Lifemobile Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Rintels

  ISBN 978-1-935212-92-8

  E-book ISBN 978-1-935212-91-1

  Book and cover design by Barbara Aronica-Buck

  Cover photo by Gary Hamburgh © 2012

  www.garyhamburghphotography.com

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any fashion, print, facsimile, or electronic, or by any method yet to be developed, without express written permission of the publisher.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  Published by

  Prospecta Press

  P.O. Box 3131

  Westport, CT 06880 (203) 454-4454

  www.prospectapress.com

  CONTENTS

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For J.B. and Ciaccia,

  my two Lifemobiles

  CHAPTER 1

  Four decades after I thought I had buried it, the hated, humiliating word had thrust up from my brain’s subconscious like Carrie’s hand from the grave. It spun around and rolled over, crashing against the walls of my skull, out of control, just like the unsafe car it described. It was that word my wise-guy buddies gleefully taunted whenever their vigilant ears detected the ringing pistons straining within the air-cooled aluminum engine in my father’s 1965 Chevrolet Corvair. Hiding in the bushes, my friends would lie in wait, giggling, until our sky-blue four-door huffed and puffed around the corner, its 110 rear-mounted horses struggling to push Dad and the other three middle management men in his carpool up the steep hill to our house. Suddenly, at the point of maximum breakaway danger, as the Corvair’s heavy tail swung around the bend and its whining engine reached full thrust, just when its tires would surely and catastrophically lose grip with the road, the guys leaped out from behind the shrubbery, shrieking in terror that word, that awful mocking jeer: “DEATHMOBILE!”

  Because you just never knew when a Corvair might suddenly spin, or roll, or veer out of control and chase you down the sidewalk, murder on its mind. “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!” the guys hollered in mock panic, diving behind brick walls or climbing up oak trees, anything to escape my father’s cherished example of America’s Killer Car.

  The Corvair was General Motors’ infamous compact car built from 1960 to 1969—all 10 years of America’s counter-cultural Sixties—and it ran counter to almost everything that had preceded it in America’s car culture. Many remember it as the car that had the trunk in the front, the air-cooled aluminum engine in the rear, the oil on the ground, the roof on the road, and the wheels in the air after rolling over like a puppy wanting its belly scratched. Famously dubbed “unsafe at any speed” by then-unknown Ralph Nader in his 1965 best-seller, the Corvair had a homicidal reputation on the highway that remains unrivaled among American automobiles, with the possible exception of Stephen King’s Christine.

  Of course, my father wasn’t the only fan of the Corvair. Elvis Presley bought one for his new wife, Priscilla. Before he became Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay owned a Corvair. How completely cool was my dad driving me around in the same car owned by Elvis and Cassius Clay? Very Cool—until Corvairs became known as Deathmobiles. Then it became Absolute Zero Cool.

  For over a week now, the peaceful sheep I tried to conjure in my mind to help me fall asleep kept morphing into Corvairs in a slow-motion ballet, pirouetting around the corner of my old street, then rolling over, bursting into flame, and detonating in elegant mushroom clouds. For four decades, I had barely given a thought to our Corvair, and now I could think of nothing else. As the dawn’s early light filtered through the window blinds, I saw in my mind my buddies run from our blazing Deathmobile. Then came a secondary explosion. Followed by a third. Wait—I was wide awake. These explosions were real.

  I reached the TV room downstairs just as the booming explosions ended and heard my son’s flat and booming voice:

  Stalking Denny Hamlin down the back straightaway at Talladega, Benjy Bennett, the talented rookie who had taken NASCAR by storm this season, knew he had a lot of car under him. But he didn’t care to share that information with the rest of the race world. Hamlin’s car looked tight, as if it wanted to kiss the wall at nearly 200 miles per hour. Bennett set him up for the pass out of Turn Four. As Hamlin’s Toyota punched a hole in the air ahead of him, Bennett latched onto the pull of the draft that the absence of air resistance had suddenly created. As if fired from a cannon, Bennett’s car exploded forward. An almost imperceptible turn of the wheel dropped him down low so that he didn’t smash Hamlin’s tail. In a blink, Bennett had the nose of his car underneath Hamlin’s.

  I entered the TV room. Benjy was rocking in his video game chair with the boom box speakers by his ears, staring intently at the video-game racing drama unfolding on the television screen. His long legs and size 13 feet pushed back and forth off the floor like the pistons of a NASCAR engine. His brown Beatles haircut and high school senior’s wispy peach fuzz made him resemble a young George Harrison; he loved to listen to my old Beatles vinyls and soak up every photo and word on the worn album covers, so this was perhaps not a coincidence. Focusing so intently on the video game that he might melt the screen, repeating a story he authored about racing Denny Hamlin at Talladega, he still hadn’t acknowledged me. For three years, he had played this same game at the same time each morning, repeating the same story almost word for word. I knew it by heart.

  NASCAR drivers face hundreds of instantaneous life-or-death decisions in every race. Making those decisions correctly is what separates the NASCAR champs from the also-rans, and the dead. Benjy Bennett faced one of those decisions right now, and he and Hamlin both knew it. He refused to back off. Instead, he pressed the accelerator, demanding every ounce of power his 358 cubic inch, 810 horsepower V-8 engine could deliver. He held his line around the turn, leaving Hamlin outside him, and took the lead. But instead of falling in quietly behind the upstart rookie, Hamlin tapped his right rear fender. For every rookie driver, there’s a first time for everything, and this was Benjy Bennett’s first time to try and keep from dying at Talladega.

  I had no idea where Benjy came up with this stuff. We had never been to a NASCAR race. We rarely watched racing on TV. Yet Benjy had created this nail-biting drama years earlier when he first became fascinated and possessed by this video game. Now came my favorite part, where his prose got positively purple:

  Suddenly, Bennett had lost the down force caused during high-speed racing when superfast air pressed down against the car’s front and rear wings. Without that precious down force, the car was light on its tires, and without tires firmly on the pavement, the cocky kid was not driving a car but piloting an out-of-control missile. Bennett had never flown a missile before, but that didn’t stop him. He coolly held on to bring it in for a safe landing on the Talladega asphalt, somehow still facing forward down the back straightaway. Benjy thought he knew the difference between luck and skill, and he knew that saving his car and his life had been pure, unadulterated luck. Now, his skill kicked in. He punched the accelerator. Suddenly, he was in firs
t place, and he wasn’t about to give it back.

  “Morning,” I greeted my son as the story wrapped. “Sleep okay?”

  “Fine,” Benjy replied. “Dad, do you think we will ever end poverty in America?” As he awaited my answer, he climbed out of his rocker and shut off the game. Suddenly, he was half a foot taller than me and staring down, deep into my foggy eyes.

  “Uhhhhh,” I stalled, trying to wake my brain cells from their torpor. “Sorry, but I haven’t had coffee yet. What was the question again?”

  Benjy then repeated the question, word for insistent word, while purposefully pacing, his long strides taking him back and forth across the room like a caged cougar. Sure, it was early, but I should have been prepared. For the past decade, my son had started almost every day not with a “Good Morning,” but with a Big Picture 10,000-word essay question. Usually, he answered it himself, before I had a chance, and today was no exception. “I think technology will help end poverty in America,” Benjy declared. “Technology will help deliver more food and stuff people need at lower cost. And education will provide more opportunity. More people will be able to go to college.” He paused briefly, then asked, “Dad?”

  I braced myself for another Big Question.

  Benjy stopped pacing and turned to face me. “Do you remember Riley?”

  Riley? I’d heard the name, but drew a blank. Someone involved in ending poverty?

  “In National Treasure. Remember?”

  Oh, now I got it. We’d changed the subject and I’d missed it. “Okay, I remember. Riley was…” But then I didn’t remember. “Benjy, I’d like to make some coffee,” I finally pleaded.

  “Riley is Ben Gates’s best friend and assistant, Dad!” Benjy said, frustrated by my obliviousness. National Treasure and its sequel were two of Benjy’s favorite movies—he loved the combination of history, fantasy, and whodunit. I’d seen them with him so often that I knew them almost as well as he did. My failure to identify Riley was an unforgivable lapse.

  As Benjy paced, his right hand flapped compulsively as if he were dribbling an imaginary basketball. “They say in the movie that he’s Irish. Do you think he’s Irish?” His hand beat down on each syllable.

  Now I was on firmer footing. Even without the benefit of coffee, I recalled our endless viewings of the two National Treasure films. “He has Irish ancestors, I think. It’s common for people to be identified by their heritage, even though I’m sure he is an American.”

  “But they say he’s Irish. How can they say he’s Irish if he’s American? They’re not telling the truth.”

  “It’s not that they’re lying, Benjy. It’s just a way some Americans identify themselves—by where their family is originally from. Almost all Americans’ ancestors came here from another country. Right?”

  “But they say he’s Irish!” Benjy insisted. “And you’re saying he’s American!”

  “Benjy, I think I answered your question. It’s just a way people talk about their heritage. I have German heritage, your mother had Scottish. So you’re half German, half Scottish.”

  “No, you’re confused, Dad. I’m American because I was born here. And Riley was born in America, so he’s American. I think they should correct that. People could get confused.”

  “I’m going to the kitchen and getting coffee,” I declared. A child like Benjy with Asperger’s Syndrome, sometimes referred to as “high-functioning autism,” often fixates and perseverates. Sometimes “Aspies” obsess about superheroes, or trains, or video games, but it can be anything. One of Benjy’s many obsessions was “truth-telling.” If someone called Riley “Irish,” then Riley darn well better have an Irish passport or Benjy locked onto the divergence from the truth like a shark on wounded prey, shaking and thrashing the inconsistency until either he lost interest or the prey died.

  Half an hour later, Benjy and I waited at the end of the driveway for the school bus. He paced back and forth across the asphalt, speaking to himself and flapping his hand, while I read the newspaper. For years, I had criticized his pacing and hand-flapping and self-talking, and demanded that he stop. He never did. He said he couldn’t. “Even if it looks odd, if he doesn’t do that stuff, he might explode,” his mother, Annie, would tell me, trying to ease my anger and frustration. “You can’t change him,” she’d say again and again. “He’ll change you.”

  But Annie had died two years earlier, after a seemingly routine case of the flu turned into a whole-body sepsis infection. Somehow, when I lost her, I also lost the will to battle Benjy constantly over his quirky behavior. I didn’t want our constant battling to drive him away—or drive us both crazy—so I tried to keep quiet. But just as I hadn’t changed him, he hadn’t changed me either. I was still angry and frustrated. I still worried what the future would hold for him if he couldn’t change.

  “You checked everything off your Before School list. Right?” I prodded. It was a question that almost always made him stop pacing to answer.

  He stopped pacing. “Yes.”

  “And the Homework Assignment List?” The lists were one of Annie’s wonderful strategies to keep Benjy on task and organized.

  “Yes, Dad,” he said, annoyed, then changed the subject to another of his favorite topics. “Dad, I don’t want to ride the short bus anymore.”

  “Then I’ll have to drive you to school,” I said, as I said most days.

  “No. I want to ride the long bus,” he insisted. “The so-called ‘normal’ bus.”

  “We tried that, as you will recall,” I said, as I said most days.

  “They bullied me because I’m different,” he vented. “It’s the bullies who have a disability, not me. I should not be penalized and stigmatized for their bad behavior. They should ride the short bus, not me. They should call it the Bully Bus.”

  “Benjy, the short bus does not stigmatize you. It is…”

  “Yes, it does,” he interrupted. “It’s for people with disabilities. I don’t like that label. I’m just different. All the kids on my bus are just different. We can do anything, we just do it differently. Why do we have to be labeled as disabled?”

  “I agree, you can do anything you set your mind to,” I continued, as I continued most days. “But some of the kids need specially trained personnel and equipment. And look at the bright side. You get door-to-door service and it gets you to school in half the time.”

  “I can’t wait to get to Wheeler,” Benjy said. “They don’t have short buses or bullies.”

  Lots of high school graduates with Asperger’s successfully attend traditional colleges, most of which have offices and support services for students with disabilities. But for Benjy, who could pace and recite for hours if no one intervened, and who had significant challenges organizing himself, Wheeler College in North Carolina was a perfect fit. In fact, it was the only fit. Wheeler was the only college program specifically designed for students with severe Asperger’s that taught independent living skills as well as academics, and was within driving distance of our home—something Annie and I had both insisted on in case Benjy suddenly needed a parent to support him.

  Benjy opened the mailbox and peered inside. “The post office didn’t deliver the envelope yet.”

  I checked my watch. “Benjy, the post office isn’t even open yet, and we picked up yesterday’s mail when you got home from school. So the envelope from Wheeler couldn’t possibly be here.”

  “If the post office delivered the envelope to the wrong house, and the person at the wrong house then put it in our box, it could be here.”

  “You got me,” I conceded, as I always did at this point in our daily discussion. “But Wheeler told us they wouldn’t send out their acceptance letters for almost another month.”

  “They could send them earlier,” he said.

  The short bus turned the corner and stopped at our driveway, and its door opened wide. “I don’t need help,” Benjy barked at Mavis, the specially trained assistant, as he did every day when she got off the bus to assi
st him. “I’m just different.”

  Fortunately, Mavis had Annie’s patience—it was part of her training—and she genially accepted Benjy’s flouting of the social niceties. “It’s just the procedure we follow, Benjy, you know that,” she said, as she said almost every day. “Did you give those NASCAR drivers another racing lesson they’ll never forget?”

  “That’s just a game,” Benjy complained, as he did every day. “I have to play a game about driving because I’m not allowed to drive for real. The DMV discriminates against people who are different.”

  “See ya this afternoon, dude,” I told Benjy, waving. “Learn lots and lots, okay?”

  Without answering, Benjy sat on the opposite side of the bus and gazed out the far window. Prompted by Mavis, he turned to me, enthusiastically waved back, then turned away to gaze again out the window.

  CHAPTER 2

  Aha! Now I understood why memories of the Deathmobile were careening all over my brain. It was because suddenly the Corvair was all over the news. Toyota Camrys with stuck accelerators were running out of control, causing accidents and even fatalities. Respected auto industry analysts asked whether the Camry was to Toyota what the dangerous Corvair had been to General Motors—a deadly disaster that could so devastate Toyota that it might ultimately go bankrupt, just as General Motors had recently—and humiliatingly—been bankrupted.

  Wow. Fifty years after its introduction and 40 years after its demise, the Corvair was being blamed for slaying the mighty multinational corporation that had spawned it. It was still the Killer Car! No wonder I hadn’t seen a Corvair in years. GM and the government couldn’t possibly allow what Nader called the “one-car accident” to continue to endanger the public; they must have banned the car from the public highways and crushed every one they could find. I wondered if that had happened when Dad was alive. I wondered if he’d heard. He’d driven me in his Deathmobile to all those Little League practices and games, and the Civil War battlegrounds he loved to tour. Did he know he had put our family in mortal danger?