from my sprawling family, casting me out into the larger world like the main character in the TV show Kung Fu. What would I do if that happened? Where would I go? How would I survive? The prospect was terrifying, yet alluring, too.
One afternoon a wreck arrived at the salvage yard that seemed to encapsulate this notion of tragic and thrilling orphanhood perfectly. I vividly recall the moment the flatbed truck hauling the car pulled up before the Front, the way all of the parts men and mechanics and body men poured out as one to see it. The car on the flatbed was a bright orange Porsche 911—or rather half a Porsche 911.1 The other half of the car had been chopped off (so Kenny the parts man claimed) when the “drunkass fool” who was driving it “flooded the engine on some railroad tracks north of Oklahoma City.” Ordinarily, a car hit in the front and dragged for miles by a freight train would be worthless, but as my brother David quickly explained, Porsche 911s had their engines in the rear, and so, miraculously, this particular car was still worth quite a lot (“a mint,” was how my brother put it), provided, of course, that a usable front end could be found for it.
1 My brother Alan claims the car was a Spyder 550. My father remembers it, vaguely, as a Triumph Spitfire. In my mind, however, the car will always be a Porsche 911.
For years after this, the wrecked Porsche sat under a tarp on the back lot of the salvage yard, a lonely import amid a sea of automobiles made in Detroit, while my father and everyone else who worked at the salvage yard listened to the radio for the words we so longed to hear: Boys, listen up, we just come into some front end parts for a Porsche 911 . . . Whenever I caught a glimpse of the orange car beneath its bright blue tarpaulin, my mind would begin to race, imagining all of the 911s out there in the world, each of them perfect in its own way, and yet at least one of them destined to be involved in some terrible accident, its front end cut away and shipped over vast distances to become one with our 911. When, in college, I was assigned to write a paper on the Thomas Hardy poem “The Convergence of the Twain,” with its famous lines describing the building of the Titanic and the simultaneous growth of the iceberg that would sink it (“Alien they seemed to be; / No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history”), I could not help but think of the orange Porsche and the terrible desire and disappointment that engulfed it.
“When do you think we’ll find it?” I would ask my father at least once a week.
“Find what?” he’d ask absently.
“The other half of the 911.”
“Who knows?” he’d answer, shrugging. “It’s an import. Parts for those don’t come along every day of the week.”
“Maybe someone else will get stalled on a railroad track,” I speculated. “Only this time, he’ll get almost the whole way across, and when the train comes, it will smack the car in the rear, not the front.”
“Maybe,” my father said. “I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.”
* * *
Stretching off a quarter of a mile behind the main buildings was the Yard proper with its row upon row of wrecked Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevys, Chryslers, Dodges, Fords, Olds-mobiles, Plymouths, Pontiacs, and so on, some of the cars stacked one atop the other like layers in a wedding cake, each of them guarded by roving bands of junkyard dogs, chiefly German shepherds and Doberman pinschers, with a few angry mutts thrown in for good measure. Often the hoods, trunks, and front or back doors of these cars stood open, creating a bizarre, stopped-in-time, Pompeii-like atmosphere. Everywhere was the evidence of Fate in the form of head-on collisions, rollovers, fire, and flood. The Yard itself was littered with more signs of the apocalypse, everything from shattered window glass to twisted sheet metal to headless dolls and solitary shoes and other debris that had come into the place along with the wrecks. In this sense, the Yard more than earned its traditional moniker of “automobile graveyard.”
Looting this graveyard was my fondest occupation. Whenever a fresh wreck was dropped at the gate, I’d be the first to go through it, ransacking the glove compartment and truck for hidden treasure. I was rarely disappointed. On top of the usual horde of loose change, road maps, jumper cables, and tire tools, I found marbles, bats and baseballs, old paperbacks (Louis L’Amour was especially popular), secret stashes of Hustler and Penthouse magazines, costume jewelry of varying degrees of gaudiness, playing cards, pocket knives, Zippo lighters, sleeping bags, beach chairs, cigar boxes full of old photographs and diaries, fireworks, spent and unspent ammo. Unless it was deemed to be particularly valuable or dangerous, I was allowed to keep everything I found.
Some of the more mangled wrecks had bloodstains on the upholstery or even bits of human hair jutting from cracks in the windshield. At first, such sights gave me the creeps, but after a while they lost their power to scare me, and I treated them with the same air of professional detachment with which a forensic pathologist might view a fresh corpse. Only rarely did a new find make me feel the nearness of death. I remember one such instance with chilling clarity. For years, I had wanted a catcher’s glove of a particular make and model (a Rawlings K3-H, let’s call it), but since baseball was not one of my better sports and the rag-tag team I played on had an older glove I could use, I could never convince my parents to buy me one. Then one day I crawled into the back of a wrecked Corvair and there, wedged under the front passenger seat, was an almost brand new K3-H. Not believing my luck, I slipped the glove on my hand and held it out before me as though catching a pitch. It fit perfectly. Indeed, the mitt felt as if it had been made for my hand and no other. But then I noticed something that caused me to shake the glove off my hand as quickly as if I had felt a spider lurking in one of the finger holes. There, written in black permanent marker across the web of the glove, was the name ROBBY—my name, exactly as I spelled it. That the handwriting looked nothing like my own or my mother’s did not abate my alarm. Somewhere out there in the world beyond the salvage yard, a second me, a ghastly twin or doppelganger, waited to do me harm—of this I was thoroughly convinced.
* * *
That whole outer realm of the salvage yard was ruled over by a strange and fascinating creature known to denizens of the salvage yard as “Yard Man.” Unlike his more sophisticated cousins in the Front or the body shop, Yard Man worked outside the whole day through and in all kinds of weather—rain, sleet, snow, burning sun. To the parts guys, many of whom had finished high school and maybe even some college, Yard Man was a clumsy, unsophisticated brute. A vandal at heart, his stock-in-trade was force and speed, not precision. Ask a mechanic to pull a motor from a car, and he’d roll it into a bay in his shop and begin a careful disassembly process that included draining the radiator, unhooking the battery, loosening a dozen different clamps, belts, hoses, and mounts. Ask Yard Man to perform the same task, and he’d throw a chain around the motor, winch it up, and then cut everything holding the motor to the car with a blowtorch. Within minutes, the motor would lurch free and Yard Man would haul it, swinging on its chain like a pendulum, to the wash bay, where a grease-covered underling (often one of my teenaged brothers) would steam it off with a high-powered hose.
All day long, Yard Man roared up and down the narrow sand roads of the salvage yard atop a strange, homemade vehicle called a “goose.” A goose was usually a retired army truck with the cab torn off, a roll cage welded into its place, and a crane-like winch mounted on the front. Other tools of Yard Man’s trade—acetylene torch, sledgehammer, straight and angled crowbars—were mounted catch-as-catch-can along the sides and back. Whenever Yard Man took a coffee or bathroom break, I would climb into the high, still-warm seat of his abandoned goose and imagine myself rampaging through the world like a tank commander in a war movie. Pow! Boom! Ka-Bam! I would free all of the prisoners! Rain missiles on the enemy! Young women and girls would run alongside me in the rubble-strewn streets, blowing me kisses! Then, when Yard Man emerged from his break to reclaim his goose, I’d imagine that an enemy grenade had been lobbed into the tank and my only hope of survival was a daring leap to safety.
Five or six different Yard Men worked for my father during the years he owned the salvage yard, but the one I remember best was a baldheaded, pit bull–like man named Billy Dan. Billy Dan had a deep