EVERYBODY HAS ONE
It was an odd place to put a garage business, neatly tucked between a row of houses, sides touching as in gentle flirtation. A short squat building flavored with a pseudo red brick facade which peeled and smelled of tar paper during the summer heat. Indubitably the shortest in the row, the garage ran long and narrow to a back door my father had bolted and nailed shut against intruders. On the other side of the door, should it be opened, was an alley that faced the sheer side of a hill made of rock. On the front side of the building above the bay door, pressed flat to the siding hung a sign that read, "Johnson's Garage, Woodus Johnson and Sons". Woodus was my grandfather. My father was one of his sons. This is not a story about my father, but rather the place he would take me to on an occasioned summer evening, after supper hours, while there was still time to get things done. When you are 12 years old and your friends aren't around, staying home on a warm summer night to play with your brother and sister, doesn't quite cut it. So when my father had asked me to go back to work with him, I eagerly said yes. I was so grateful he had asked me that I even told him I'd clean the bathroom for him, a job he had more or less come to expect me to do. I rather enjoyed it, too. It was a challenge to try to make the grease stained sink white; and the toilet bowl! God forbid if my mother found out I was playing in that.
The humidity hung close in the early evening air leaving that sticky sweaty feeling all over your body. As we pulled up in front of the garage, I knew it was going to be sweltering inside. The building faced the western sky, and glancing at the sun, I knew it had a good two hours before setting beyond the Hudson, the river that ran behind houses and a few small businesses across the street from the garage. It was your lower than average mixed neighborhood of rundown two and three family homes with businesses placed haphazardly here and there. Tonight the street was quiet. Only a few inactive boys in dirty shorts and sweaty tee-shirts quietly compared their latest baseball card winnings. Later in the evening as the sun went down, the shadows would be filled with people fanning themselves on their front stoops; men without shirts and women in house dresses trying to catch the evening breeze before retiring to their heated muggy apartments where no fan moved the air.
My father waved to a man who was cleaning the plate glass window on the front of a building down the street. His name was Eddy and he owned a radiator business three buildings down. He and my father referred customers to one another and Eddy believed that gave him the privilege to stop in at any time for idle conversation. Rest assured, Eddy would stop in to see us tonight. He was a small, wiry, talkative man who had a queer habit that always made me wonder why he never went deaf. Whenever he came in to talk to my father, he would pick up a pencil and without too much thought, stuck the pointed end in his ear as far as he could and begin to twirl it around. When he was finished he would check out the point for ear wax, wipe it off with his fingers and place the pencil back where he got it. Later on I would go over and throw the pencil away. I always wondered what happened to Eddy.
We stepped through the small door that stood to the left of the bay door and were immediately greeted by the smell of old oil and gasoline. It was the same odor that had welcomed people at least thirty years before my time, the stench of a musty old garage, and it took your nostrils an instant to get used to. But to me, it was an aroma that ran deliciously through my mind. To this day whenever I smell gasoline being pumped, my mind travels back through my feelings to a time when I played at my father's garage. On this particular night as I stepped from one world to another, with the insight of a child, I knew at once the reason I had come. It was parked at the furthest end of the garage, waiting in silent blackness, be at any moment to come alive and swallow me whole. My heart leaped with excitement. Thoughts raced through my mind in anticipation of the evening and of what I had discovered here in my father's garage. As my father began the business he came for, I set off to investigate my discovery. It was the length of one and a half cars and as I examined it from all angles, I felt it tease my mind. The Grand-daddy of all Cadillacs, the monster in the closet, the drooling snowman at the foot of the bed, every persons' nightmare, and it beckoned me to come and play and I allowed the hearse to assume my whole presence.
Cautiously I circled the black beauty. A curious mind made me wonder what it would be like to lie stiff in the back where they placed the coffins with dead people in them. What a tale I'd tell my friends about where I had spent last night, lying in the back of a hearse. Daddy played his air gun and I played dead. Ha! I'd be a popular one tomorrow with this story. I tried the door on the passenger side but it was locked so I went around to the driver's side door. If either door was unlocked it would be this one. I pressed the knob and pulled the handle back but nothing happened. Disappointment came over me like a dark cloud. I did not want to ask my father for the key for he might say no and break the spell. I went around to the back end of the hearse and pulled back the handle which opened the door that led to the place where they slide in the coffins and pushed them forward till their heads rested gently against the bench seat; and I slowly climbed in, lying back, afraid to fall too deep, down into a pool of unknown, breathing death, sensing nothingness but vast infinity, living and dying in one breath. My hair stood on end and my breath quickened as I listened to the silence. One by one my senses came back to me. It was then that I became aware of the strong interior scent. I knew right away this must be what dead bodies smelled like. It was a sickly sweet leathery smell and the muggy summer night made it more intense. I then looked around at my surroundings and realized I had crawled all the way up to the front where my back was pressed against the front seat. The back was wide enough to accommodate two coffins and there were two U shaped handles on either side. I couldn't imagine why they would put them there because the people who rode in the back certainly didn't have any use for them. The interior color was a creamy mocha brown which rather intensified the sickly smell. I then realized it was getting very warm in here. I couldn't remember closing the back door when I climbed in, but it was shut tight and there was no sound. Funny I thought, they sound proofed a hearse? Who would live to talk about it? I laughed at my stupid joke just for the sake of hearing a sound, and sound was still present. My legs were sticking to the leather as I rolled over on my side. I looked through the oversized back window of the hearse and could see shades of daylight fading. The overhead lights were on and the bay door had been opened out into the street. Soon it would begin to cool down outside but in here there was no air, and all I could think about was telling my friends where I was last night. Suddenly the door opened and fright alerted my senses and my nerves responded. My father stood at the other end of the door looking at me puzzled and asked what I was doing. "I wondered where you disappeared to. Aren't you going to clean the bathroom? Come on out of there before you can't breath anymore." (I wondered what he meant by that.) I climbed out of the back of the hearse and was pleasantly cooled by a phantom breeze, only momentary, but it felt good. Standing before my father on this summer night with the beast in the background and the sweet smell of oil and gasoline running freely through the air, triggered something deep within my mind, and I was saddened by the thought. It brought to mind a verse from a poem I had once heard.
Leave behind the summer days
we laughed and played then turned away.
Our deafened ears just would not hear
those words that spoke so loud and clear.
Leave behind the warmest night
when love was ours and all seemed right.
The words were there to cause us pain
we knew the words had beckoned change.
Leave behind your love for me
but never never leave me.
What I had experienced that night in the hearse was the beginning of something new for me. Emotional maturity had begun and I was facing a new chapter in my life. It was the beginning of leaving behind a part of my childhood I did not want to let go of. I came to realize no one is immortal; there is a beginning and there is an end to everything and there is a time when everyone comes to know this and there is a place where it happens, and everybody has one.
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