by DJ Lincks
I grew up in my father’s 1997 silver S-Series First Generation Saturn. It was a traveling planet, fixed with broken seatbelts and smoothie stained carpets. Its grey paint chipped off, like meteor debris breaking off of iced rings. It was manufactured in Spring Hill, Tennessee in a steel plant. I wanted it to be prettier, shinier, like the cars other kids’ parents had. The headlights looked like tired eyes that were too close together with poorly applied liner. My dad bought it from a work buddy. Its matte finish looked as though it were made specially for a blue-collar working class family. Maybe it shone to whoever bought it first, but once acquired by my dad, any shine it had left died along with the power steering. Everything was manual. He would yell while trying to turn, sometimes punching the steering wheel for good measure. The Saturn followed suit–, making inaudible, jarring noises, then cooling off moments later, as if nothing happened. It was as if at any point on the road, pieces could go flying, floating into space on long stretches of asphalt concrete. He never managed to get to any repairs and eventually drove it till it died on the side of the interstate with me in the backseat.
18,000 miles per hour[1]
We’d chase the moon home from Highlands Ranch, a wealthy suburb some miles south of Denver, four nights a week for as long as I could remember. It was an eternity, boxed neatly into an hour. Our destination was always the same, turf soccer fields with stadium lights, ensuring no practice could be canceled unless a landlocked hurricane struck. The ways that we’d get there however, changed night to night. If we were lucky, I-25 south, a straight shot, wouldn’t be in its expected bumper to bumper traffic. We’d pass through the Denver Tech Center, where office buildings stretched far into the sky, accompanied by chain restaurants that dad would frequent while he was waiting for practice to be over. Every building reflected the sky like one-sided mirrors, looking the same at all points of the day until the sun set and the only lights reflected were brakes and the moon. More often than not, we’d take I-70 west to 25. It was the scenic route, my dad used to say, as we drove through endless foothills. Regardless of the season, they always appeared golden, swaying and shining as if the sun were always set there.
I’d ask my dad how the moon kept up with our car. 20 miles over the 75 miles per hour speed limit, she had to have been speeding too. His response never changed. First, he’d take a quick glance at me, then adjusted the silver volume knob on the velcroed XM radio stereo satellite receiver that was coated in an unknown dark crust from 23 to 28. This allowed Mike Malloy to fully project his rat-bastard accusation upon Rush Limbaugh. He rewinded the recorded shows if he heard memorable lines, or “aphorisms,” as he once taught me. “Deej, Deej, you gotta listen to this one, this is a good one,” he’d say, turning the knob to its right. Malloy would yell with imagined spit shooting out of his mouth and he’d say, “every morning I wake up and thank God that I don’t believe in him.” He’d rewind it as many times as it took until I listened.
My grandfather gave my dad his first radio at the age of 12. It was 1967, the same year “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees and more notably, “Light my Fire” by The Doors were released. His dad never liked the “new wave” of rock n’ roll, instead largely preferring big bands and Sinatra. My dad tells me he would sit in his room with his radio, listening carefully to each song, writing down the lyrics that he treasured most. It’s how he became an encyclopedia of words. When I was 12, my dad and I would sit in the living room watching “Don’t Forget the Lyrics,” a nighttime cable T.V. show, where contestants would finish the lyrics to songs in order to win a large sum of cash.
“We ought to try our hand on this, bet ya we’d make some good money,” he’d tell me after I would finish the first verse to Foghat’s, “Slow Ride.”
Attendant on a Person of Importance[2]
Sometimes I’d get lucky, usually on the way back. At this time, I-25 was a safe bet. The sun was fully set and the moon would make her presence wholly known. My dad would get tired of Malloy, of the drive, of my questions about the speed that the moon traveled, and with one delicate motion, the station would change to “Classic Vinyl.” Don Mclean would make his usual 8:45 pm appearance, giving dad and me a full eight minutes of being unconditionally whole.
“What’s the ‘book of love,’ dad?” A line he would always rewind. “Something that causes wars,” he’d say. He was raised devoutly Catholic in Cleveland, Ohio. His Aunt Carol’s ex-priest husband, Bill, used to yell at us whenever we’d walk through their freshly cut grass, our shoe soles igniting pinks and oranges. Dad often spoke of Father John, a teacher at his school who was a “grammar genius.” He also talked about the old nuns who used rulers to bloody his knuckles every so often. Despite my mother’s affinity for spirituality, dad ensured my siblings and I grew up religionless, spending our Sundays in front of a television screen watching the Browns lose over and over again, only to hear him yell as if he were stuck in traffic. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t believe it, Father John never once helped the Browns win.
The Brick Moon[3]
The moon slowed its pace. It seemed a good sport, waiting for us to catch up through red brake lights and angry steering wheels. It gave me the chance to watch through our spaceship window, allowing me to gaze into another world. Sometimes their world looked like mine, a parent, sometimes two, and a child. Both parents wearing a frustration they swore they’d never show to their offspring in their dragonfly hunting days. Sometimes their world looked different, perhaps smiling, trading fun facts about the moon. “The dark spots are actually called ‘mares,’ which means ‘seas’ in Latin,” the small blonde boy would say. “What do I have a computer for? I can ask my son any question I have and he’ll always have the right answer,” the dad would say. She picked up her speed again, this time, she wasn’t waiting. How could I blame her? She had probably grown tired of listening to my questions, or perhaps she didn’t have the answers and was afraid of disappointing me. I had hoped, like the freshly born caterpillar, for the latter.
Across the Universe [4]
Somewhere in deep space, large hunks of metal are floating gently. They balance like black birds with red feathers on golden cattails. I don’t think they’re American-made, but the Beatles weren’t either. Our nights would always end the same. Pulling into the driveway, the moon in the midst of her midnight glow, signing off as she had every night. I’d tell her, ‘good-night,’ and my dad would ask, “who are you talking to?”
[1] Average speed of a satellite traveling through space
[2] Definition of ‘satellite’ in the 16th century
[3]A novella by American writer Edward Everett Hale, published serially in The Atlantic Monthly starting in 1869. It is a work of speculative fiction containing the first known depiction of an artificial satellite
[4] On February 4th, 2008, NASA beamed its first ever song, “Across the Universe,” celebrating the Beatles’ 40th anniversary of its recording, directly into deep space