Bug? Ugh!
My first car came from Gaspar.
Long Island didn’t know from mass transit. Not my part of Long Island, unless you rode the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) Babylon line to Penn Station because you worked in Manhattan. I didn’t. Work in Manhattan. My first job was at the Woolco just north of Sunrise Highway and east of Wellwood Ave. I was sixteen, had a work permit, and rode my brown Schwinn Continental there. Then I’d find any way I could to disappear and read my Guitar Player and Circus and Rock magazines in the bathroom. If I ever took the LIRR it’d be to see a concert in the city. Jethro Tull. Boston. Yes in the round. I was 13, 14, 15, riding the train with friends, no adult chaperone. We’d board in Lindenhurst, change at Jamaica, then emerge from Penn Station a few steps from Madison Square Garden.
There must’ve been buses, too, running on the south shore, along Montauk Highway, but I never rode one. I barely took the school bus, which I fucking hated because that’s where the cruelty would begin. Assholes giving you shit for no other reason than you’re an obvious target. The fat nail that sticks out, getting hammered down. They didn’t know my skin had been toughened at home and nothing they could say would land quite as hard. Still. I wanted off the damn bus and the high school was a bit too far for a bike ride.
So I saved up my Woolco money and went looking for a moped.
Mopeds were just then becoming a thing, imported by the thousands as everyone sought cheaper ways to get around during the fuel crisis. In the Pennysaver classifieds I found a Jawa moped somewhere near Dix Hills and cajoled my mother into driving me over there so I could plunk down $300 cash for orange freedom on wheels. It was too far to ride the Jawa back, so over my mother’s strenuous objections I slid it flat into the back of her Impala station wagon.
The Jawa quickly became my favorite thing (after my cock, the guitar and food), even if its two-stroke engine required me to mix oil into the gas. I wasn’t required, however, to wear a helmet and I’m not sure how I escaped a traumatic brain injury, especially that winter night coming home from my shift at Cieslak’s Modern Bakery. Making the left onto Broadway, I hit a patch of black ice and the Jawa went over on its side. It slid along until its front wheel came to rest under Adam Tese’s car. Adam, a classmate whose mason grandfather built the house I lived in, stopped, jumped out of his car and asked “You okay?” as I got up and dusted myself off.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. What happened?”
“Hit the fucking ice.”
Adam helped me pry my Jawa out from under his front end and I got my moped – bent wheel, bent forks – the few blocks home by muscling it along. Within a week I’d located a replacement wheel and forks (black, not orange), swapping them out myself. You’d think the next step up from the Jawa would’ve been a motorcycle but I got frustrated not being able to haul anything but the few items I could bungee to the rear carrier.
Enter Mike Nicolosi’s father Gaspar.
He had a non-running VW Beetle and persuaded me to buy it for $95, making it seem like fixing the bug would be no big deal.
Dead battery? Blown radiator? You can do it yourself!
I bit, thinking If I can’t fix it, my brother Mario can.
I can no longer recall what year the bug was (it was old enough to have a 6-volt system), what was wrong with it or even its color (in my mind it was “Curdled Cream”). But I bought it. Now I just needed to get it home. Gaspar got rope and tied the VW’s front bumper to his Ford’s back bumper. Before departing North Lindenhurst, he leans into the bug’s driver side window and very seriously says, “Listen, be careful with the brakes.” I nod, swear I will, even if I don’t think his towing method is a great idea. We make it all the way to my block before I panic, thinking I’m about to plow into the Ford after Gaspar slows dramatically. I hit the brakes hard and both cars come to an abrupt stop. The rope between us is pulled taut and then tears the bug’s bumper off. Gaspar climbs out of the Ford, comes over to my window and starts yelling at me right in front of John Watt’s house.
What the hell is WRONG with you? You wanna KILL me?! Didn’t I tell you to GO EASY ON THOSE BRAKES?!
I’m paralyzed by his rage, so like my father’s, and can’t think to yell back This was a STUPID IDEA. What the fuck did I know? I’d never been behind the wheel of a car by myself. I’d taken some driving lessons from an eczema-riddled smelly guy but this was the first time I was steering or braking myself. Having Gaspar tow me all the way from North Lindenhurst to the south shore was just one of the many Fuck, that was probably dangerous! things we did all the time. But what about Gaspar? Didn’t HE think it was dangerous? Or was he just so eager to get the VW off his property and out of his life that he didn’t care if his son’s 16 year-old friend died in the process?
Gaspar helped me push the bug to a spot in front of my house, then got the Ford the hell out of there. The VW sat for months, mocking me. I couldn’t fix it and my brother flat out refused, sneering I don’t work on those things. My mother kept yelling CHRISTOPHER, get that DAMN car OUT OF HERE or I WILL! until I called one of the junkyards on Hoffman just north of the railroad tracks. They came for the bug, handing me $50 (not the first time I’d lose money on a car).
Gaspar never mentioned the Beetle business again. When I’d visit Mike’s house I could feel waves of contempt rising off him: Tsakis, you got those boots on again. How many times I have to tell you about those boots?.
A few years later, after lingering in a hospital bed a week, he’d succumb to injuries from a single car crash (did he fall asleep? did he hit black ice?). Mike was never the same.
The Nihilistics are the proof of that.