| The Blue Chevy (cont.)
An Essay by Andrew D. Cohen worse by the grim navy-on-navy color scheme my parents settled on. “Look at that thing,” my brother said under his breath, lest my father remind us how when he was our age he’d been out on in the goddamn freezing cold delivering the Brooklyn Eagle so his family could eat. He would have been right. We were lucky: for our food and clothing, our private educations, our season tickets to the Jets and the countless other little and not so little luxuries we assumed were our birthrights. But he also would have been missing the point: we didn’t care so much about having a different kind of car as having a different kind of father. There must have been a brief period when that car gleamed—when the paint sparkled and the faux-wood dashboard shone and the cloth seats shimmered as brightly as they did the day my father drove it off the lot. But by the time my parents arrived at the Massachusetts camp where my brother and I spent eight weeks each summer playing T-Ball and Capture-the-Flag with a few hundred other Jewish boys from the Tri-State area, the windshield was splattered with insects, the dashboard was covered with ashes from my father’s cigar, and the backseat was stained with my sister’s vomit. “Would you believe it?” my mother said, scratching at the ruined fabric. “One minute she was sleeping and the next minute it was everywhere.”
From the outset my father took a perverse pleasure in roughing up that car—driving it for miles after the low-gas-warning light went on, waiting five and six thousand miles to change its oil, and garaging it on the edge of Spanish Harlem under the watch of a scar-faced giant named Rudy, who whipped the car around the garage at lightening speeds, often nicking up the fenders in the process. But what you really had to see was the way my father drove that car, steering wheel in hand, cigar clamped between his teeth. “Look out for that taxi, Joel!” my mother, nerves of Venetian glass, would scream as he merged into the tightly packed lanes at the Lincoln Tunnel tollbooths. “Quiet, Lillian,” my father would say, punching the car forward. “He don’t know who he’s fucking with.” And when someone cut him off on the Turnpike, my father would gun the engine as though he had every intention of running him off the road—though, in truth, this was nothing compared to the way he parallel-parked, preferably in a spot just big enough for that Porsche my brother was still talking about, throwing his right arm over the back of the front seat, and then, thinking better of it, using both hands to literally beat the steering wheel—thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap—like a boxer with his man on the ropes, stopping only when he heard the decisive
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