Pigs and Anarchists

I drive a temperamental Chrysler Caravan that refuses to start when it rains. “Did you prime the engine?” Abie asks when I call him on his private line. “Yes,” I say. “You pressed your foot on the gas?” “Yes.” “All the way down? And you released slowly?” “Yes,” I say again. “Primed and released. My fingers hurt from keeping the key turned.” “You’ll have to call the CAA,” he says. “Oh—” I say, my voice trailing off.

After supper I tell him the story. “You should have seen him─he was this old hippie wearing a baseball cap and he had long hair and a long flowing beard to here. ‘Every time it rains,’ I told him and he said, ‘Right on.’ He said he’s started every caravan in the city. ‘Every rainy day,’ he said. You have to change the plugs every three months. How come you didn’t tell me?”

“What’s the point?” Abie says and of course I know what he means. The front door handle has been broken for a year, door knobs are stuck, faucets drip or leak, staining sinks and ceilings, then there’s the dishwasher, air-conditioning, humidifier─the house rebelled from the moment we moved in. Maybe it’s just an old hippie or wino or both. I go around without my glasses so everything looks fine. My father is meticulous. Dates are sewn into his suit jackets and even his shoes. He shakes his head when he visits and I cry every time. He can’t talk to me, he tells my mother. Once he came for the weekend and sat in one of our two good rooms and interrogated me about Abie: what was he doing anyway and why didn’t he get a real job what with two children and all. Talking through tears constricts my throat. “Phil, Phil,” my mother said. Two days after they left my mother phoned. My father’s chest pains on the return flight. put him in intensive care. “Stress,” my mother said. It turned out the visit left him with a bout of severe indigestion. When he did have a heart attack two years later and was in a Miami hospital for a double bi-pass, I wasn’t there with him.

I don’t remember why. Maybe it was money. Or I was afraid to leave Abie alone with the girls. Everything would get better with money, we would thank him, he said. I think he changed the summer of ‘75 after working in the Don jail. A guard had half an ear bitten off, and once in the back of the van, a group of anarchists raised a raucous, screaming and stomping their feet. The cop turned on the heat, full blast. “What do you mean turned up the heat?” I said. “They turned up the heat all the way. On a record hot summer day.” Sometimes he makes things up to protect me or himself, because I know those pigs roughed up the anarchists. It’s an anarchist’s lot. Sometime during the summer, Abie started calling homosexuals fruits and queers and talking about voting conservative.

But then there are those times when we’re watching the National Geographic about married conservationists, and we’re sharing together and identifying like crazy. Abie collects National Geographic and I used to cut out pictures for my school projects from my father’s journals in our living room built-in bookshelves.

“He’s insane to drive off and leave her alone,” Abie says when the husband hops in his Land Rover and drives off.
“She’s not alone,” I said. “See, she’s with the film crew.”
“Oh, yes, you’re right,” Abie said and put his arm around me. There was a certain heaviness in the room, like in the country after a rain storm, when the air is stagnant and has substance, yet is still so new and fresh. I remember things like that.