IT WAS A CADILLAC convertible from the mid-1960s, though I can’t remember the exact year. It must have been twenty years old when I got behind the wheel—but it had been lovingly restored by its true owner, a client of my father’s named Howie Shapiro, a former drug addict working his way through culinary school. It was white, with extraordinary fins in back and a big chromium grill in front. It was nearly a block long, or felt as if it were, and I could barely see over the dashboard, but the engine was perfectly silent, and the steering wheel moved with the touch of a finger. The mere thought of tapping the gas pedal sent the machine gliding forward like a great white shark. Did I mention that the interior was red leather? And the radio was incredibly loud? The thing was brash, devoid of self-doubt—all the things I wanted to be.
The car was Howie’s, but he had nowhere safe to park it, so my father stored it for him in the garage under our apartment building. My father may have started out with good intentions; good intentions are a family trait. In this case that would have meant keeping the Caddy safe under the tarpaulin, probably, but pretty soon he was driving it around town, and then I was driving it, too, and then Howie seemed distracted by his own problems (money, sobriety, marriage, cheese soufflé). After a while, he stopped coming by to check on it, and I didn’t see him again for a long time.
I took it on a camping trip, of all things, with a bunch of college friends. I didn’t have a tent, so I planned to sleep in the car—the front seat was as big as a couch; I could completely stretch out on it, and a friend of mine took the back seat. But during the night I kept rolling into the horn, which was unbelievably loud, the brass section of some kind of gigantic dream orchestra. No one slept too well, even the squirrels. But I wouldn’t leave the car. I had latched on to the idea of sleeping in it as some kind of self-conscious gesture of cool.
My sister, Perrin, was moving to Chicago to go to art school, and we drove her out there in the Caddy. A friend of hers by the name of Jan Chelminski did most of the driving—he would speed along at about a hundred miles per hour, with a single finger wrapped around the steering wheel. With the top down it felt as if we were flying at an altitude of about one foot over the payment, a very naked feeling, both frightening and magical. I remember falling asleep in the back seat out of sheer exhaustion—an incredibly deep sleep—and then waking up, unsure for the briefest moment where I was. The wind was beating at my head and the trees were rushing by, and beyond that there was nothing but fields. It was like waking up from a dream into a different dream.
Some years later, I was driving down the street in a car I actually owned, a Chevy Impala with a ripped-up interior that I’d inherited from my grandfather, when I recognized the Caddy up ahead—there was no mistaking that magnificent beast. The top was down and my father was behind the wheel, and next to him was a friend of his, Jim Kirk, who was dying of cancer. I knew that my father took Jim out on drives, but I’d heard it from my mother, not from him; I was living in Brooklyn at that point, and there was a bit of unacknowledged distance between my father and me . . . which is a way of saying that I don’t know what ultimately happened to the Caddy. I ran into Howie some years after that on the street, but he looked like a junky again, wearing those mismatched clothes from Goodwill. He said hello and then darted away.