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From the The Tenement Series of non-fiction essays by Harry Buschman
© by Harry Buschman
The Twelve Cylinder Packard
Uncle Fred came
to live with us when I was less than a year old, and until I was old enough
to know better I thought I was the only kid on the block with two fathers. His
estranged wife, Margie, had put up with him for five years and finally threw
in the sponge. He was my father's brother, "but no more like my father
than I to Hercules," as Hamlet was moved to remark.
Al slept in the bedroom that should have been mine. When I was old enough to
sleep alone, I found myself on a fold-out horsehair davenport in the parlor
with a Kranach & Bach upright piano for company. But, Fred paid for his
room and with money as tight as it was with us, I had to make the sacrifice.
If he had redeeming qualities I'm sure I could have forgiven him, but uncle
Fred was riddled with shortcomings.
During the Great War, (we called it that to differentiate from the Spanish American
War) Uncle Fred was a steam fitter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He thus avoided
the draft and made heaps of money. Never having had any money before, the only
thing he could think of to do with it, was spend it, and the only way he could
spend it as fast as he made it was by drinking and gambling. So he gambled and
drank with the enthusiasm of a Diamond Jim Brady. His devotion to the primrose
path was what probably attracted Margie in the beginning but she couldn't keep
up with him and she walked out on him. He came to us, my mother later told me
"with nothing but the clothes on his back." That may well be, but
my mother knew very well that Uncle Fred was pulling down $25,000 a year at
the shipyard, which in those days, was a fortune.
With Margie gone, it wasn't long before he added women to his drinking and gambling
habits and there would be periods when he'd be gone for a while. When he'd return
he would be stretched out pretty thin and in dire need of a home cooked meal.
He would lick his wounds for a week or so, then, when the bell sounded, back
he'd go -- back into the fray.
For someone devoted to gambling he was a surprisingly bad card player -- my
father beat him regularly at pinochle, and by the time I was ten, I could beat
him at cribbage. He bet on fights, baseball games ... and to prove his lack
of sense, he even bet on wrestling matches. There were times he didn't collect
on the bets he won because he'd either lose the ticket or forget the bet, but
many of the scars and bruises he bore were evidence of the ones he lost and
forgot to pay. The bedroom mirror above his dressing table had an oval mahogany
frame in which he would wedge hundreds of stubs of past raffles lost and those
still pending.
When my mother
dusted his room she would throw away the dead ones, but as luck would have it,
one in particular caught her eye one day. It was a book of chances on a 1922
Packard touring sedan he had bought at a VFW dinner a month ago. For some reason
it rang a bell with her.
There had been an item in the morning paper concerning a raffle. It seemed the
winner still hadn't claimed the prize. I was doing my homework on the dining
room table at the time and my blood froze when I heard my mother shout. There
she was in the middle of the kitchen with the book of chances in one hand and
the newspaper in the other.
"Look," she gasped, "the number's the same -- Uncle Fred's won a Packard!" Nobody had a car in those days, certainly not a Packard -- my mother's face turned sharp and calculating for a brief moment.
"You know,"
she said, "your father and me could go down to the VFW, Fred doesn't even
know he's got the winning ticket." Then her face softened a bit as she
thought it through. "What would we do with it?" She was a practical
woman. If the prize had been a diamond ring I think she may have been tempted.
When Uncle Fred finally rolled in before supper that evening we broke the news
to him. He had not only forgotten the book of chances but he couldn't remember
having been at the VFW dinner. He and my father decided they would go down to
the VFW right after dinner and drive the prize home.
Neither of them knew how to drive. Driver's licenses were not required in those
days, if you owned a motor vehicle it was assumed you could drive it as well.
The rest of the family sat out on the front stoop waiting for them to return
and it was nearly dark when a long black behemoth of a machine with my uncle
at the wheel cruised up to our front door.
"It won't
stop, dammit," my uncle shouted, and they continued down the street
and made a left turn at the corner.
"They're
probably gonna give it another try," my mother observed. They were more
successful on the second pass, it shuddered to a stop with two wheels up on
the sidewalk.
The 12 cylinder Packard was every inch a behemoth. It had to be housed in a
public garage and it demanded constant and loving attention. These were qualities
Uncle Fred lacked completely. In the first place it was not new, it had been
used as a general staff car in France during the war and bought for a song as
surplus war material. A coat of black paint had been hastily brushed over the
original olive drab, and when you looked under it you could still see the muddy
fields of France stuck to its underside. We had our first and last ride in it
that evening -- from then on it was used as a love machine for Uncle Fred.
In spite of its war record and Packard's reputation for dependability, it didn't
last long. No one is crueler to a finely tuned machine than the man who doesn't
understand it. It soon became dented and dusty. Within a month it had undergone
more abuse than it had in its eighteen months at the front. Fred was forced
to abandon it by the roadside next to a hotel in Patchogue where he'd gone for
the weekend with a lady friend -- the two of them had to get on a Long Island
Railroad train and came back to Brooklyn. As far as I know the twelve cylinder
Packard may still be standing by the side of the road in Patchogue.
©Harry Buschman 1996
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