The Early Posthumous Work

Second Best Friend

35 Second Best Friend Let’s face it, love is not only blind, it’s stupid. A man is always falling in love with someone who’s too old or too young, already married, waiting for the light to change, or walking away across the airport terminal. One falls in love with shirts, screwdrivers, dogs, chairs, peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. And it has no fashion sense, love, nor any sense of timing. When all my contemporaries were embracing either Marx or money market mutual funds, some embracing both, I fell in love with a car. I was twenty-nine before I owned an automobile, and the one I bought then, because it was eleven years old, cost me only four hundred dollars (I had to borrow half of it). It was the first thing of appreciable value I had ever owned, a green 1966 TR4A , what used to be called a “sports car.” The car was small, dirty, and loud, and a rectangle the size of a shoebox had been cut out of the clouded rear window of the convertible top so that one could see. “Roadster,” the title said. The day I bought it, I had handed over a check and waited in the seller’s driveway while he telephoned my bank, then we signed papers, shook hands, and I was ready to leave. The guy started the car for me, leaving the hood up, then disconnected the battery with the engine still running, brought a different battery out of his garage and swapped out the one he had started the 36 The Early Posthumous Work car with, closed the hood. Smiled. I thought, Too late now. And I really wanted this car. So I had to buy a battery the next day, and the day after that, new tires. The tires were new only in the sense of being new acquaintances to this particular car. I bought them behind service stations and off the used racks at tire dealers for five dollars, five dollars, two dollars, seven-fifty. One guy crouched down beside one of the front tires, ran his hand over the brown cord showing where tread had once been, and said, “Yep, you’re riding on air, there.” A week later, one side of the front suspension broke away from the frame, fortunately for me, not at speed. I found a guy in the phone book to weld it back. After that everything else on the car broke, too, but I loved it anyway. That was a long time ago, but like an ex-lover, I could tell you in all the intervening years, even long after we had parted, where to find that car, the street address I mean. For fifteen years it was in Columbus, Ohio. Now it’s back in Texas, in Fort Worth. I live in Mississippi. But I bought the car in Austin. I had been thinking about buying a car for fifteen years, by that time. In high school I used to read the classified ads, looking for cheap XKE Jaguars and such, enjoying the thrill you get when for a split second the mind confuses wanting with having. I still do this, on occasion, and still get pleasurably confused. I had good reason for wandering in the want-ads as a teenager , what with my mother’s car, which was a highly visible old Oldsmobile, which even she was a little embarrassed at, an antique which had been my grandmother’s. It was two-tone, fuchsia over mauve. I didn’t have any money then (it’s a chronic condition), so my shopping was idle. My mother allowed me to use her car while suggesting I get a job and buy myself my own. But money just didn’t seem to accumulate for me the way it did for other people. I made peace with the double-purple Olds. This happened in Texas, where like much of the country away from the East Coast, you pretty much couldn’t exist without a car. Couldn’t and didn’t. Among young people, the car was an Steven Barthelme 37 identity—”she drives that SuperSport,” they would say. “He’s the GTO.” To give an address or directions to a house, we didn’t talk about Tudor or French provincial and we didn’t tell people what color the shutters were. We just specified what was parked outside...