My Father Drives

                  Nobody liked to drive with my father.  Every time that he got behind the wheel he acted as though he were a gladiator in the Colosseum.  When he was in his teen years, he made his bones by driving trucks all over the Midwest, and that gave him the right to tell other people how to drive.  He would honk and yell at the other drivers and give them instructions on how to drive better.  On our road trips to Minneapolis or Vermont, Dad would prepare the car by strapping the luggage onto the roof to make room for the kids and dogs on the inside.  Then he would test his level of endurance by leaving our house in the middle of the night and drive until he exhausted himself.  Mom was his copilot, and her job was to read the map and to make sure that he had a supply of gum and a Coke at the ready.  When he was happy, Dad would whistle, and when “King of the Road” came on the radio, he would sing along to his favorite song.  I think that our road trips reminded him of his days of being a long-haul truck driver.

As time went by, his driving became worse because, while he was still as aggressive on the road as he had always been, his skills had diminished.  His eyesight became so bad that he would have to ask, after he had stopped for the traffic light, “Jeff, what color is the light?”  I would reply, “it’s red Dad.  I’ll tell you when it’s green!”  If he had to stop at more than two lights in a row, Dad would yell out, without any warning, “Every Goddam Light!”  It was hard to relax if you were a passenger in his car.  Eventually he couldn’t even drive anymore because of his eyesight.  One day, when he tried to take a sharp turn in his little Mazda sportscar, he hit the curb and the concrete scraped the side of the car.  Dad got out of the car, looked at the damage, and handed the keys to my mother.  He never drove again.

This came hard to a man who had few passions, and his love of driving was at the top of his list of things that made him happy.  My earliest memory was that of my father driving a little GM sports car at breakneck speeds through the backroads of Louisville.  It wasn’t a good memory because Dad drove so fast that I was terrified.  Cave Hill Cemetery is juxtaposed between the downtown area and our house in St. Matthews.  The road around the cemetery is full of twists and turns and Dad loved to take them as fast as possible.  I think that I left indentations on the dashboard because I had gripped it so hard in preparing for the crash that I was sure was coming.  Now that he had given up his driver’s license, Dad was deprived of the one thing that he unquestioningly loved.

Eunuch

  

Chapter 4 Section 4: The Night Carolina Got Drunk 

The problem with the marriage of Andrew Clark III and Carolina was that he had all of the power and she didn’t have any.  In addition, he made the money and put her on a budget, which Carolina resented.  When she did try to make it on her own, by selling jewelry or encyclopedias, she failed miserably.  Carolina’s final career move was to become a realtor but that didn’t work out for her either.  She was powerless and angry and the only way that she could express her rage and frustration was through drinking.

Carolina refused to get a job when her real estate career fizzled.  “What do you want me to do?  Sell women’s clothes at the dress shop?”  The problem was that without a job, and no career, she had lost her purpose.  She had failed at raising a family, hadn’t done anything that she could be proud of and had no purpose in life.  Carolina did not know how to make herself happy.  One night, when she was alone and tired of her own company, she wanted to get out of the house for a while but the kids were too young to leave by themselves.  Carolina didn’t have the money for a babysitter so she decided to take a break from her life by taking a couple of drinks.  Beer wouldn’t do the trick.  She wanted to get drunk and get drunk fast, so she raided Andrew’s stash of whiskey.

When the kids heard their mother sing, they knew that something unusual was happening.  The Clark house was devoid of any happy noises so if Carolina did sing it wasn’t a happy tune or a popular song.  She sang an old World War I song that she picked up from an old movie and the lyrics went like this; “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, in your stomach and out your mouth.  Did you ever think as a hearse goes by, that you will be the next to die?”  The kids didn’t know what to make of the dark songs that their mother was singing while drunk.  The other boozy song that came dribbling out of her mouth went something like this; “nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going out to eat worms.”

Andrew came home to see his wife laying on the bathroom floor with vomit drooling out of her mouth.  “I wish I were dead,” she said as he approached her.  “I wish I were a man.”  When she realized that it was Andrew who was in the bathroom with her, and not one of her children, she called him names.  “You are a eunuch,” she said.  “You couldn’t get it up with a ten-foot pole.”  She was mixing but was too drunk to know or care.  Andrew took this abuse, probably because the kids were in the next room, but also because he knew that she was partly right and had been caught off guard at this insult.  It was at this point in the night that no one would forget that Carolina inexplicitly hit her husband.  He wasn’t expecting it, and it didn’t hurt, but he was so surprised that, out of reflex, he hit her back.  It was just an innocent smack on the shoulder.  Carolina stood up suddenly, laughed at the light hit, and her body language all but dared him to hit her again.  “Eunuch!”  She infuriated Andrew by taunting him.  “Eunuch,” she scolded her husband over and over again.

The second hit wasn’t a light smack.  The whole room felt like it erupted in Carolina’s mind and she was temporarily blinded.  Andrew did a ‘round the world’ swing and hit his wife square on the cheek bone.  A bright light temporarily blinded her.  The reverberations echoed throughout her brain; the inside of her cranium felt like it had been hit with an electrical shock as she crumpled to the floor.  The blood flowed easily from the newly created wound as she lost control of her bowels and bladder.  When the shock settled in, Carolina threw up all over the bathroom carpet, and the scent of stomach acid and too quickly consumed whiskey filled the room. 

Andrew hadn’t meant to hurt Carolina and felt so guilty about punching a defenseless woman that he nursed his wife by applying cold compresses onto the cut on her cheek and her bruised forehead.  It could have been a nice moment when he picked Carolina off the bathroom floor, allowed her to drape her arm around his shoulder, and let him to guide her upstairs to the bedroom.  In a fit of self-control that even he didn’t know he possessed; Andrew did not react as Carolina continued to taunt him.  “Eunuch,” she repeated, knowing that this one barb had easily pierced the veneer of Andrew’s fragile ego.  “Eunuch,” she said again.  The children heard this fading voice as they hid in their bedrooms, even though they didn’t know what the word meant.  The last words of the evening that the four Clark children heard were “I wish I were dead.  I wish I were a man.  Nobody loves me.  I wish I were dead.”

The next morning Carolina had to ask what happened to her cheek.  The children suggested that she must have fallen in the bathroom and hit her head on the tub.  Andrew kept his mouth shut and said nothing to disabuse the family of the made-up story.  The family coped with the incident by pretending that nothing unusual had happened.  However, there was a noticeable strain to the relations between Carolina and Andrew.  They became cordial to one another as their marriage never recovered from Carolina’s drunken outbursts.  There was an undeclared truce; neither one talked to the other, but they didn’t provoke each other anymore either.  A cold war that would last for the rest of their married life began in earnest the night that Carolina got drunk, and the frost that had settled on their once happy relationship would not melt away until one of them died.