow, assimilating stages. Not till dawn do things let up. The tattered clouds withdraw before the pink-and-golden light that, from an upstairs window, shows it’s all okay—blown leaves and twigs and a branch or two in the drive but all is well. The pink of the Cadillac has never shown so purely pink before, as if there could be any purity in pink, as if it could be understood as fundamental, even primary, in some way—the blush of passion as experienced or as skillfully applied.

Bob felt there ought to be a point at which his instincts should turn inward. All his cunning with regard to stealth, concealment of the evidence—the smoke, the smells, the residue, the groanings in his sleep, those soft, unbidden little noises that emerge on contemplation of the photograph, whose bright, clean, snowy Scandinavian distance stretches out behind her fading smile forever—when all that has fallen away and he no longer needs to care, it is because he’s come to inhabit the Cadillac truly and completely. He has come to understand his place within it. Found the yoga-like positions corresponding to the circumstances, sensed the pallid color of desire as emanating from himself, as percolating from these elemental regions where he rides along, essential to it now, adept at snatching raw materials from the street. Half-eaten meals and bits of clothing if he’s lucky. All of life in its disintegrated forms comes back around to him. He’s at that deep, regenerative level. At the level of the barnacle, the saint perhaps, the Cadillac infused with him at this point. They reduce toward one another, and inevitably there are compromises—subtle at first but gradually more detectable. Gas mileage suffers—hardly an issue ordinarily, of course, in such a vehicle. But noticeable after a while. A sort of lassitude or something about the steering, about the functioning in general—you can tell when something’s changed, a general change, you know. Before you know it, even. An alteration in the basic terms of things. A Cadillac—well, that’s a thing to be relied upon to carry certain assumptions. There’s a mass and a momentum to appearances—that’s one. Conviction overpowers error is another. Doubt is weakness. Life is sweet. And so on. There are smells that come and go. And dreams. And so at last it’s taken in and hoisted up. And there is quiet in the bay. Pneumatic power tools fall silent. From within the glass-walled waiting room she watches with her driver till she’s summoned. Eyes of four or five blue-uniformed mechanics fix upon her. They withdraw at her approach, then stand around not saying anything. Not getting back to work. A radio somewhere across the shop plays Mexican songs of love and loss. Her own mechanic stands by quietly with a work light and a look of vast apology, as if to say there’s nothing he can do. As if, were she not dressed in such a delicate print, her presentation of herself so near the fragile verge of passion, pink and saffron shading into frail translucencies of age, all love and loss as it turns out, he might reach out to take her shoulder, guide her under. But she follows, gazes up with him. A short, soft phrase in Spanish is repeated over and over right behind—they’ve gathered in. The light’s too bright and there is nothing for a while. What should it look like anyway? What should she be expected to find in any case? She’s never looked beneath her Cadillac before. She’s never listened to Mexican music on the radio. She knows, of course, those mariachi bands that play in restaurants—so exuberant and colorful and festive. Not like this. What is he saying over and over just behind her? Like a prayer. She looks and looks until it strains and starts to darken at the edges. Light draws in to a sort of halo, which surrounds a sort of face. Is that a face? What sort of face is that—so battered and composed? Is this what she’s supposed to see? What is he doing under her Cadillac? A couple of the mechanics and a woman from the office have knelt down. Can she emerge from this somehow? She must look awful in this light. Is this a miracle? Is there another car that she can take? Can she be beautiful again?