Juror’s Introduction:
A long time ago the late, great Grace Paley, who graced (sorry) the Hudson Valley with her fierce, openhearted, brilliant presence, told me, “You’re a real writer.” Without a clue as to what she meant, I stored her comment in my shirt pocket for years, pulling it out, creased and faded, whenever I was truly stumped or tangled up in a net of prose. Recently I had a head-smack of a moment when I realized that what she meant was reflecting a real effort: a struggle, a wish, an ambition, and a clear love for language in all its elastic and rigid forms. So I now convey her words to the writers whose stories I had the privilege to read for this contest. The stories were written by real writers: they had art and intention and desire written all over them. The paradox of fiction is that if it doesn’t feel real, it doesn’t feel like fiction.
The winning story, “The Minivan,” by Mimi Lipson, was so real it made me laugh. On one level it is a very real-feeling portrait of a very real-seeming character who has a real kind of obsession with all the wrong, but real, things in life—such as a Ford Aerostar. Now there was a car, half clunker, half beauty, that had real written all over it (I had one, so I know). The details are real. The tools. The facial expressions. I can see it all. But on another level the story is about how the heart attaches and detaches; about how the heart itself has to be realistic. We go through this all the time, don’t we? And that is what I loved about it. Congrats. Really.
—Jana Martin, 2008 Fiction Contest judge
Jana Martin is the author of Russian Lover and Other Stories, a critically acclaimed collection published last year. She lives and works in Ulster County and is in the throes of a novel.
THE MINIVAN
I met Isaac when he was doing some work at my house. I think he asked me out because he admired my fiberglass spaghetti lamp. He was foxy, punk rock, bratty in his banana curls and calculator watch. Mostly, he was hilarious! On our first date, at a bar in South Philly, he told me all about his plan to poison the crackheads in his neighborhood by scattering cyanide-filled vials on the sidewalk; about shooting pigeons by the bucketful in the warehouse he used to live in; he had me in stitches with his megalomaniacal fantasies about turning a certain abandoned factory into his fortress of solitude, where he would build his own personal Road Warrior Batmobile. Of course this was before I knew he wasn’t kidding about any of it. We hoisted mug after mug of lager that night, thrilled to have found one another. We groped behind a dumpster. We groped in a dumpster.
Isaac showed me his photo album a few weeks into our affair. I thought it was amazing. With the overconfidence of a new lover, I deemed it a distillation of his very essence. Here was baby Isaac, standing unsteadily in a hallway, gripping a bench for support. Here was Isaac as a slack-lipped high school metalhead, eyes stoned and affectless beneath a frizzy mullet. Here he was perched high up on a roof truss in the warehouse, aiming a BB gun at the camera. And here with his old dog, Death Ray, lost in an acrimonious break-up. There were random snapshots: a brutalist municipal building; an ornate Victorian window grate; a boat in a weed-choked lot photographed through a cyclone fence, christened “The A-HOLE.” There were pages and pages of photos of floors—red pine, tongue-and-groove oak, parquet—that he’d installed or refinished or repaired over the years. Occasionally these would show someone in a corner holding a shop vac or a bucket, but Isaac didn’t identify them as he leafed through the album with me.
He stopped at a picture of a skinny blonde girl in the passenger seat of a van. I thought he was going to tell me about an ex girlfriend (maybe the one who’d kept Death Ray), but instead he began waxing nostalgic about the van she was sitting in. It was an Aerostar, he said, with plush velour seats and AC and power everything, and it was the nicest car he’d ever had. This began a disquisition on the subject of minivans, which Isaac felt were the perfect work vehicles. They got better gas mileage than a truck, you could fit a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood in the back, and you could sit in a nice civilized captain’s chair up front with a cup-holder and everything. (He liked his creature comforts.) He told me he had drawn plans for a prototype of the modern minivan when he was 10 years old, and he therefore felt that in some small measure he had invented it.
But Isaac had no minivan now, and indeed, no driver’s license. An epileptic, he had crashed the Aerostar into the side of a church during a grand mal seizure. He’d been taken to the ER, where a doctor put a medical suspension on his driver’s license, and he couldn’t get it back until he could prove he hadn’t had a seizure for six months. This would require appointments with neurologists. Also blood tests, various costly scans and imagings, who knew what else; and furthermore, he wasn’t remotely seizure-free. He had hangover seizures, stress-related seizures, strobe light/trance music/op art seizures; he had just-for-the-hell-of-it seizures. “Everyone should have a seizure,” he told me. “It’s intense.” He hadn’t seen a neurologist since they sprung him from the hospital. He couldn’t. He had no health insurance. And rather than apply for Medicaid, he’d done what came naturally: He had slid effortlessly, numbly, fatalistically off the grid.
Somehow, he was maintaining a floor-sanding business on his bicycle. A floor sander, in case you’ve never seen one, is a huge thing. Isaac’s weighed probably 200 lbs. Then there’s the buffer, the edger, the milk crates full of sandpaper, the five gallon buckets of polyurethane—all this had to be transported to and from the job. Astonishingly, he was able to get the various housewives who engaged his services to shuttle him and his equipment in their SUVs and drive him to Home Depot, or to Diamond Tool, or Bell Flooring, often making several trips a day due to his chronic disorganization. He wasn’t apologetic or even particularly nice about it—he was basically a petulant, sarcastic teenager about it—and yet these housewives loved him. They loved him with all the exasperation and indulgence that their inner soccer moms possessed. I saw it with my own eyes. They clucked disapprovingly at his diatribes about, say, apocalyptic forms of population control, but still they made him nice lunches and sewed buttons on his shirts and paid him in cash because he didn’t have a bank account.
His invisible charm worked on me, too. The clichés pile up as I try to explain: He made me laugh. I could be myself around him. I’d never met anyone like him—gimlet-eyed and crazy in equal measure. Ultimately, though, he was just so naked and guileless. He concealed none of his emotions, positive or negative; everything he felt seemed to register on the surface of his skin. Within a month he had moved into my house.
Summer came. We rode our bikes all over town. Isaac showed me his cherished places: the decommissioned banks under the Frankford El; the impromptu, oddly homey arrangements of sofas and chairs and milk crates and industrial spools where junkies congregated in vacant lots; the boarded-up buildings that he’d pillaged or planned to pillage for light fixtures, doorknobs and other treasures. At some point in our travels, he showed me a mid-’80s Dodge Caravan, sun-dulled and putty-colored, beached on a Fishtown sidewalk in the shade of an ailanthus tree. It had a for-sale sign in the back window. “I’m gonna buy that minivan,” he said, and he wrote the phone number down in his sketchbook. I probably laughed if I reacted at all.
• • •
I forgot all about it. Then one afternoon I came home early to find Isaac sitting on our stoop, shit-faced drunk. Having nowhere to be that day, he’d gotten bored and polished off a bottle of vodka I had in the freezer. Thus emboldened, he’d called the phone number in his sketchbook and told the presumably delighted owner of the Caravan, “If you can get it to South Philly I’ll give you $400 for it.” Maybe half an hour later, the minivan pulled up to the curb in a cloud of whitish smoke and rattled to a stop. I took a look and went back in the house.
After a while, he staggered inside and found me sitting at the kitchen table.
“That’s one happy sonofabitch that got your $400,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, how am I supposed to get money for something better if I can’t even drive my tools around? Are you going to buy me an Aerostar? No? That’s what I thought. Everyone else has a fucking minivan but me.”
I started asking all the obvious questions. How was he going to register it? How could he just drive it around without a license? Had he even looked at the engine? But this was not the point. Isaac was sick of not having a minivan, and he was sick of thinking about it, so he’d called the guy, and now he had a minivan, and not only was I not happy for him, I was giving him crap about it. And as for his driver’s license, as far as he was concerned he was so thoroughly fucked that there was no point in thinking about that either.
“Fine,” I said, “Don’t call me when you get pulled over for driving around without a license plate.”
Isaac let out a long, quarrelsome fart as he contemplated this, then disappeared into the basement and re-emerged with a roll of duct tape and some scissors. He grabbed a box of Cheerios off the table, dumped its contents in the sink and cut a license plate-sized rectangle out of the cardboard. I followed him outside to see what he would do next. He looked up the street, wrote three letters on the piece of cardboard with a sharpie, then looked down the other way and added four numbers. He taped the cardboard onto the Caravan’s license plate holder and got in. The engine turned over after several tries, and the minivan lurched to the end of the block and vanished around the corner.
After a few hours of furious paging, I heard from him. He was at his friend Larry’s house. It sounded like there was a party going on.
“Hey, you’ll never guess what happened,” he said. (My heart dropped.) “You know that junk shop at Frankford and York? Larry just bought a Silvertone Danelectro there—you know, one of those Sears guitars? The case has a little amp in it. He’s letting me play it.”
“You drove that thing to West Philly? Without a plate?”
“I have a plate. I make my own plates!”
“Isaac, I’ll say it again. You don’t have an inspection sticker, insurance, you don’t even have a fucking driver’s license.
“Fuck that. This is Philadelphia. I’m telling you—it’s the Wild West. Only chumps do it the hard way. Plus, if I’d had the minivan yesterday, I could have bought this Danelectro. It’s totally adorable—right up your alley. You should come over here and see it.”
“And you’re drunk.”
“Aw man, just come over or leave me alone,” he said, and hung up.
I got on my bike and headed over to Larry’s. Did I think I was going to talk Isaac into leaving the minivan at Larry’s? Or did I just feel like I was missing a good party? Who knows. I’d been with Isaac only a few months now, and already I was tired of being the heavy.
The ride was calming. I felt my foul mood slipping away as I crossed the Schuylkill and coasted down Baltimore Avenue, sweetly dappled in the summer twilight; past Clark Park, from whose virid depths came the first cool suspirations of the evening. And by the time I got to Larry’s I wasn’t angry anymore. Someone handed me a cold bottle of beer. I found Isaac down in the basement, happily flailing away on the Danelectro.
I drank my beer and threw my bike in the minivan, and we headed home. Isaac leaned his seat back and dangled one arm out the window, his profile bobbing to some inner soundtrack. I put my feet up on the dashboard, rolled down the window, and let the night air wash over me as we drove past Clark Park and up Baltimore Ave. This felt good. But the transmission was definitely slipping a little.
• • •
Isaac was out in front of the house every day working on the Caravan and I was often out there keeping him company. Frank, a mechanic who ran a garage across the street, took a liking to Isaac and gave him a hydraulic floor jack and let him borrow tools. I would set up a lawn chair and read magazines while Isaac crawled around under the van, and occasionally I’d hold down some greasy flange while Isaac listened to the engine, or sit in the van and tell him if a gauge moved or a light went on.
Isaac removed the transmission and had it rebuilt, which cost $650. The brakes were leaking fluid, so he replaced the master cylinder, then the wheel cylinders, and finally the brake lines. Most of the exhaust was shot—the muffler, it turned out, was hanging by a couple of straps, unconnected to anything—and Isaac was afraid the explosive noise was attracting too much attention, so he replaced the pipe all the way up to the manifold. I stopped keeping track of how much money Isaac had poured into the Caravan. Still, he seemed pleased with it. “Look how tight the steering is,” he’d say, giving the wheel a jaunty wiggle.
Sometimes I’d run into Frank and he’d ask, “How’s Isaac making out with that minivan?” and then he’d shake his head sadly.
The inevitable happened: Isaac got pulled over and the Caravan was impounded. I thought that might be the end of the road, but Isaac was determined to get it back, so we spent the next day in traffic court. When Isaac’s name was called, he stood before the judge—a black woman in her fifties with a maroon bob—while an official-looking group conferred around the bench in a low murmur for several minutes. The bailiff told Isaac to remove his baseball cap and continued to watch him suspiciously as the murmuring at the bench continued. Isaac put his cap back on and was told again to remove it. Finally, the judge addressed him:
“Are you Isaac Winchester?”
“Yes.”
“And is this your car? A…” She consulted a sheet of paper in front of her. “A 1983 Dodge Caravan?”
“Can I say something?”
“Is this your car, Mr. Winchester?”
“I was born in this country, and I work for a living,” he said, giving me a thumbs-up.
The judge ignored this. “Mr. Winchester, do you own a 1983 Dodge Caravan? Yes or no?”
“Yes, that’s my minivan. How do I get it back? How much is the fine?”
“And do you also own a 1992 Ford LTD?”
“I wish!”
“This… this Dodge Caravan is your only vehicle?”
“Yes.”
“And is your license plate number MAB1557?”
“Well, I made that up,” said Isaac.
“You made it up? I don’t understand.”
Isaac effected a tone of nearly exhausted patience. “I went outside, I looked at one plate and wrote down three letters, then I looked at another plate and wrote down four numbers.”
There was another conference at the bench, and after a moment the judge addressed Isaac again.
“This license plate number you made up belongs to an individual in Harrisburg, a person who owns a 1992 LTD that has accumulated $1,840 in parking violations from the City of Harrisburg. I’m not sure what to do with you. You appear to have invented a new kind of violation for which there is no statute.”
Isaac straightened a bit and puffed out his chest.
“What are we going to do with you, Mr. Winchester?”
It took several tries, but Isaac eventually explained his situation to the judge. In the end, it seemed that the city would only release the Caravan to a licensed owner with proof of registration and insurance, and there was nothing the judge could or would do about it. Isaac would not be responsible for the parking tickets, but he would have to pay an $80 impound fee and $260 in fines for driving without a license, registration, or insurance. There would also be a six-month suspension on his driver’s license, beginning at such time as his medical suspension had been removed. He was advised to “grow up” and dismissed.
It was impossible not to feel sorry for Isaac. For weeks now, he had done nothing but come home from sanding floors all day to work on the Caravan, sometimes long after dark. It had taken on the nature of an undeserved affliction. Every dollar he’d earned had gone into it; and now, because he had no health insurance—and with his epilepsy he was virtually uninsurable—his right to own it had been revoked indefinitely. Maybe I hadn’t filed a tax return in years, but this, this was what it truly looked like to fall off the grid, I thought.
I became obsessed with the idea of returning Isaac to official personhood. I made appointments at the welfare office and filled out Medicare forms for him, but more than anything I dedicated myself to morale-boosting pep talks. To him it was all pointless, impossible. He’d had a seizure a few weeks earlier after a boisterous night of drinking with Larry, so even assuming he saw a neurologist tomorrow, that would only be the beginning of the six seizure-free months he needed to resolve his medical suspension; and after that he’d have to wait out the other six months. Just thinking about it made him feel like he was going to have a seizure.
But I persisted; and because I felt he was doing his best, I did something that might have been a mistake. I bought the Caravan from Isaac for a dollar and registered and insured it in my name. Even more foolishly, I let him drive it, until he was pulled over for blowing a red light (racking up an additional three months on his suspension), and the minivan got impounded again. After that, I began shuttling him and his floor-sanding equipment around and taking him to Home Depot, or Bell Flooring, or Diamond Tool. Isaac was becoming a full-time job. And, unlike the housewives, I was also on duty weekends, nights, and holidays, driving that hideous Caravan around with teeth clenched, hoping no essential engine parts would fall off, and thinking wistfully about the bicycle days.
By August, we badly needed to get out of town; and since we were still pretending the Caravan wasn’t a disaster, we headed north to visit my brother in Boston. We got a late start after a long Saturday—I’d filled in as Isaac’s helper on a 1,000-square-foot buff-and-coat job at Society Hill Towers—and sometime after midnight, a mile or two east of the Tappan Zee bridge, we had a blowout. I pulled the minivan into a rest area, only to discover that we were traveling without a spare tire. And of course, it had begun to rain; and the thought of setting out into the Westchester County darkness to find a phone was too awful, and for that matter, useless. We made a nest on some drop cloths on the back and fell into an exhausted sleep.
When I woke up, Isaac was sitting in the wet grass beyond the parking area, staring without expression at the flat tire. We walked back along the highway to a gas station and hung around for a while, despondent, not looking at each other. Miraculously, a mid-’80s Dodge Caravan pulled up, and a large, incongruously well-dressed man got out to pump gas. He was, it seemed, on his way to pick up his grandmother and take her to church. After some haggling, then begging, he sold us a bald spare for $75, and we humped it back up the highway and got going again.
Just outside Framingham, the engine overheated and blew a radiator hose. We left the van in an AutoZone parking lot on Route 9 and called my brother. As soon as we got to Sam’s apartment in Jamaica Plain, Isaac started chug-a-lugging beer until he passed out and had a seizure in his sleep. After a brief, stupefied visit, we replaced the radiator hose and took off down 95 South.
At the Mansfield town line, I noticed the temperature gauge creeping up again. A mile later, it was in the red—the hose again?—and I pulled onto the shoulder. When Isaac lifted the hood, a steaming yellow-green geyser erupted from the radiator, sending us running for cover. From a safe vantage point in the ditch, we watched as the geyser ebbed and the loud hiss resolved into a series of distinct metallic groans and pops. I didn’t have to ask. I knew what I’d just witnessed: the engine had overheated definitively and fatally, cracking the block.
“Fuckshitfuckingfuckfuckfuckfuck,” said Isaac finally. “I fucking give up. This cock-sucking van has kicked my ass for the last time. Let’s just go.”
“We can’t just leave the goddamn van here, Isaac. They’ll trace the VIN to me.”
We argued about it until Isaac agreed to go into town and get a tow truck. He was quiet all the way to the garage, where the Caravan was pronounced dead on arrival.
The field around the garage was dotted with parts cars and piles of used tires. While we were getting the bad news, I noticed a familiar-looking grill poking out from the alley between the garage and rusty white trailer. I hoped Isaac hadn’t seen it, but when I glanced at him, I saw that it was too late. He interrupted the mechanic:
“Hey, is that an Aerostar?”
“Sure is. Runs, too. Just needs a brake job and a new transmission.”
“No!” I said, “No, I will not register that car for you! I swear to you, I will do everything in my power to help you get your license back, but I can’t go through this again.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Isaac said. “That’s not a fucking Caravan. That’s an Aerostar!”
“Please don’t ask me to do this, Isaac.”
Isaac went dead-eyed. “I figured you wouldn’t help me. Why would anyone help me? I’m just some asshole without a car. Fuck me.”
• • •
In the end, I headed back up north to my brother’s place, and Isaac headed south. And when I got back to South Philly and turned the corner onto my block, I saw him in front of the house loading the last of his things into a Ford Explorer with a Germantown Friends School sticker on the rear window. I ducked back around the corner and waited until he got into the passenger side and the Ford pulled away from the curb.
Inside, I found a milk crate on the kitchen table. He’d left three cut-glass doorknob sets, a wood carving he’d made—an exquisite little black dog—and a commemorative Space Shuttle Challenger nightlight. There was also a note:
Dear Kitty,
Here is some stuff that you can have. Also left you that industrial roller track in the basement, which I can’t take because my dad is a freak and won’t let me put anything in his garage. Okay, I’ll see you around I hope. Thank you, Kitty.
Love, Isaac
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This article appears in November 2008.
