We’d walked barefoot along the tracks, balancing on the sun-scorched rails and cooling our feet on the sharp stone ballast every few steps until we were above the Eleventh Street beach and then sat side-by-side on the sandstone cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, shoulders touching, arms wrapped around our bare shins, and watched surfers carve the blown-out late-afternoon sets and talked about her new Tom Jones 45, I Can’t Stop Loving You, and the Archies and Sugar Sugar and skating under the limbo stick at the Tri-City rink in Solana Beach and her mother’s morning Old Fashioned in a tall glass with maraschino cherries and a Lucky Strike and how she hated school and Wednesday night mass. We didn’t talk about the Kadett.

We were quiet for some minutes. She turned to me then, her sea-deep blue eyes locked into mine, the bridge of her nose swollen and purple, wavy blond tresses on her tan bare shoulders, a pink pimple on her chin and she smiled and her teeth were white and perfect and she leaned into me and our lips touched. There is only one first kiss; the warm, chamois-soft press, the smells of young woman sweat and Herbal Essence shampoo, of seaweed and saltwater and warm sandstone, of bourbon and cigarettes, scents that even still bring back that moment.

“You’re a better kisser than David,” she said.

*             *             *             *

Except Spanks, everybody called David Lip. Indeed, Lip’s lips were what you first noticed about him; plump, moist, the color of raw meat and highlighted by Latin eyes and a coppertone complexion. They stuck out from his face and lay one on top of the other in a way that looked pouty, rich, and magazine pretty. His mouth molded itself to his attitude of the moment so that his mood was always on his face. It was the deep corners, the feminine curves to his upper labium and the soft crease to the lower that gave him away; the corners twitching independently of each other, the parting and pressing of the fleshy pretties, the silvery braces, the enthusiasm of his tongue that together created a billboard to his mind. But we didn’t call him Lip because of that, we called him Lip because he never shut up.

We met in third grade and had been best friends ever since. He was adopted and built model airplanes and was a loud spoken and argumentative expert on most things. On his back patio just outside the lanai, there was a rock-lined pond with a three-foot bronze statue of a naked boy standing on an island in the middle. The statue was connected to a pump so that the arcing stream from his verdigris penis aerated the water for the fish. After school we’d ride our bikes to his house and dive bomb the fish with one of his model airplanes, squirting the fuselage and star-spangled wings with lighter fluid, lighting it with wood matches and buzzing the fish until molten globs of black plastic dropped and sizzled into the water and we burned our fingers and the low-flying aircraft crashed into the sea. Then we’d go inside and eat Pop-tarts and watch Hogan’s Heroes while the koi examined the wreckage. During the war years, no fish were harmed.

Lip and I were the same height, same skinny, young-boy build, same uncombable surf dreads, his wavy and brunette, mine blond and straight. He had braces, my two front teeth were jagged and broken and braces don’t fix that. Most nights during the summer, we slept at each other’s houses; he had his own room with a king-size waterbed and a new Motorola color TV in a wood cabinet and a bookshelf above his bed filled with car and airplane models, Robert Heinlein sci-fi novels and Cycle World magazines. In the stacks of motorcycle rags, he stashed old copies of Playboy he’d dug out of his father’s trash. I shared a room with my brother and had a rust-orange corduroy sofa bed that used to be in the living room and a 12” black and white Westinghouse TV with rabbit ears wrapped in tinfoil. I didn’t have money for magazine subscriptions. Mostly we slept at his house.

When I was ten, my parents bought me a surfboard for Christmas; a used 7’2” Hansen, too long to be cool but cheap. Lip got a board that year, too, a new 5’6” white Hobie with redwood stringers, hard rails, and three skegs. While it was still dark, we’d grab our sticks out of his garage, balance them on our heads and walk barefoot to the Eleventh Street beach wearing nothing but our suits, Lip in Hawaiian board shorts with big flowers, me in cutoff jeans. We’d trot down Van Dyke, that was the street Lip lived on, dart across Highway 101, dodging truck traffic even at that hour, walk down the Eleventh Street hill, hop across the tracks, scramble down the sandstone cliffs, and paddle out, the cool morning air against our upper bodies and the water against our legs as we straddled our boards exactly the same temperature; the orange glow of the sun rising over the cliffs behind us turning the black water blue and warming our backs as we looked out to sea for the next set.

Del Mar doesn’t have big surf; a four-foot day is a good day. But a lot of summer mornings, the water’s glassy and the waves are well-formed and tubed. In 1967, the Eleventh Street beach was mostly deserted in the early morning; there was better surf up the coast for people with pickups or vans. On any morning there was never more than half-a-dozen guys waiting for waves at the Eleventh Street beach, a lot of mornings it was just Lip and me.

The bigger waves come in sets, rising out of the ocean until they tower over you and block the horizon and you spin your board to face the beach and lie on your chest and paddle hard until the water lifts the board from behind and takes the power from your arms and suddenly you’re looking straight down, a four foot wave has an eight foot face, and the board tips forward and accelerates down the nearly vertical water and you grab the rails and lunge to your feet and if you didn’t fall off or pearl (dig the nose of the board into the water and get launched), you race down the face, dig a rail into the water for the bottom turn, left or right depending on the break, then work the pocket just ahead of the barrel, legs and torso crouched for power, arms waving and punching for balance, feet working the waxed fiberglass to stay in the glassy water as it curls and crests and the break is at your shoulder as the wave crashes behind and the wind from the speed and the spray press cool against your body, and the joy is existential and the world that’s not blue and white foam doesn’t exist, even when your ten. And then the wave closes out or you kick out or you fall off. And you paddle out and do it again.

Lip and I would surf until eight or nine when the wind would blow out the waves and whip up chop and we’d climb back up the cliffs and go back to his house and shower off the sand and saltwater in his parents’ walk-in pink-tile shower, naked and tan except our white butts and hairless boy-bits. We showered together, muscly and lean and wrestling under the hot water and soaping each other up and rinsing the salt and sand out of each other’s hair and laughing and fucking around until the hot water ran out. His mother one day overheard us through the open bathroom window and put a stop to it. That was about the same time pubic hair and girls started happening.

Lip’s mom shopped at the Big Bear grocery store on Fifteenth Street; Pop-Tarts, Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Skippy, Welches, Wonder Bread and Oreos in the cupboards; Blue Bonnet in a plastic tub and whole milk in cardboard cartons in her green Sears Coldspot. When we were done showering, we’d toast strawberry Pop-Tarts in the Toastmaster, eat a box of cereal with a half-gallon of milk and make half a loaf of bread into PB&J sandwiches and eat them, too.

Lip’s father was a world-famous physics professor at UCSD and raised red roses in wood beds for competition at the San Diego County Fair. In the summer before the fair, their backyard smelled like farm shit. A lot of years he won first prize. In Lip’s parents’ bedroom, there was a green classroom-size chalkboard and after we got out of the shower, while we were still taking showers, I’d stand on the raked white shag naked and dripping and try to puzzle out the lines and lines of chalk symbols and numbers of some problem he was working on. He was blond and going bald and chain-smoked Camel Straights and wasn’t home much.

*             *             *             *

Spanks was a liar, a drunk and a thief. She lied to her parents, she lied to her teachers, she lied to her friends, she stole from me. We accepted her unwillingness to prioritize truth as an oddity in the same way you might accept a friend with a stutter or a limp. If she said “It’s raining,” we just looked outside to make sure. We brought no judgement and we weren’t surprised when what she told us wasn’t real.

She crafted a reality that amused her so that when she told us that a school priest took her into his office and spanked her along with the details of him pulling her school uniform over her head and sliding her underwear over her scuffed Mary Janes and pulling up his cassock and arranging her across his bare thighs so he could slap her butt, letting his hand caress her cheeks between blows and breathing hard with his efforts and saying always the same prayer when he was finished, “Oro pro te, filia mea. I hope you learned something this time,” we heard a story. That was all. We didn’t take it home, we didn’t tell our parents, we kept it to ourselves and joked and teased her about it and called her Spanks, and she’d laugh and light a cigarette or take a drink and a month or two later tell the story again.

It was always the same priest: silver cross hanging on his chest, thick glasses that he laid on his desk, stained and crooked teeth, the sour stinks of sweat, red wine and lunch meat that filled the room when he lifted his robe, scratchy black belly hairs. A big painting of Jesus, downcast eyes, blond hair and beard holding a white lamb in his arms hung above the priest’s desk; she said she like felt Jesus was watching as she lay stiff and silent on the priest’s lap wearing just her shoes and received her punishment. Each time she told the story, she described that picture of Jesus and the sheep. She told it to us over and over until she went to high school. The details didn’t change much.

Being a girl, babysitting was Spanks’ job. It paid fifty-cents an hour. The fact that she thought babies were disgusting was unimportant; her mother had been a volunteer at the Catholic school for years and bragged about her daughter at gatherings of young moms from up and down the coast and Spanks worked most Friday and Saturday nights. Oddly, very oddly, she had a good reputation, mostly it seems from her mom being her mom and not burning down a house or dropping a baby. She chewed pink Dubble Bubble, the gum snapping and popping was who adults thought she was, and it covered up the reek of stolen booze. She handled her liquor well and could mostly walk fine to the dad’s car for the ride home; if she stumbled over her feet or her words, it was because she was young and sleepy.

Spanks’ favorite whiskey was Jack, but she’d drink most any brand, Jimmy, Johnnie, Wild Turkey, whatever. When she could, she chose her jobs because of the liquor cabinet; if all the parents kept was gin, she wouldn’t take their job unless she needed a drink and then she’d force herself to manage their kids while she grimaced and gulped down their Gordon’s and filled her flask. She refused to babysit a second time for people who didn’t have a liquor cabinet.

Whiskey wasn’t all she stole. She rummaged through dresser drawers, suit pockets and purses looking for what she could find; change, dollar bills and once in a while a five, even a ten. If there was a cigarette smoker in the house, she’d find the carton in the freezer and take two or three packs. She liked menthol. She took earrings, necklaces, watches. Sometimes she’d take a house or car key just because she could. She wasn’t careful in what she stole, she took what she wanted. As a Catholic school girl, assumptions about her were biblical. Even so, some couples didn’t call her back.

Most Friday nights, she babysat for a family in town and Lip and I would ride over and hang out. Walking in, she’d be sitting on the sofa watching Johnny Carson and bouncing the fussy baby on her lap, a cigarette between her fingers, an ashtray and a glass of whiskey on the table beside her, “You’re an ugly little whore, aren’t you?” The kid would think she was bragging about her and would quit fussing and gurgle and wave. She’d hand us her glass as greeting and we’d pass it around. I didn’t like bourbon much and I could see Lip taking little sips, too, but we’d keep at it until the three of us were laughing drunk and the baby was asleep on the couch beside her. If a diaper stunk, she’d complain but wouldn’t change it; I never saw her change one, anyway.

In a school bathroom one day, Spanks watched in the mirror as her sixth-grade teacher slipped a silver flask from a pocket in her habit, unscrew the cap and take her late-morning fortification. A few days later, a friend distracted Sister Judith as she was walking out the classroom door for recess, “Sister, why was Noah drunk and naked in Genesis?” she giggled. The nun pursed her lips, “That is not a discussion for today,” she snapped. As expected, she blocked the doorway for a moment with her annoyance so that Spanks walking just behind had to squeeze between her bony butt and the doorjamb, “Excuse me, Sister,” she said as she slipped a hand into the pocket of the nun’s habit and pinched the half-empty flask of holy water and tucked it behind the bible she held in her arms for the purpose. “For God’s sake, Mary,” the nun said as she stalked down the hall without her flask.

The flask was oval-shaped and heavy with a screw lid and a cork gasket attached with a silver chain. Christ, naked and hanging from nails on a pretty cross, his head canted to one side, his beatific smile, his flowing silver mane neatly combed and resting on his shoulder was cast into one side; the words “Vinum Meum Est Deus Meus” were scratched into the tarnished and dented silver on the other side of Jesus. The letters were crude and uneven like somebody’d scraped them in with a screwdriver but the words were clear. Spanks kept the flask in a beaded-wood purse with a beaded-wood chain. She kept her cigarettes and Dubble Bubble in the purse with it.

*             *             *             *

My mother dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley when she got pregnant; I was born spring semester 1956. She was a junior, a chemical engineering major; my father was a sophomore, a mechanical engineering student and ROTC cadet. After my dad graduated, we moved to Fort Ord and lived on post. He was a combat engineer and spent two years building sewers and roads. When he got out of the Army, he got a job with Westinghouse and bought a used 1962 Opel Kadett, a red two-door car faded dull-pink by the California sun. It had a 46-horsepower, 4-cylinder engine, a 4-speed manual transmission with a long, skinny black shift lever and a chrome am radio with no pushbuttons set in a shiny-red steel dash.

He drove the country in that car, living in motels for months at a time while he managed the installation of “big iron” mainframe computers in paper mills across the south. He told us stories of brass spittoons on the shiny white floors of Texas offices, changing a flat tire on the Mississippi delta in July, civil rights strikes and protests and kids splashing in the algae-green water and floating cigarette butts at the motel pool in Birmingham, the motel manager’s wife refusing to talk to him because he was from “the north”, a man yelling “room service” at two in the morning and robbing guests who opened their doors (my father didn’t open his door); driving through a blizzard in west Texas with winds so strong he had the front wheels turned to the steering stop to keep from being blown off the road. He drove the Opel until the clutch wore out.

When the clutch wore out that summer, my father bought a ‘65 Mustang, forest green, inline six-cylinder engine, automatic transmission, manual steering and windows, black vinyl seats, pushbutton am radio; the pink Kadett was dead and my father’s road stories were about to become used parts and scrap metal. I reasoned, argued, pleaded that he let me have it, let me fix it, let me figure it out, until finally he said “Maybe you’ll learn something,” his tone confident that he was only postponing his call for a tow truck.

In early June of that summer, the summer of 1970, in the shade of the Torrey Pine at the end of our dirt driveway, Spanks and I stood next to the Kadett with the engine idling, radio knob turned all the way to the right, the doors open and the hood up and studied the problem. When the cigarette commercials stopped, “You’ve come a long way, Baby,” and a new song, tinny and loud, came splashing out of the open doors, she would sway with the bourbon while she soaked up the beat. When she figured out the song, she would start to shuffle her bare feet on the dirt driveway. Drunk as she was, she had a grace and easy balance that moved from her feet into her ankles and knees, her hips in short cutoffs, her abs and ribs, shoulders, arms and hands, left and right, all tan and bare except the thin straps that held her crop-top top over her boy chest and left her belly button exposed, and into her neck and head and face, so that by the second stanza, her whole body flowed with the music, her movements quick and effortless, her timing just on rhythm, her eyes closed, her lips pursed and kissy and mouthing the lyrics.

 “I have to pull the motor out of the car.”

“I love the Supremes!”

“No way not to.”

“Let’s go to my house. My mom’s not home. We can turn up the stereo.”

“If I don’t fix it, my dad’s going to junk it.”

*             *             *             *

Briggs & Stratton taught me what makes the world go. The rewind spring in our Craftsman lawnmower broke — the spring that yanks the rope back when you pull-start a gas mower — and I unbolted the shroud with a combination wrench from my father’s toolbox and found the broken spring and after several tries and a jagged, greasy cut to my finger, installed a new spring and when the mower started again, showed off the dirty band aid and the black grease crescents under my fingernails.

I spent that summer cutting neighbors’ grass with that mower and at the end of the summer, I bought a Taco 22 minibike from Beau Stevens for seventy dollars; Beau was the son of the Del Mar lifeguard and lived a few blocks away. The Taco had a 3-horse Briggs with a centrifugal clutch, a pipe steel frame, a scrub brake on the rear tire and no front brake, pipe steel forks with springs and no dampers, a torn scrap of blue vinyl stapled over a pad of foam rubber for a seat. It was geared too high for Del Mar hills so I’d have to run alongside and push it up the steep bits. It left a trail of gray smoke and when I tried to pop a wheelie, the front wheel fell off; the scabs and bruises healed but I never did get the forks straight.

After I’d ridden the Taco for a couple of weeks and most of my friends had ridden it and we’d argued its numerous shortcomings, I unbolted the engine from the frame, put it on the workbench in the garage and unbolted the carburetor, the muffler, the rewind shroud, the flywheel, the oil sump, the cylinder head, the camshaft, the connecting rod and piston, and all the rest until I held the crankshaft in my hands, its weight shocking for its size.

Crankshafts power the world. Cars, motorcycles, trucks, tractors, ships, locomotives, airplanes (except jets), generators, weed whips and chainsaws, lawnmowers, minibikes and most everything else that runs on gas or diesel all have at their core a painstakingly engineered, cast, machined, balanced and assembled, an astonishingly heavy length of grey iron and shiny steel: the crankshaft.

What the crankshaft does is convert the linear motion of the piston, powered by the expansion of burning fuel (gas or diesel plus air), into the rotational motion that turns clutches, gears, sprockets, belts, chains and wheels. Once all the bolts, nuts, springs, washers, seals, gaskets, and shiny black oil have been unscrewed, scraped and cleaned away, what’s left is the essential beauty of human endeavor; its pins and journals machined to a 0.0010” tolerance, its screw threads fine and delicately cut, its keyways and oil galleries polished to a mirror finish, its cast iron counterweights a delicate grey against the shiny journals and shafts; what’s left is the invention that makes modern life go.

I put the engine back together, oiling the cylinder walls and compressing the piston rings with my fingers to fit the piston into the bore, aligning the timing marks on the cam gear and crank, torquing the connecting rod bolts to 180 inch-pounds and the head bolts to 168 inch-pounds, put it back in the frame and after a few tugs at the starter cord and a splash of gas in the carburetor, it started and ran just as smoky and gutless as before.

*             *             *             *

As we stood beside the idling car, Spanks grooving to the radio, Lip, Luci and Iggy rode up. They had Fogi with them. Word had gotten out that I had a car. “My dad’s Spyder would eat that piece of shit’s lunch,” Lip said. His dad drove a white Corvair convertible with red seats and a red dashboard, a six-cylinder turbocharged engine, a 4-speed transmission and an AM/FM radio.

“Eat my fucking laundry,” I said.

“Let’s get some waves.” Lip’s lips were firm and confident.

Luci and Iggy were twins. Curly black hair cut Navy-short, barefoot, Levi cutoffs, no shirts, “Got any weed,” they said it in one voice like they’d been rehearsing. Their solution to most problems was to cop a buzz and not think about it. Nobody volunteered weed and Spanks didn’t offer her flask and we stared at the Kadett and listened to the AM radio tin-bang top-forty and Spanks danced.

The twins’ father had been killed that spring. He’d been a nuclear physicist in the Navy until he was blackballed by McCarthy and discharged. The Navy rehired him as a contractor and Sunday and Friday nights, he drove between the Naval Air Facility in El Centro and their house in Del Mar, three hours each way. Late on a Friday night, he rolled his International Travelall off a mountain road driving home through the Peninsular Range; he was passing on a blind curve, that’s what the cop report said.

A 1959 truck, the Travelall had a Black Diamond six-cylinder engine, four-wheel drive, four-speed manual transmission and manual everything else. Saturday afternoons, their dad would drive us to Baskin-Robbins in La Jolla, Luci, Iggy, Lip, Spanks, me and whoever was hanging around the house. He’d crank down the rear window and drop the tailgate and we’d climb into the steel-bed. He was a fast driver and we’d brace our bare feet against the wheel wells for his hard turns and quick stops. We didn’t have to hold on accelerating away from a stop sign; it was a heavy truck and it took a while for the little six to get it up to speed. He’d buy each of us a single-scoop in a wafer cone and we’d climb back into the Travelall and try not to dribble ice cream on our bare legs and stomachs as he raced us home.

Their mother was from Argentina and had an accent and drove a yellow Checker, a retired taxicab her dead husband had bought cheap. The car had an 80-horsepower Continental inline six-cylinder engine, three-on-the-column transmission (without first-gear synchromesh), grey vinyl seats that stuck to your legs if you were wearing shorts, screw holes in the dash where the meter and the two-way radio used to mount and no AM radio. She was less than five feet tall and looked through the top of the steering wheel to drive. Luci and Iggy called her The Bag and so we did, too.

The Bag was thin and gray; gray lips, gray hair, gray dresses, black eyes, black shoes with clunky heels. Until her husband died, we’d hang out at their house and she’d make us cream cheese and watercress sandwiches. After he died, she quit making lunch and started screaming; I don’t think I ever heard her talk in a normal voice again. She screamed at Luci and Iggy and she screamed at the rest of us, too. When she screamed in English, her accent was so strong only her sons could understand her. The rest of the time she screamed in Spanish; “Ignacio, Luciano, sweep the driveway, clean the garage, lava los platos, limpia tu cuarto, no amigos en la casa, no vas a salir de esta casa.” She’d gotten a job as a receptionist at a doctor’s office in Encinitas. During the work day, she screamed at them over the phone so when the phone rang, we’d all go quiet while Iggy or Luci explained that no friends were standing around him in the kitchen laughing and passing a joint or a bottle of Strawberry Hill and shushing each other up.

Fogi was a couple of years younger than the rest of us. Chubby with a pink complexion, thin blond hair going bald, he wore khaki shorts his mother ironed and white t-shirts, he carried a knitted green blanket and sucked his thumb; rumor was he still peed the bed. His father was a Navy pilot who’d flown combat missions in Viet Nam and now flew for the Blue Angels out of Miramar Naval Air Station a few miles up the road. Fogi had three or four of his old flight helmets, drop-down sun visors, speakers, microphone, comm wires dangling out the back, the scratches and sweat-stink of hot piloting.  His callsign, Fogi, was hand-painted on the back of all of them. When we were younger, we’d flown all over town wearing those helmets.

“Why are there three pedals?”

“Fogi, throw that nasty fucking blanket away.” Lip curled his upper lip in disgust.

“Clutch.”

“It’s so you can shift gears.”

“It’s nasty.”

“My dad’s car just has two pedals.”

“His Chevelle’s got an automatic. Automatics do the shifting for you.”

“Two-eighty-three, that Chevelle ain’t shit. Let’s get some waves.” Lip’s parted lips showed his distain for the little V8 until his confidence pressed them together again.

“When I get a car, I’m going to get one with an automatic.”

“When can we go for a ride?”

“Got any whiskey?”

“Stick’s more fun to drive.”

“I babysit tomorrow night, I’ll get some Jimmy.”

“I’ve got to put a clutch in it.”

“It sounds good to me.”

“It’s not going anywhere without a clutch.”

“How long will that take?”

“My mom’s not home. Want to come over and listen to music?”

“I’ve got to do this.”

“We gotta get back to the casa, Bag’ll be home in few.”

“I’ll come over and dance,” Lip’s lips were red and wet, curled up at the ends and open slightly so I could see the silver glint from his braces.

“Fuck you, Lip.” My tone surprised me.

In all the years I’d known Spanks, I’d never really thought of her as a girl. We’d built rafts and floated on the sloughs on both ends of town and fallen in the viscous green and waded to shore through the weeds, saltwater and mud reeking of rot and dead fish, had dirt clod fights in the newly framed houses in Del Mar Heights, hiked Snake Lady’s Wall, the steep eight-foot stucco wall that circled the acres and burned mansion at the top of Del Mar (rumor was it was built to keep snakes out; it didn’t work, we saw rattlers on both sides), climbed the fence and snuck into the county fair, watched the trainers work the horses at the racetrack (if it was harness racing they were training for, we’d stand at the rail and wave hitchhiker thumbs at the drivers and sometimes get a fast ride around the track balanced on the sulky axle and holding on hard), eaten ham sandwiches with potato salad on paper plates handed down from the dining car by the laughing black porters in white livery working the shiny four-car train that brought rich people from Los Angeles to Del Mar to bet on the ponies, snuck out at night and laid on the beach and drank whiskey and smoked weed and stepped on dead jellyfish and stung our feet, and a thousand other stories. There were things she didn’t do with us. She didn’t surf, she didn’t have a minibike, she didn’t spend the night at our houses, her mom wouldn’t let her. When we took turns lying on The Bag’s bed with the plug-in vibrator she kept in a dresser drawer for her shoulders, Spanks would stay in the kitchen or go home. But until that day standing next to my broken Kadett, she’d just been another kid I did stuff with, maybe braver than the others. And, sure, we roller-skated and listened to records on her parent’s stereo.

Lip didn’t hear it, “Tu mama, maricón. Let’s catch some swell.”

“Seriously, man, fuck you.” I didn’t know where the rage was coming from. There was something about the eagerness in his tone, the long stares, the parting and pressing of his mouth as he watched her dance that I hadn’t noticed before. Spanks heard it too because after he said it, she shifted her feet so that they pointed just at him.

“Man, didn’t eat your Wheaties this morning?”

Now they were all looking at me and I was really pissed and without thinking about it I said, “Six hundred and sixty-seven days, motherfucker. This car’s my ride out of here.”

“What happens in six hundred days?”

“He gets his license. That’s how many days until his birthday”

“Cool.”

“This piece of shit’s dead. You ain’t going anywhere.”

Spanks said, “I’m going with you.”

“I’ve got to pull the motor and change out the fucking clutch, Michael Jackson ain’t going to help.” It was piss talk, I could hear it in my voice and I knew they could, too, but I couldn’t stop it.

Spanks looked at me like she did sometimes, a hard, blue-eyed stare through her drunken half-lids like she wanted me to say something and when I didn’t, she turned her head away, “Let’s go, David.”

Luci laughed, “Lip’s going after your girl, man.”

“Fuck Lip. Fuck Spanks. Fuck you.”

“We gotta get back to the casa,” he said, “Bag’ll be home in a few.”

Fogi and I looked at the Kadett and the Jackson 5 finished their song.

*             *             *             *

It was mostly Fogi and me that pulled the engine out of the Kadett and replaced the clutch. It took us a couple of afternoons to take off the hood and the air cleaner, disconnect the electrical leads, the fuel line and carburetor linkages, undo the clamps and pull the radiator hoses and drain the cooling system onto the driveway, pullout the radiator and the fan, unbolt the exhaust from the manifold, unbolt the transmission from the bellhousing, unbolt the motor mounts, and hoist the motor out with block and tackle, tied it off to the tree trunk and let it dangle. Once it was hanging in the air high enough to clear the grill, we rolled the car out from under it, much lighter without the engine, and unbolted the bellhousing and the pressure plate and finally I had the clutch in my hand, the rivets holding the asbestos friction material to the steel disc chrome-shiny from the metal-on-metal scrubbing.

Fogi didn’t know anything about mechanics but he liked doing it. When I asked him to unbolt the exhaust and showed him what he needed to do, he tied his blanket around his head and crawled under the Opel and lay on his back in the mud from the coolant in his ironed khaki shorts and white t-shirt. I reached over the fender and handed him the ratchet, an extension and a socket and he grunted and strained and unscrewed the two nuts connecting the exhaust pipe to the manifold while rust fell in his face. After he crawled out from under the car and took off his turban, he put his thumb back in his mouth so his lips and cheeks were covered with coolant-green sludge. He asked me what I wanted him to do next and I handed him a screwdriver and pointed at the clamps on the heater hoses.

The parts and machining were fifty bucks and had to be ordered; the auto parts store wanted their money up front. I’d gotten out of the lawncare business the year before; my allowance was seventy-five cents a week and I had to sweep the front patio to get it. I asked Lip and he lied and said he didn’t have it. I didn’t bother to ask the twins or Fogi; the twins were poor and Fogi was Fogi. Lip told Spanks I didn’t have the money and she called me and said, “I’ll buy your clutch.”

“You’ve got that much money?”

“Money is not the problem.”

*             *             *             *

It took two months for the parts to come in and a day for Fogi and me to install the clutch and put the engine back in the car. When it was done, I got my dad to drive me to the the Del Mar airport to test drive it, the airport was built for Navy blimps and abandoned after the war and we did laps on the runways. The clutch worked just like before.

Spanks came by after it was done, she wanted me to show her how to drive it.

 “I’ll do the driving,” I said.

“Show me. I just want to know how.”

“I don’t want it wrecked.”

“It’s my clutch.”

She sat in the driver’s seat and I went over it with her, the key, the gas, the choke, the brakes, the clutch, the transmission, headlights, turn indicators, even the windshield wipers and the AM radio; I showed her how it all worked. She turned the key and pushed the gas and brake pedals and ran through the four gears with the clutch, easing it out in first and reverse until the car moved to get the feel of it, dialed the radio to Boss Radio 1360, and blinked the blinkers and pushed dust around on the windshield with the wipers.

“I can do this,” she said.

“We’ll take it out to Black Mountain. You can practice out there.” Black Mountain in those days was scrub ranch land east of town with dirt roads that went for miles with no traffic and no cops. We’d ridden our minibikes out there for years.

“I’ve got to babysit tomorrow night.”

“Saturday?”

“Twelve?”

Midnight Sunday morning, I snuck out my bedroom window; Spanks was going to meet me in the driveway. She wasn’t there. Neither was the Kadett.

She made it almost as far as Escondido before she rolled the car off Del Dios Road. Driving drunk in the dark, she didn’t stand a chance on that twisty little highway. Her dad owned a business in Solana Beach, he designed and built custom camera equipment for the Navy and had once been the mayor of Del Mar; he talked with the police and she was never charged. He talked with my dad and offered to pay for the car and my dad told him it was junk anyway. I never saw it again. I don’t know when the girl who stole my first kiss stole my keys.

Spanks died a few years ago. This story’s for her.