The Groove Project

I squeezed the door handle and settled inside, noting for the first time the green shag carpet on the floor. Flipping some knobs, the radio crackled to life, the speaker rattling in the dash. I turned the key and was rewarded with a healthy “rrrrhump” as the engine caught and settled into a loping idle. The stick shift wobbled with each vibration and I wrapped my hand around it as if to calm it down. Gingerly pulling the shifter into first gear, my first move as a car owner was greeted by a searing whine and clatter from the transmission. I jerked my hand away from the stick as if I had touched an electric power line. Pawing at the floorboard with my left foot, I found the clutch pedal and nudged the stick into first gear. The car moved. That was a good sign. A mile away from the school, I rounded the turn near my neighborhood, hearing and feeling the engine reach a deeper timbre as I climbed the hill of our street. I stopped short of our house, now realizing that I had not thought about exactly where this car was supposed to fit in our three-car garage, given that the third bay was home to my dad’s golf clubs, a lawn mower and some bicycles. So, I just pulled it to the curb in front of our house, shut down the engine and walked inside. An hour later, the house shuddered as my dad slammed the garage door, clicked open the latch on the back screen door, and tossed his briefcase on the kitchen table. “Who parked that piece of junk in front of our house?” After a few seconds my dad stood in front of me, his thumbs hooked into his belt, glaring down at me. “What did you pay for it?” “Two hundred,” I replied. “Two hundred and twenty, actually…eventually.” “Does it run?” “Got it home…” My dad eased ever so slightly. “It’s your dog. You feed it. You take care of it. When it dies, you bury it.” The next day, the Chevy fluttered awake at my first turn of the ignition key, lumbered back up the hill and made it to school, with the only premonition coming from some last-minute twitches from the temperature gauge. At the end of classes, I eased the car out of the space, my eyes now riveted on the temperature gauge as it crept toward red zone as I neared my street. Turning down the cul-de-sac, the thought of working on the car out in the street seemed both impractical and rude to the neighbors. So, leaving the car to an uncertain idle in the driveway, I hurriedly shoved the bikes and lawn mower to the side of the third bay of the garage and then eased the now-lurching Chevy into the space. The engine sputtered and then fell silent, except for a muffled wheezing and pinging from the radiator. Reaching under the grill with my fingers, I hoisted the hood as it groaned in protest. I might have well opened the bilge of an old cargo ship. The compartment reeked of the stench of fluids—oil, water, brake fluid, anti-freeze—all in various stages of decay. The battery was coated with grease; little peaks of grayish corrosion surrounded the terminals. Rivulets of vapor curled around the engine. “It’s probably okay,” I assured myself as I eased the hood back into place. That night, the garage door closed with a sharper thud, and the briefcase hit the kitchen table with a smack. “What is that piece of junk doing in the garage!” my dad bellowed. My mom kept her position at the kitchen sink. “Ed, it’s just for a few days. He just has to fix something.” The shadow of a dark look crossed his face, then he raised his eyes to me as I stood near the refrigerator. “Dad, I’ll be careful. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I have plenty of time. I just need to replace a gasket or something.” “Better be,” he growled. “And as soon as it is fixed, it needs to get back outside. We don’t have room for that in the garage.” He started to turn away for the living room when he looked back over his shoulder. “You do know what a gasket is, right?” “Oh, yeah,” I scoffed. “Who doesn’t…”