Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The Jag


My father was a car salesman when I was a teenager.  And he was good.
He had a way of dismissing you into wanting whatever he had to sell.
“Yeah, I’ve got this one here.  But, I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you’d really want.  It doesn’t have such good gas mileage.  But, that’s what you get with a V12 engine.  I mean, it’s just impractical to have a car that can go from 0 to 60 in less than five seconds…”
(Long drag of cigarette.)
“Nah, this Jaguar’s probably not for you.”
As a salesman, he could drive one of the cars from the lot.  And that meant he’d often have a different car every day. 
Jaguars were my dad’s favorite cars.  So they became my favorite car.  When he’d get one of those on his Sundays off, we’d sometimes go driving through the back roads of North Carolina – just to see the tobacco farms go by real fast.
He’d have Vivaldi blaring on the stereo.  We’d open the windows – and occasionally the sunroof.  He’d have a cigarette in one hand and a Solo cup full of bourbon on ice in the other.  But, he’d still manage to conduct the orchestra while we barreled down the road - he steered with his knees.  He had been a fighter pilot – he thought that meant he could multi-task if he was going less than 500mph.
The cars gave us a chance to feel rich.  In reality, the family was in a long, slow decline.  By the end of my twenties, he was living in his mother’s house and working part-time at a pawn shop. 

Still, he managed to scrape together enough to buy an old 80’s Jaguar: British racing green paint job, tan leather, sunroof.  It was about his only possession… and it was in the shop a lot of the time.  But when I went back to visit him in North Carolina, he would take me for a drive around the city, cruising the back roads… because the cops didn’t often patrol there for drunk driving.
We never could talk about what was actually going on.  We’d occasionally share a memory from a building we passed.  “Hey, remember the pancakes there?”  That was the sum of our visits.  But, when I’d hug him goodbye he would always say, “Sweetheart, when my ship comes in, I’ll give you whatever you want.  And, at the very least, I’ll give you my Jaguar when I die.”
Now, when my father actually died, I thought and felt all kinds of things.  But, this is just a story about the car. 
My older sister had been keeping track of his finances. She told my younger sister and I that he’d been in a real bad state in the weeks before he died, just swirling the drain.  On a lark he decided to drive down to Pensacola Florida – where he had his fighter pilot training.  While he was there, someone stole the Jaguar.  That was his story, anyway.
I never expected that he’d be able to keep that promise; he didn’t keep many.  But, as my sisters and I were driving around after his funeral, we started joking about the bills he left unpaid.  And I said, “Yeah, well, he promised me his Jaguar.  And I’m not getting that.”
My older sister said, “Yeah, he promised the Jaguar to me too.”
My younger sister said, “Yeah, me too.”
And at that point, we all began to suspect that perhaps the Jaguar’s disappearance was intentional – just so he wouldn’t get caught.  And we could just hear him up in Heaven somewhere…
(Long drag of cigarette.)
“Nah, this Jaguar’s probably not for you.”

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