the american road

A brief history of my errors.

1. The Beemer. 

A 1976 BMW 530i that I bought used for $3,500 in 1997 when my first wife and I separated for the third time. 

Holy shit, I loved that Beemer! It roared and leaped! It was olive green, with beige leather seats, a five-speed manual transmission, and six cylinders. I imagined it would be fun to learn to maintain it myself. Here was an opportunity to remake myself, to become a self-sufficient, hands-on, interesting guy. Fix the car. Fix myself. I changed the oil once. Then, little by little, things started to go wrong. I do not even know the names of the things that went wrong. I had a manual but couldn’t understand it. The tools I had bought mystified me. A local import car mechanic was able to fix some things. But eventually, the cost, or total unavailability of parts, rendered further measures impossible. Beemer sat in the driveway, still looking great but now silent, in a car coma.

I sold it to my second wife’s brother for $1 plus the cost of removing it from my driveway. 

2. The Jeep. 

A 1998 Jeep Wrangler convertible that I bought new after my first wife and I divorced and using as a down payment of $10,000 that she gave me after she’d received a big advance for a memoir she’d written about the challenges of OCD and of being married to me. That was a good book. She took the advance and moved to be with a new boyfriend in New York City while the kids stayed with me.

Holy shit, I loved that Jeep! What a blast! And perfect for me as I was experimenting with becoming an outdoorsy guy. You could take it anywhere: mountain tops, beaches, in the surf, Mars! Amazing! I mean, I didn’t really take it to any of those places. But I had fun putting the top down in the summer and taking the kids to the lake! Well, actually, putting the top up and down was kind of irritating. And then there was the hard shell top for the winter, which weighed a ton. Plus, in Michigan, most of the year seems to sort of toggle hourly between winter and summer, so I often wrangled the hard shell top on just when the temperature unexpectedly spiked and then removed it, only to watch my kids freezing in the back seat as the wind whipped the plastic rear windows of the cloth top. 

A year later, I traded it with $5,000 for a used van when my second wife and I decided to take my kids to Oaxaca, Mexico, for six months. 

3. The American Road. 

A 1989 GMC Van that I bought used in 1999 for $5,000 plus my Jeep Wrangler. On its side were detailed the words “The American Road.” 

Holy shit, I loved that Van! Riding up high in the swiveling driver’s seat, I felt like a ship’s captain, a proper American dad for once, kids happily romping in the back or crashing on the pull-out bed. Imagine the adventures! The memories! Man, even when it was just parked in the driveway, it was awesome. The kids and their friends would use it as a playhouse. But two hours into our trip to Mexico, it threw a rod—whatever that is—and I had to spend $5,000 to rebuild the engine. This was on top of another $1,500 repair two weeks after I bought it. I hadn’t thought to have a mechanic check it out because we were buying it from a friend of my wife’s family who owned the used car lot—also because it said “The American Road” on the side.

A year after we returned from Mexico, my second wife and I divorced. She said, “I’m done.” She made a painting of me and called it “Stone Man.” That was a good painting.

A year later, I agreed to sell the American Road to a neighbor and friend for $400. He took the keys and the title, which I’d signed over to him. But he never paid me.

4. The Bug. 

A 2002 VW New Beetle that I bought new around the time my first ex-wife had asked to move back in with me and the kids—just platonically. She had no job, nothing was left of her big advance, and I thought it was good for the kids to have her around. 

Holy shit, I loved that Bug! Bud vase! What?! Sunroof! Great sound system. Four-speed manual transmission; it was quick and handled great after lumbering around in the behemoth American Road. I taught my oldest to drive in that car! I had some memorable adventures in the Bug for a few years. But, you know, the trunk was tiny, and the leg room in the back was shit, while my younger son was growing like bamboo. 

Then, about six years after my first ex-wife and I had begun our experiment in platonic cohabitation, I met the woman who would become my third and final wife and ex-wife. She was not down with the existing arrangement. So, when she got a new job in another state, terrified that I’d lose her and be doomed to spend the rest of my life living with my ex-wife, I followed her and left my kids and the Bug behind with their mother. 

Not too long after, my oldest stopped talking to me for two years. My youngest still isn’t talking to me, 14 years later. But even if that weren’t the case, leaving my kids behind was by far the worst, most painful, and harmful decision I’ve made in my life. 

5. Farlene

A 2006 Honda Accord that I did not buy. 

My third wife bought it when she got that new job, and we’d moved away from my kids, first to St. Louis and then, after a couple of years, to northeast Ohio, where she got a different job. Farlene was a boring car. I can’t say I loved Farlene. But in her very boring reliability, she enabled me to feel that I’d been responsible and mature for once, having passively participated in a reasonable car-buying process involving Consumer Reports, much research, and proper test drives. Never mind that, all the while, I stubbornly told myself that it had somehow not been the height of irresponsibility to leave my kids behind. 

I drove tens of thousands of miles in bland Farlene, commuting two and a half hours each way, two or three days a week, from Ohio to my teaching job in Michigan for seven years. I did this because my ex-wife firmly believed that the survival of our relationship required us to stay under the same roof every night. I had no opinion on the matter, but having gone all-in by leaving the kids, I wasn’t about to rock that boat, and I gamely went along. 

Eventually, I took a job at the small college where she taught. On the surface, it seemed that everything had fallen into place. But, in addition to misgivings about leaving the job where I’d finally felt valued, I had also numbed myself out to the shame and regret of having left my kids, as well as to the unfair resentment I felt toward my wife for asserting her career preferences. So, looking back, it’s not surprising that eighteen months after I secured that job and our life was now just what for ten years we’d been saying we’d wanted it to be, all those buried feelings should well up with such force that I clumsily set off a chain of events that ended with me jobless, careerless, wifeless, houseless, and carless.

---