Benchwarmer by Josh Wilker

Author:Josh Wilker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015-02-18T21:18:02+00:00

Volume 3:

7–11 Months

N

New England Patriots

See Asterisk.

New York Mets, 1993

See Young, Anthony

Next Ryan Leaf, the

A used Dodge Intrepid looms over my life with Abby. It first materialized years ago, just after we’d moved out of New York City and were staying at her parents’ place in Racine while looking for work in Chicago (see Goalby, Bob). We needed a car. Neither of us knew anything about cars. Neither of us knew anything about what our new life together was going to be like. We were grasping at an idea that the used Dodge Intrepid was some kind of an encapsulation of what we thought our new life had to be. It was dark blue and clean and big and seemed sturdy. It was bland, apparently capable, midwestern, a regular American car for a regular American life.

Neither of us ever got comfortable with it. Abby, a fan of the space program of the 1960s, that high point in American capability, put a NASA sticker on the bumper. A few weeks later, while I was driving back to Racine from a writing conference in Vermont, the car broke down. The transmission was shot. The replacement transmission pawned off on me by smiling mechanic-shop criminals in upstate New York where the car had stopped working turned out to be another lemon and conked out a few weeks later. At that point, after thousands of dollars of our savings had vanished down a dark blue hole, Abby’s father stepped in and insisted on helping by buying his daughter a new car, a small black Ford Focus.

This car lasted for years, steady and reliable, but it was always a faint, nagging reminder to me that I couldn’t quite manage a regular American life on my own. A relative to this nagging reminder was the memory of the Dodge Intrepid, a dark blue cloud that appeared above us whenever Abby and I were on the brink of a big joint decision. I don’t think Abby shared my sense of guilt and inadequacy over the Ford Focus, but our Dodge Intrepid visions of decision dread were so in synch as to be a defining characteristic of our life together.

“Is this going to be another Dodge Intrepid?” we would ask, though eventually we didn’t even need to ask it. We both knew it was there, hovering above our hesitant choices: a big dark blue mistake. We tried to avoid these decisions, preferring a life in which we existed in our adjacent personal decision-making solitudes, but every once in a while we had to make a large joint decision, and it always felt like we were stepping off into nothing. If all our decisions worked out, we might have been able to bury the memory of the Dodge Intrepid, but every once in a while we leaped into nothing and didn’t glide or take wing but instead just crashed down hard to earth, like when we signed a lease on an apartment that turned out to be one headache

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