My car was broken down again and it was snowing. There was nothing going on except my art problem, which was: I’d agreed to write an essay interpreting a poem for my friend’s poetry newsletter but I didn’t know how to do that and it was snowing.
At least my car was in the shop and not out on the street where the plows would get it. I didn’t own a shovel. Would I have pulled the snowflakes off the car one by one with my bare hands.
Thinking about my art problem at least distracted me from focusing on my mechanical problem and the mechanical problem was helping me not think about my brother who was dying.
My mechanics were stumped.
I’d gotten a phone call from them the previous night and it sounded like they were ready to surrender. But I gave all the mechanics a rousing pep talk as they huddled together.
I said, “You can do this, I believe in you. You have the skill. You have the technology. You have all of human history on your side. You have opposable thumbs and YouTube.”
One last attempt they were making.
Under usual circumstances I would have consulted my brother. But I didn’t want to sap any remaining life force from him. A mere mention and he would have driven up to Jersey City and been looking under the hood, flashlight in his teeth, two hands going on my malfunction.
I took out a piece of paper and wrote the words “What’s a Poem?” at the top. And underlined those words. Twice. Thrice. Four times.
Out the window I couldn’t see past the brick convalescent home across the way. Was it snowing on southern deserts. On the moon. The sun. The town where I was born.
I clicked my metronome on as if I was about to begin practicing piano. But I owned no piano.
One hundred and five bpm.
I raised the metronome to one hundred and six.
Recently I had acquired this metronome so I would know exactly how many beats per minutes I was waiting around for something good to happen.
The snowstorm before this one, my brother showed up at my elderly parents’ house and told them he had blood cancer. First he shoveled their driveway. Then he said the thing about his blood cancer.
My mother was crying at the table. My father had his head in his hands.
On the way out, my brother cleaned the steps again. He shoveled their driveway again. The poodles were barking crazy the whole time.
Afterwards my parents called me on speaker phone (which my family is big on) and relayed this terrible news.
“That’s terrible.”
“It’s worse than that.”
“Chemotherapy?”
“We don’t know.”
“Can you shut your dogs up? Did he look bad?”
“He looked very sick.”
“What’d the doctors say? Does he have a chance?”
“A chance to what?”
“We didn’t talk about that.”
“To beat it.”
“We didn’t—”
“Take it easy, it’ll be all right.”
I listened to them both cry for a little while. Then my call waiting was going off and it was him, so I said goodbye. I pretended I didn’t know when he told me himself.
Said, of course, any way I could help, I would. Asked, did he want to come stay in the spare room?
No, he wouldn’t do that, he had a whole life down there and there was nothing that irritated him more than the city I lived in.
I asked him straight up what the outlook was. “Could you beat it?”
He said, “I don’t think so.” He said he’d moved on to the bucket list.
He asked me what the clicking sound was. I ignored the question and said, “What’s on your bucket list?”
He was quiet for a long time.
Finally he said, “Well, I always wanted to read Moby-Dick.”
I said I’d read it with him.
Before this mysterious third mechanical breakdown, my vehicle shit the bed two times in two weeks.
The first time was just that the tire exploded off the rim as I was driving down the highway.
This happened very early in the morning. Five in the morning. The stars were still up. I jacked the car up as traffic flashed by just a few feet away. A lot of people die on the highway. They die late at night and they also die very early in the morning. Which are the same thing.
Then I noticed the spare in the trunk was almost totally flat. I would have to call a tow truck.
But it’s just too embarrassing having to deal with tow truck drivers. They hitch the car up and drag it on the bed and chain it down then you climb in the passenger seat and once you’re driving down the highway again, the pregnant silence is broken because the tow truck driver has something smug to say like “What’s the sense of having a spare tire if you’re going to let it go flat?”
And you sit there in the passenger seat and there’s just nothing to say. You can shrug. The tow truck driver won’t be watching the road as they drive, they’ll be looking at you for the reply. They’ll see the shrug. The shrug will say it all. They’ll usually add, “See what I do is, I check and make sure my spare tire has air in it before I go anywhere. You might wanna start doing that.”
I may be a fool but I’m not foolish enough to call a tow truck driver to tell me I’m a fool.
Though I knew better, I put the flat spare tire on my car.
Off the offramp I wobbled.
Into a strange sleeping town.
I couldn’t afford to take any turns, the rubber would peel off the rim. But there was a tiny gas station on the corner. I gently pulled in. The station was closed. But the air compressor was right there, just feed your money in. One dollar and fifty cents for three minutes of air.
But I didn’t have coins for the machine and it didn’t take a credit card, so I walked down the sidewalk, in this pre-dawn city. Everything was twinkling, the way it always does when you are completely fucked.
Traffic was idling at the light.
“Hello,” I said, to a random woman in a minivan. “Do you have some quarters?”
She smiled at me and rolled down the window. Her breath slid out like a foggy snake.
She was a real estate agent of some kind. That same face of hers was blown up and printed on her van, smiling in that identical way, in dot matrix. The only difference was her hair was up in some kind of bouffant in the print, but flat, in real life.
She shook a dollar at me but I said, “No, I need four quarters. Or even better, six quarters.”
She said, “Honey, you need to let me help you.”
She shook her dollar at me. I opened my wallet and took out six dollars, a five and a one.
I said, “Do you have change for this?”
“What?”
“I’d need eight quarters and four singles if you have it.”
The light turned green. She didn’t move. The car behind her, a Lincoln Continental, just sat there. I waved it around. The car just sat there.
She said, “It’s cold out here. No one should be—should be sleeping on the streets.”
I said, “I have an apartment.”
She shook her head.
“It’s small but it’s something.”
She shook her head again. The Lincoln laid on the horn.
“Go around,” I yelled. I was getting irritated. I said to her, “When I sell my apartment, you can list. Okay. You can have an extra percentage point on the sale. I just need six quarters.”
She rolled up her window.
I said, “I’ll give you six dollars for six quarters, I’m going to be late for work.”
The light turned yellow. She just sat there. Then she thought better. Both cars ran the red light to get away from me.
I wound up finding the change in the trunk of my car. My wife had a filthy beach bag still in there from the summer. Piece of a sandwich in it. Disgusting. Fifty cents I found in the bag with all the seashells hot glued to it. Seventy-five cents I discovered in the pockets of one of the beach chairs. A quarter I found lodged all the way under the passenger seat.
Later that day I carried the rim with the shredded tire into the shop. The guy was a wiseass, of course. He looked like a giant chipmunk, the way wiseasses often do.
Pointing to the damage, he said, “Why’d you wanna do that.”
I laughed. “I could have told you you were going to say that.”
He said, “No. Seriously. Think it’s time for a new tire.”
It wound up being two tires. This is how that went down:
He was in there in the shop whistling while he worked. The whistling was irritating. I was sitting in the waiting room flipping through Herman Melville. Page 31, the hero had a drizzly November in his soul, was pausing before coffin warehouses, and was bringing up the rear of every funeral. I shut the book. It was impossible to read with the whistling going on.
Who enjoys listening to psychopaths whistle while they work? Not me. Especially if there is no radio playing. If there is a radio playing, I can accept that they are just caught up in their work and may be whistling along in some kind of accompaniment with the radio, which may even be unconscious. But I find it inexcusable when people just whistle to break the quiet. That being said, I despise isolated trumpets, fugal horns, harmonicas, tenor saxophones, alto saxophones, most flutes, all oboes, and the list goes on and on.
The whistling suddenly stopped and I heard him call my name.
I walked out into the repair bay. My car was up on the lift and he was staring at the slow leak spare tire I had just put on the car that morning.
“See this.”
“Yeah you’re supposed to fix that too.”
“You gotta see this.”
I got under the car with him.
There were two nails in the tire, pretty close to each other. Half an inch or so apart.
He said, “You know what that means, right?”
“I don’t know. Can you patch it?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. This isn’t good.”
“It’s not good,” I agreed.
He looked at me with serious eyes. “Mr. Smith, I think somebody is out to get you.”
“Sure, yes. Pull them out and patch it?”
“No can do. Too close together. But did you hear me, you got bigger problems.”
“Yup.”
“Somebody is trying to kill you.”
“So then replace the tire. That’s what it’ll have to be.” He wanted to talk more about my would-be assassin but I couldn’t get into talk like that.
I went back to the waiting room and read some more about the whale or God or the dilemma of birth or sudden sweeping snuffing out of light or the answer to any question we were ever going to have, whatever we dared to ask various voids, or captains, or both. Everybody was wrong. Everybody was right. Whoever. All of us on a sinking ship we couldn’t tell was going under though it certainly was. No denying. And there was the whistling again. I shut the book.
My dad texted to say that my brother had requested a leave of absence at work. Though my dad was retired, he had passed down his old job fixing garbage trucks and cop cars at the municipal garage to my brother. My dad texted that he felt like he was retiring twice because of it and the first retirement had almost ended his life. He texted that no father should have to outlive his son. I had a hard time writing back. The words wouldn’t come. I sent one of those super sad emojis. I had writer’s block so bad I couldn’t even work on the speech for the funeral my mom had requested. She wanted it to be really epic. Would take many many drafts. That’s why we were starting so early.
Two days later, the fuel line burst on top of my engine and I took it into the garage down the hill from my apartment. That cost me two hundred and fifty with an oil change.
I’d hung out an extra half hour after the car was done, just talking to the mechanics, drinking Miller Lite with them.
Then when I was driving the car home from the shop, the engine began to misfire because maybe the fuel that’d sprayed the engine block had soaked some of the spark plugs or there was another problem, a clogged fuel injector, or the hose they’d used to replace the bad one was defective, or collapsed, or who knows. I’m just guesstimating a guesstimate of an approximation to try and be helpful, I guess.
It could be any number of things.
I did a U-turn and brought the sputtering car back. The mechanics looked so heartbroken, setting their beer cans down on the speedy dry drum. Their leader took a knee.
My phone rang. My mother calling. I answered and the dogs were still barking and my father was still yelling for them to shut up. I asked her why it always had to be speaker phone.
She said, “Your brother is a moron.”
“Okay.”
“He’s not dying,” my dad yelled. “I hate him.”
“The lying sonofabitch,” she said.
Dad said, “He’s not sick, he’s not, he’s not anything. All our sleepless nights.”
“He’s got allergies,” Mom said.
“He does not have leukemia. It’s pet dander.”
“Every seven years your body changes. The little dickhead has allergies now. He’s going to be fine. I just drove him into work myself.”
“Please back up,” I said.
Mom said, “I had gone over there and told him I wasn’t leaving until he agreed to get a second opinion. There’s been so many advancements.”
“Cancer isn’t what it used to be,” Dad said.
“No, medicine is not what it used to be,” Mom corrected. “I’ve got him by the ear and I’m twisting and I’m threatening him that if he doesn’t get a second opinion—you know, the neighbor behind us, his wife passed away, but before she did, she was on these radical new treatments, malignancies are just no match for them—he’s got to see this specialist, is what I was saying, and twisting, he’s got to. Can you believe what he said next?”
“Can you believe it?” Dad said.
“What did he say?” I yelled.
“He hadn’t even gotten a first opinion!”
Mom said, “He opened his laptop and he showed me the—” She couldn’t go on. The dogs must have been on the table barking directly into the receiver.
“Showed you the what?” I said. “I’m hanging up. Silence your beasts. I’ll drown them.”
“Web MD.”
“He’d looked up all his symptoms. He had. Himself. Showed her on Web MD.”
“Did you hear your father?”
“Loud and clear.”
“He had, not a doctor. He had. The kid can’t even fix garbage trucks right, without my help, calls me up says, ‘daddy, I can’t get the hydraulics to stroke, hellllllllp.’ Yeah. His girlfriend got a Maine Coon. That’s the issue.”
“They’ve got him on prescription Benadryl.”
I hung up on them and I was so mad I hysterically laughed for minutes, hours, days, weeks, no way of knowing. Then I was crying. Then I was laughing again and out the window the blizzard had erased the convalescent home completely. I held my breath like you do when you’re trying to beat the hiccups and when I was done with that I could think straight so I called the jackass on his cell.
“Yo,” he said.
I waited thirty seconds. He waited thirty seconds.
“You there?” he said. “What are you wearing?”
“Were you trying to be an asshole.”
“No, I was wrong, that’s all.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. “And I should have expected that. You’re going to heaven. But. So what’s a poem, really?”
He didn’t say anything.
I added, “Sorry, I should have said hello. I’m just sitting here trying to figure something out. I’m kinda stuck. What are you doing?”
“Just put the last snowplow on the garbage truck.”
“You’re at work?”
“Yes I’m back. They called me in. Be happy I’m gonna live.”
“Life? In your condition?”
“Yes. Emergency. Overtime. Now it’s just sit here till something else breaks. Drink coffee. It’s going to snow all night.”
“Here too. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe nothing will break.”
“Something always does.”
“You bored yet,” I asked.
“I’m listening to that Moby-Dick audiobook. Did you start reading?”
“How far are you in?”
“Sixteen hours.”
“What page is that?”
“No idea.”
“What’s happening? And by the way, I heard Catherine’s cat makes you sneeze now.”
“They’re hunting a big fat pale devil. That’s what they’re doing. I’m at that wet part, still. Waves. And the guy in charge losing his mind. And yes. I guess Mom told you. I was gonna call you later. Been busy.”
“Yeah, whatever. I’m supposed to write an analysis of a poem. Can you help me? What’s one you like?”
“A poem? Like? I don’t know. Jack and Jill went up the hill. No that’s a nursery rhyme. Let me think.”
“Google ‘poem’ real quick.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m not doing it, that’s the problem.”
“Looking now. I don’t know much about poetry.”
“Who does? Don’t worry about it. The more people know about it, the less it seems they understand.”
I slowed the metronome.
He said, “All right, psychoanalyze ’The Raven.’ ”
“Won’t work. People would want something a little more off the beaten path.”
“That’s what ‘The Road Taken’ is about.”
“‘The Road Not Taken.’ Not. It’s about the opposite of that.”
“How much are they paying you for this?”
“They? For this?” I said. “There’s no money. This is for my buddy’s random newsletter.”
He said this next bit very slowly, with maximum disdain: “So why do it?”
“Why do anything? Art thing. You know. They never really pay. Though I’ll tell you the truth, I could use the money. Car is back in the shop. They might not even be fixing it but I’ll still have to cough up a hundred for the diagnosis.”
“You can’t expect a mechanic to work for free. Your car isn’t an art project. Your car isn’t a poem. I’m tired of people who can’t fix a problem complaining about the people who can fix the problem.”
“You’re scared of doctors apparently.”
“The information is right there if you know where to look. Last time I went, the dummy said I was getting blubberous. I’m not. You think if you go left instead of right, the world is gonna end. But I’m here to tell you, there’s a Chilton repair manual for everything, even your tiny dick.”
“Sure.”
“We don’t need condescending middlemen. Some of us don’t anyway. Mom told me your car is broken down again. You got it in a garage, I heard. Heard you can’t fix it.”
“Just trying to help these starving mechanics feed their children. And I could fix my car if my garage wasn’t a coat closet. If my driveway wasn’t the busiest street in America. If my attic wasn’t under my bed.”
“Yellowbelly talk.”
“When you got a problem, an important problem, you go to a professional.”
“How do you know a professional is professional?”
“What are you scared of?”
“Dying and being a dead clown or living and being a living clown.”
“Fair enough. But that’s everybody. Serious clowns.”
“Nobody has ever worked on one of my cars.”
“You’re going to outlive Methuselah, Enoch, and Noah put together. Be quiet. The guys I’ve got are kinda ace, I think. I just don’t want to pay for them to tell me they can’t solve my riddle.”
“Nobody should work for free. This goes for you too. If you are going to say what a poem means, then that right there is a diagnosis. You should be compensated. There is a diagnostic fee. For anything.”
“I could charge a hundred, you’re saying. No, you’re wrong. Nobody would pay money to hear what I think about ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ or ‘Howl’ or ‘Because I could not stop for Death.’ You know what this reminds me of. Rae had that bright idea over the summer. She wanted to walk around the beach and tell people when they were getting sunburnt. She wanted to start a business for this. Walk up to someone becoming a lobster and tell them they were becoming a lobster. Five bucks for the information.”
“Sell them a squirt of suntan lotion for another five.”
“No, she would have had to sell them a time machine to go back to before they even got the sunburn to begin with.”
“You’d know more about the beach than I do.” He was a redhead, he’d gone into the ocean maybe seven times in his whole life. Me, I had a PhD for the beach. The lifeguards call me Dr.
“I told Rae it would be worthless information and people would just be mad at her for trying to tell them about it. That’s the same problem with poetry. Or any kind of art, really. As soon as you say your opinion out loud about what it means, they just get mad at you. Better to just be silent. Best to mind my own business.”
“Well, you could lie.”
“Lie about my opinion? No, it wouldn’t matter. Any opinion would be the problem. A true one or a fake one. Dancing about architecture.”
“And are you trying to sell me your broke down car?”
“I don’t know yet. You’re gonna live now. A formerly dull coin now gleams. What will you offer?”
“It was running when you dropped it off?”
“Who knows if it got worse while they were attempting to re-repair it.”
“That makes no sense.”
“But that’s what happened when they worked on it last time.”
“Why’d you bring it back there.”
“It’s a short walk. And they’ve kind of become my friends. By the way, this guy the other day told me he thinks someone is trying to kill me. There were two nails stuck in my tire. Close proximity. Was it you?”
“Fix your own tire! A baby could.”
“Babies absolutely cannot. If you, a professional, helped the baby, then yeah.”
“I would have just shot you in the head. Walk up behind you and one quick one, blam. I’d use a silencer. I’d be gone before you even hit the sidewalk. At your funeral I’d say you were paranoid someone was trying to kill you.”
“Nice. I’m not paranoid. It’s the whistler at the fucking tire shop who is. Probably neighborhood kids, maybe, the tire. The theory the tire guy had was that they could have balanced the nails against the bottom of the tire so the nails were resting on the nailhead with the points sticking up into the tread and when I backed out of the parking space, the puncture would have happened. That’s another thing, the car has a few brand-new tires on it.”
“What year is it?”
“2007.”
“But you crashed it a few times.”
“There’s no way you could prove that.”
“I thought you were writing a novel. Forget the poetry newsletter. You’re not a critic. You can make some good cash selling a novel. Write another Moby-Dick. Write Moby-Duck, even.”
“Right now I’ve been doing short stories. You want to read one?”
“No. Write 758 pages, write em real good. I’ll listen to the audiobook while I do pig brakes.”
“This one place is asking for a short story, they asked me a few times, asked me last year, and asked me again this year. I don’t want to keep saying no. Plus they’d pay something. If I can think of one. And if I can send it to them by the end of the month. If they like it.”
“How much they pay?”
“A million dollars.”
“There you go. That’s more like it. What story are you going to send the million dollar people?”
“Suddenly you’re interested. Okay.”
“Never mind, I don’t care.”
“I got nothing. I was too worried about you. First time in my life I got a block.”
“You were worried about me? I’m touched.”
“At your funeral I was going to say nice things. But now forget it. I guess I could send them this one story I’m working out in my head now. It’s about this pussy who’s suddenly allergic to his own life.”
“Hmm.”
“There’s more.”
“What else you got?”
“Well, the guy has a brother whose car is broken down and he’s trying to write a story and he’s trying to read a book and it’s snowing and he just found out his brother isn’t dying after all, so at least he doesn’t have to lie and say sweet things in an obituary. Not to mention the guy has to write an analysis of a poem, but—”
“No, I mean, this is like everything that bores me all mashed together.”
“All ideas are stupid.”
“Just send the poetry analysis thing to the short story people. Call it a short story. Forget my obituary. Tell your newsletter friend his newsletter was published at the place that publishes the short story. Kill two with one rock.”
“Yeah sure. Great idea. I’ll do that. Thanks.”
“Now you owe me, one hundred dollars.”
“For what.”
“Diagnosing your problem.”
Well the dickhead smashes the ship. The peg leg loses. There’s one lone survivor. You know his name. The ship that saved that man, it’s called Rachel. Same as my wife. I shouted, “Wikipedia is amazing, want to hear something incredible?”
From the other room Rae yelled back, “What?”
“You pulled the narrator from the wreckage of the Pequod.”
“What?”
“Pequod,” I shouted.
Rae came down the hallway with my phone in her hand. “For you. Stop yelling.”
I answered the phone, hoping it was the garage with miraculous news but instead it was my friend with the poetry newsletter and he was asking about my progress on the essay, yet again.
I lost my temper. Everything I was mad about came out, aimed at him. Judgmental tow truck drivers. Whistlers. Dealing with real estate agents before dawn. Inept saints. Skilled buffoons. I shouldn’t have screamed into the phone at my friend. I was no better than my parents’ dogs.
“Calm down, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack!”
“You’re not a doctor,” I said, breathlessly. “Forget about the essay. It’s become a short story and I’m going to send it to the Southwest Review.”
“Typical of you.”
“I’m not sorry.”
“Can I ask what they are paying?”
“One point five million dollars.”
He was quiet on the other end. He was laughing in an obscure octave.
Finally he said, “What is that clicking sound.”
“Nothing,” I said and shut my metronome off. 
Bud Smith lives in Jersey City and works heavy construction.
