COLUMNS
Talk Show 11: with Jon Clinch, Don Lee, Robert Anthony Siegel, Alix Strauss, & Sean Wilsey
/ Jaime Clarke
04.13.08
––What ultimately happened to the car?
Clinch: I traded it in for the second-worst car ever made in this country or any other, a 1976 Dodge Aspen. Don't even ask.
Lee: A couple of days before I left, I miraculously got an offer for the car. I'd parked it on the street with a sign, and I really hadn't thought there'd be any takers. We agreed on $500. My last day, I drove it to the guy's house. He wasn't home, but his daughter gave me the cash and asked me to move the car from the driveway to the street. No problem. Except the car wouldn't start—not an unusual occurrence at that juncture. So I backed it out in neutral, and fortunately the street was on a hill, and I was able to pop the clutch and roll-start it. I parked it on the street and guiltily hightailed it out of there as fast as I could.
Siegel: Some years later, I was driving down the street in a car I actually owned, a Chevy Impala with a ripped up interior (I’d inherited it from my grandfather), when I recognized the Caddy up ahead—there was no mistaking that magnificent beast. The top was down and my father was behind the wheel, and next to him was a friend of his, Jim Kirk, who was dying of cancer. I knew that my father took Jim out on drives, but I’d heard it from my mother, not from him; he and I were going through a period of estrangement and hadn’t spoken in a while…which is a way of saying that I don’t know what ultimately happened to the Caddy. I ran into Howie some years after that on the street, but he looked like a junky again, wearing those mismatched clothes from Goodwill. He said hello and then darted away. My father died in 2002. It’s been five years, but I still find missing him incredibly disorienting, like waking up in that gigantic white car, doing a hundred with the top down.
Strauss: Sadly, after 120,000 miles and 8 years later, it was sold to a family-run business and then given to one of their employees who ended up destroying it. I still feel a slight twinge of loss when I'm picked up by my friend in her black Range Rover. It reflects the new life she has, the family she's started and how many years have gone by since our college days.
Wilsey: Sold it to a Saab dealer in Ramsay, New Jersey, and took the bus to New York.
Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston.
Clinch: I traded it in for the second-worst car ever made in this country or any other, a 1976 Dodge Aspen. Don't even ask.
Lee: A couple of days before I left, I miraculously got an offer for the car. I'd parked it on the street with a sign, and I really hadn't thought there'd be any takers. We agreed on $500. My last day, I drove it to the guy's house. He wasn't home, but his daughter gave me the cash and asked me to move the car from the driveway to the street. No problem. Except the car wouldn't start—not an unusual occurrence at that juncture. So I backed it out in neutral, and fortunately the street was on a hill, and I was able to pop the clutch and roll-start it. I parked it on the street and guiltily hightailed it out of there as fast as I could.
Siegel: Some years later, I was driving down the street in a car I actually owned, a Chevy Impala with a ripped up interior (I’d inherited it from my grandfather), when I recognized the Caddy up ahead—there was no mistaking that magnificent beast. The top was down and my father was behind the wheel, and next to him was a friend of his, Jim Kirk, who was dying of cancer. I knew that my father took Jim out on drives, but I’d heard it from my mother, not from him; he and I were going through a period of estrangement and hadn’t spoken in a while…which is a way of saying that I don’t know what ultimately happened to the Caddy. I ran into Howie some years after that on the street, but he looked like a junky again, wearing those mismatched clothes from Goodwill. He said hello and then darted away. My father died in 2002. It’s been five years, but I still find missing him incredibly disorienting, like waking up in that gigantic white car, doing a hundred with the top down.
Strauss: Sadly, after 120,000 miles and 8 years later, it was sold to a family-run business and then given to one of their employees who ended up destroying it. I still feel a slight twinge of loss when I'm picked up by my friend in her black Range Rover. It reflects the new life she has, the family she's started and how many years have gone by since our college days.
Wilsey: Sold it to a Saab dealer in Ramsay, New Jersey, and took the bus to New York.
Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston.