In the end Michael served six months probation, during which he was assigned the task of painting the center lines on highways with a “cleanup crew” of other parolees. The thing was, in both instances Michael had only needed transportation to the temple. Once he’d arrived there he seemed to have no further use for the stolen car. I’m not suggesting there was anything rational in any of this. Paris would’ve loaned him her car at the drop of a hat. She had a two-year-old black Pontiac four-door. She’d made all her payments. That was a situation heretofore unknown to me. In my house, it felt as if my mother was going to be making car payments for a hundred years.
Anyway, in late June Pinnie Oler said to me, “You always look fairly glum when you get to work. I figure you’ve got a lot going on at home. I’m not going to ask. Just consider this library your daytime address. But I can’t let you sleep in here. I get the feeling you’re about to ask to. But go ahead and consider this old bus like a café in Paris — nobody’s gonna kick you out. I’ve never been to Paris, but I heard that’s true.”
Engine-wise, the bookmobile had a lot of problems: stalled out at a corner, blue hood raised, radiator geysering steam, grind of metal and friction smell, fan belt broken, oil spilling out, things like that. “Just bus problems,” Pinnie Oler would call them, shrugging philosophically. Looking back, the word that I think accurately describes him is poised. He’d walk right up to a house, knock on the door, and when someone appeared, he’d point to the bookmobile and ask to use the telephone, and far more often than not it worked out. He would call his wife, Martha, who was a bus mechanic for the Grand Rapids school system. It must’ve been rare to have a woman mechanic back then. Maybe it still is. Martha would come to the rescue. She drove a green pickup truck with built-in toolboxes.
To my mind, Martha Oler was an absolutely beautiful woman. I thought she looked savvy and confident. During my months as a bookmobile assistant, she had to be called out on at least half a dozen occasions. Each time, she’d climb down from the cab of her truck, walk over to her husband, lean him against the broken-down bookmobile, and in her smudged mechanic’s smock kiss him as deeply and passionately as people kissing in any movie I’d seen up to that point — right out in the open, daylight audience or no. I saw a lot through the bookmobile window. Then she’d return to the truck, get her tools, and attend to the bus problem. She was slightly taller than Pinnie, had dark red hair and a quick, lip-biting smile, and always leaned inside the bookmobile to say, “Hey, sport, fancy seeing you here!” That was her little joke, me being a fixture like I was.
The bookmobile made eight official stops per day. Hillcrest Elementary, the public swimming pool, Mills Retirement Village, Blodgett Memorial Hospital, across from Dykstra’s Apothecary, Mulick Park Elementary School, Union High School, and the YMCA. But in the summer of 1964, Pinnie Oler also made, a minimum of twice a week, what he called an unscheduled stop. This was in front of his own house, at 58 Wycliffe Drive NE. The first time he made this unscheduled stop, he switched off the ignition and said, “There’s a park nearby. Take a Nehi orange or keep filling out overdue notices, whatever you want. Me and Martha are trying to make a baby.” He turned the roundabout handle to open the door, stepped out onto the street, went to the front of the bookmobile, and propped open the hood so it looked like the bus had broken down. “For appearance’ sake,” he said. His wasn’t a front door he had to knock on. Two Nehi orange sodas later — add to that sitting in the park reading a book about adventures in the far north of Canada, dangling my feet in a pond that was home to two aggressive swans to watch out for, and nodding off under an oak for a quick nap on a sultry afternoon — I went back to the bookmobile. There I found Pinnie Oler sitting in the driver’s seat, the motor idling. Martha was browsing the Science section. “Martha’s got the afternoon off,” he said. “She’s going to get some reading in.”
It was about this time that I started to write letters to other people’s fathers. I wrote a lot of these letters in the bookmobile during lulls. I wrote them on the backs of overdue notices, upward of ten notices per letter.
First I made a list of fathers. All told, there were twenty-two. I wrote to Jerry Boscher’s father, Marcia Eldersveld’s, Paul Bigelow’s, Shawnay Smith’s, Gary van Eerden’s, Becky Marcellus’s, Jay Osherow’s, Stephen Peck’s, Tommy Sturdevant’s, Esme Carlyle’s father (he was an elementary school principal), Ellen Hake’s, Brian Siplon’s, Sara Schoen’s, Genevieve T. Park’s, Eric Klein’s, Eileen Heuvelhorst’s, Darlene Diane Johnson’s, Bobby Fodor’s, Mandes Iver Garnes’s, Yvonne Muller’s, Nancy Wong’s, and Ira and Jay Dembinksky’s father.
I never sent a single letter; in that sense, my epistolary life was willfully unrequited. But I didn’t throw them away, either. Plus, I made carbon copies. “A letter never sent is a kind of purgatory,” writes Chekhov. What made me write all those letters? The basic desire to speak to any father with a sense of intimacy, I suppose. Being able to organize emotions, the direct address, the implorations and requests, the letting off of steam, the indictments, the complaints, the attempt to feel things deeply. And since I was composing these letters on pieces of paper with the words Overdue Notice at the top, they must’ve been written with an abiding sense of urgency, not to mention some notion of imposing a penalty. No single example can fully represent this veritable fugue state of letter writing. But here’s one written to Mandez Garnes’s father, whose first name was Jacob.
Dear Mr. Garnes,
You probably remember that I’m friends with your son Mandez and that I’ve been at your house. You probably remember that at your barbeque Mandez and I took our chicken and potato salad over by the guest house. Mandez told me the guest house was going to become his own private room. It was going to be his birthday present when he turned sixteen. I work in the bookmobile and have some time to think about important things. One of these things is that last week you might remember seeing me in front of the Majestic Theatre. I wasn’t short on money for a ticket. I didn’t need to ask you for money because I work in the bookmobile, as I said. I don’t remember a lot of things my own father said but he called that kind of movie a shoot ’em up. Why I’m writing this letter is for the following reason. I want to tell you that I thought it was wrong of you to embarrass Mandez when he found out he was short of ticket money himself. You said it builds character to earn your own money and why should you pay for Mandez, he’s already fifteen. My own father embarrasses me every day by not being around. Mandez is lucky you’re around but you didn’t have any cause to embarrass Mandez that way, I think. You could just as easily of given him the ticket money and talked to him father son in private later on. That’s all of it. By the way something you should know is that Mandez is good at earning money. For instance there’s nobody better than your son at finding money people dropped under the bleachers at Ottawa Hills stadium, during football games. Maybe you didn’t know that every Saturday and Sunday morning Mandez walks around under the bleachers and finds money like that. Were you ever that smart when you were 15? Maybe you should give that some thought. I don’t think Mandez enjoyed the movie very much because of all of what you did.