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My 1991 Dodge Stealth

As far back as my memories take me, I always wanted a car. When I got my first restaurant job at fourteen years old, the only thing that truly motivated me to work every Friday and Saturday night was the idea that, if I saved up enough money, I’d be able to make it happen, I’d somehow have enough to buy my own set of wheels.

It wasn’t just about buying a vehicle, it was the independence that came along with it. For the first two and a half years of high school, I was stuck riding the bus. I felt pathetic, standing at this random street corner in my Catholic school business casual dress code, waiting around in the cold with a bunch of upperclassmen from my town that were too cool to be caught interacting with me.

When I was a freshman, the juniors and seniors that rode the bus to school in the morning were anything but cool. They were a bunch of bullies. They’d make us play this game called red light. Basically, you start at the front of the bus and you have to run to the back, touch the red light near the emergency exit, and make it back to your seat, all while this group of sixteen and seventeen year old dweebs gave you dead arms and noogies.

I wanted nothing to do with any of that nonsense. And so I did it, I put enough money away that well before my seventeenth birthday came around, I had enough to buy my own car. There was this house a few blocks down with a red sports car parked in front marked with a “For Sale” sign. I needed it.

My dad came with me to do the negotiating. I found out that it was a 1991 Dodge Stealth, not that I’d ever heard of that model before going to check out this particular car. The seller and his wife gave us their pitch, there was some back-and-forth between the adults about prices and taxes and … to be honest, I have no idea what they were saying. I was just staring into the front seat, imagining myself shifting gears and outrunning cops on the highway. I knew it, that I was going to buy this car. I would have paid everything that I had.

This was all a few months before I was legally licensed to drive, so for a while I had to be content just to look at this thing in my parents’ driveway. I’d sit in the driver’s seat and listen to the radio. I bought a pair of black fuzzy dice for the rearview mirror. It was everything I’d ever wanted in life, right there.

And then I turned seventeen and I started driving to school, to work, to get McDonald’s, to buy CDs. But with great power comes great responsibility. Like the responsibility to start paying for repairs and stuff. After a month or so, one of the power windows died. So that was like two hundred bucks. And then the exhaust system needed to be replaced.

Then there was a little fender bender, and something about a radiator. I think I’ve forced myself to forget the specifics, because it started quickly eating away at my cash reserves. But it was just like at those initial negotiations. You could have quoted me whatever estimate you wanted for a jon, I didn’t care, OK, all I cared about was that car, and I would have paid anything.

Finally after a year or so of use, the transmission started to fade. When I shifted into third gear, it would make this really loud sound, and after a while I had to skip from second to fourth. Eventually the problem got worse and I had to take it in to a transmission shop. They quoted me over a thousand to replace the whole thing. That kind of hurt. I mean, I think I could have made it work. It would have taken maybe a little loan from my folks, but I’d just work extra shifts that summer, pay them back in no time.

But I never even got the chance, because that week I wound up rear-ending some guy, smashing up the front of the Stealth. I would have sold a kidney to pay for the repairs, but nobody was willing to bankroll both the accident and the transmission. There weren’t any options. I had to junk it. They gave me three hundred bucks and then charged me like a hundred to tow it away. I tried not to cry like a little baby.

But man, it took me a long time to get over that car. For the better part of the next decade, it was a very real goal of mine to resave up all of that money and buy another Stealth, the same model, the same year, I didn’t care what else life threw at me, I needed my Dodge Stealth. But yeah, saving up all of that money isn’t as easy when you’re not in high school. I didn’t feel like working every Friday or Saturday night anymore. And now I had other stuff to pay for.

I don’t even have a car now, and there aren’t any plans to buy one in the immediate future. If and when I do have the opportunity to buy something, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be a twenty-year-old two-door coupe. So yeah, for better or worse, I’m slightly more realistic now. And thankfully my soul doesn’t pine for the Stealth with the intensity that it used to.

Still, I’d be lying if I said that I never get those dreams every now and then, the ones where I’m back at my parents’ house and I remember that I didn’t junk my Stealth, that it’s been in the garage the whole time. I spend a frustrating five or ten minutes clearing boxes and other garage junk out of the way. I find the keys and squeeze into the front seat. And as soon as I turn the ignition, I wake up in my bed, the hairs on my arms are standing on end as my euphoria melts into the crushing disappointment that my Stealth is long gone, that I’ll probably never feel as cool as I did that year when I turned seventeen.

Grinds in the coffee

I make my own coffee at home. It’s nothing fancy, just plain drip coffee. And while most of the time there’s nothing to say really, because it’s just a regular coffee machine making regular pots of coffee, every once in a while I’ll screw it up. My mistake won’t be noticeable right away, I’ll pour myself a cup and everything will look OK enough. But as soon as I add some milk, it’s like one of those trick pens that reveals a secret message, that it wasn’t just coffee that I poured out of the pot, but also dozens of chunky coffee grinds floating on the surface.

It’s just such a bummer, like I don’t even know how or why it happens, but it does. Not always, and not often enough that I’d consider really trying to figure out what’s going on, but just every now and then, like oh yeah, coffee with grinds in it, I almost forgot I’ve got to deal with this on a semi-regular basis.

I’ve got a bunch of theories as to what causes the grinds to make their way into my coffee, but they’re all just kind of half-thoughts, nothing conclusive. At first I had the idea that I wasn’t grinding my coffee fine enough, that after the water gets sucked up through the base of the machine, it then sprays over the basket of grinds, and since it’s all so granular and loose, it causes everything to spill out of the filter, into the pot.

So I started grinding my coffee very finely, holding down the top of the grinder until upon examination of the results, you’d never be able to tell that this dust ever came from something remotely resembling a whole bean. And nothing changed. It was still pretty decent coffee, for the most part, except that every once in a while it would still be polluted with grinds.

I don’t know what to do, or what to think either. I looked toward my various restaurant jobs to see if maybe the professionals were doing something that I wasn’t in preparing and serving large quantities of coffee. A quick tour of our coffee prep station gave me a few insights. Like, espresso is ground very finely, and you need a big espresso machine that shoots highly pressured water capable of breaching the tightly packed grounds. Drip coffee was looser, so everything could kind of make its way through the maze of bigger sized coffee crumbs.

This didn’t help at all, because like I said, I’d already tried both methods, and neither of them prevented the inevitable dirty pot. I thought back further, to the restaurant I worked at in high school. We didn’t grind our own beans. Everything came pre-ground in these vacuum packed bags. And everything worked, for the most part. The thing about this particular machine was the glass pots. Every once in a while, you’d brew a batch and a thin layer of tan foam would accumulate at the top.

“It’s the fucking coffee grinds!” my foul-mouthed but insanely good-natured boss Marcello would scream at us from across the restaurant, “You put the fucking grinds in the wrong fucking way and now there’s grinds in the fucking coffee! Throw it away! You! What are you looking at? Do something, lazy motherfucker!”

I swear, despite Marcello’s liberal use of the f-bomb, both in private and directly in front of all of his clientele, he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked for in my life. But even his profanity driven work ethic was unable to prevent the occasional grindy pot of coffee.

And yeah, it’s not pleasant. But what are you going to do about it? Where I work now, you can’t see if there’s a layer of foam, and aside from sticking my fingers in each cup of boiling hot coffee, there’s no way to tell if what I’m serving is untainted liquid. Every once in a while, I’ll see a hand waving in the air from the other side of the dining room. I’ll walk over and a customer will be livid, “There’s grinds in this coffee!”

And trust me, I love my coffee, so I get it. But what are you really going to do? Because there’s no guaranteed solution. When it happens to me in my house, yeah, I used to sometimes wash out the filter and run the whole pot through the machine again. Or if I didn’t feel like going through that whole ordeal, I might skim a piece of paper towel over the surface, try to catch as much particulate without absorbing my entire cup.

But even that is so much more of a hassle than I want to endure. Now I’ll just suck up as much of the grinds as I can into the first sip, and swallow them as fast as I can, before I have to feel them on my tongue, or stuck in between my teeth. Because whatever, sometimes you get grinds in your coffee. Am I going to get pissed off about it? Or expend a bunch of unnecessary energy trying to fix a really minor inconvenience? No, it’s not a big deal. It’s a cup of coffee. Hopefully tomorrow it’ll turn out a little better.

I thought I saw something

You ever get that feeling like you just saw something out of the corner of your eye, but you’re not sure if it was real or imaginary? I was just sitting at my desk when I swore I noticed some sort of movement, just right at the edge of my peripheral vision. I looked, and there was nothing. But what was it that I thought I saw? Was it real? I have no idea. I don’t want to say it could’ve been a bug, because to verbalize it might make it come true. So I kind of do a quick check behind the desk, alongside the wall. There’s nothing out of the ordinary.

It’s tough because there’s no reliable track record for this type of activity. I can’t go back and judge this experience based off of past encounters with roaches or spiders. It’s like, every once in a while, I’ll think I see something, and then a minute passes, maybe another minute and, yep, it’s a bug, it’s a roach and it’s running across the floor.

But then other times it’s all in my head. Like when I was a little kid and I still believed in Santa Claus, every now and then I’d swear I caught a flash of red out of the corner of my eye. So I don’t know what to believe. I do know that if I’m not careful, I’ll let my imagination get the best of me. If I too actively seek out every shadow or imaginary movement I think I see, it’s only going to increase the frequency at which I’m seeing these phantom blurs.

But I also know that I live in New York, that maybe half the time I catch myself looking behind the dresser or underneath that stack of plates, it’s because I actually did see something. And sitting back and ignoring it, pretending like I never saw it in the first place, it never solves the problem. Best case scenario, it just comes back out a minute or two later, and now I’ve definitely seen it, now I have to take action and kill it. Worst case, it disappears into the cracks and crevasses of my walls and flooring where it’ll spawn an entire generation of creepy-crawlies.

I hope I’m not giving the impression that I’m living in a bug-infested dump. My place is very clean. But I’d say once or twice a year I’ve got to kill a roach, usually a really big one that’s either trying to find a warm place, or that’s trying to get back outside now that the weather is nice. I definitely see bugs all the time outside. And mice. And rats. Luckily my block is overrun with feral cats, and so yeah, I’d much rather stray cat colonies to rats.

Several years ago I was living at this apartment by my school in the Bronx. That was the first time that I had an actual mouse try to move in. Those little guys are fast, much faster than any bug. And so that feeling of seeing something moving in the corner, once you actually get a mouse cohabitating with you, it becomes way more pronounced. You’ll see that blur of darkness every time you enter a room. And the worst part is, once out of every twenty or so times, you’ll actually see it, like for real, a real mouse.

Then you have to lay out traps, and worry that the peanut butter is going to attract bugs. And then you finally catch the mouse and you have to wipe up all of the guts and everything that explode all over the place when the mouse finally takes the bait. Like I said, I’ve been really lucky that the worst I’ve had to deal with here is the occasional roach.

And a silverfish every now and then. I don’t know why, but silverfish don’t gross me out as much. For some reason they always kind of blend in with the floor, and so maybe it’s just like an optical illusion, but I never see any imaginary silverfish.

OK, I just saw it again, the movement, something creeping around. I’m still not convinced that it’s anything real, because I’ve just spent the better part of a half an hour talking about roaches and mice. If anything, I’d be more concerned if by this point I hadn’t concocted some hallucinatory pests. But still, I’m having a hard time suppressing my urge to start stomping on the floor, kicking piles of stuff. If it’s hiding in there, I want to see it. I don’t really want to see it. I hate when it comes true, when it pops out from one hiding spot and immediately dives into another. I just … I just wish I had X-Ray vision, that I could see any bugs in the walls of under the floors. No, that would be a terrible super power. A curse really. I just want the phantom movements to stop.

Let the dog have his bones

I feel bad that my dog doesn’t have an iPhone. I have an iPhone. All that my dog has is a bunch of dumb bones that I bought at Petco. He’s happy with them for a while, until there’s no more liver-flavored paste in the center. After that they just kind of take up space. I try to keep all of his old bones in one central location, but he much prefers it if they’re scattered across the living room floor. I should just throw the old ones away whenever I buy a new one, but I feel like he’s always looking at me, right as I’m about to toss them in the trash, he’s thinking, “Come on Rob, you have an iPhone, you have the Internet. For me, it’s just these bones, and that’s it. You really want to throw them away?”

And I make it a point to just do it, because I can’t have these bones everywhere. It’s like, even when I think they’re all accounted for, there is always at least one or two hidden away where I’ll never be able to find them. Sometimes I think they’re so well hidden that even my dog loses track of where they are. And it’s like one day I’ll be looking for the remote or for my phone and I’ll lift up the couch to see if there’s any way that it’s maybe stuck deep between the cushions, and out falls a bone, sometimes right on my foot. I’ll go to throw it away but there he is again, he’s so happy to see this particular bone. Even though there’s no more liver-paste, it’s like he totally forgot about this bone.

It’s kind of like when you’re a little kid and your mom makes an effort to really clean out the downstairs closet. And you see that she’s putting your old Nerf gun into a black trash bag. Of course you haven’t played with it in years, but you also haven’t seen it forever. It’s been buried under all of your Lego sets and wrestling actions figures, you’re like, “Mom! Don’t throw that out, that’s such a cool Nerf gun!” and she’s like, “You never play with this stuff, come on, it’s just taking up space.” But you’re insistent, and you kind of even believe at some level that you’ll use it again, but you’re mistaking this nostalgia for a forgotten item with a feeling of genuine interest in a toy that … well, sure, go ahead, fire off a few rounds.

By tomorrow your mom’s going to be looking at this plastic piece of junk lying in the corner, saying stuff like, “See? I told you we should have thrown it out. Now it’s just another piece of clutter taking up visible space.” And so you pretend to play with it for a little while longer, just until she leaves the room, and then you bury it back under the Sit-n-Spin, somewhere you can’t see it. You don’t want to play with it, but you don’t want to face the idea that you’ll never be able to play with it again either.

And yeah, maybe things would have been different if you were a little kid today. But only if you were a kid and you had an iPhone. Would you have had an iPhone? I don’t know. Your mom wouldn’t buy you a Sega Genesis back then, she probably wouldn’t buy you an iPhone. You can just hear it now, “What does a little kid need an iPhone for?”

My dog doesn’t have an iPhone either, and I’m always wondering whether or not he’s secretly jealous, watching me spend so much time staring at my little screen. Why don’t they make iPhones for dogs? Something a little more durable, so he could chew on it while he’s not surfing the web, watching clips of the Puppy Bowl on YouTube, I’m just kind of throwing out dog-related Internet activities, I’m not sure exactly what he’d use an iPhone for, or if it would have the same user interface as human iPhones do.

But even if they did exist, am I really going to spend that much money on a piece of equipment that I’m not even really sure my dog would even enjoy? No, just let him have his bones. Sure, he’s figuring out how to get at that liver paste faster and faster each time, it’s like I can’t keep up with all of the empty bones lying around everywhere. And just last week, I woke up and came downstairs barefooted in my pajamas, my dog walked up to me, but I didn’t realize that he had a bone in his mouth. This one had to have been his biggest bone, and these things are heavy, sometimes too heavy for him to keep in his jaw. And I don’t know if he was just happy to see me, but he walked over with this thing in his mouth and dropped it right on my foot. It hurt so badly, a sharp pain that shot straight up my leg, like I could feel it in my shoulders.

And I wanted to round up all the bones right there and toss them in the trash. But then my iPhone made a buzz, like I got a message or an email, and my dog went over to the coffee table to investigate the sound. For a minute I thought, is he looking at the phone? Is he interested in text messages? At the very least, I thought he looked curious, and maybe he really does want one, and so I forgot all about my foot. I’ve got my technology, let the dog have his bones. So what if the place is a mess? What right do I have to take them away?

Beyond my wildest dreams

I want to paint my house bright green. Neon green. But just talking about it, I’ve already ruined it. This can’t be something planned. I just want to get up out of this chair, go to the Home Depot, have them mix me up a bunch of cans of the most fluorescent green anybody’s ever seen, and then I want to come home and start painting. I don’t want to have to ask my wife’s permission, or look up on the Internet how you’re supposed to go about painting a house, OK, I want this project done by the end of the day. I just want to take a wild impulse and run with it all the way to the end, straight off a neon green cliff.

OK, I want to take out a thousand dollars in cash, buy a bunch of sandwiches, hop on my bike and just start riding west. No, I won’t know where I’m going, OK, and I’m not bringing my cell phone either, so don’t think I’m going to wimp out once it starts getting dark out, looking for directions home, asking somebody to drive out and give me a ride back to town. No, no plans, nothing thought out. That’s what the thousand dollars is going to be for, I’ll have my money do all of the thinking for me. Like, where am I going to sleep? I don’t know, I’ll buy a really small tent, something I can put in my backpack, next to my sandwiches. I’ll camp out wherever. Just straight out west.

I want one of those long jobs at sea on a freighter, all right, and I don’t want to join any union or train for any certain position. No, I want to be right at the docks, I’ll already have the perfect seaman’s beard, I’ll have everything that I need, ready to go, the ship’s going to be ready to drift out of the port, I’m just going to hop on with the rest of the crew, right, I’ll blend right in. I’ll do like they do, swabbing the deck, I’ll jump in the kitchen at dinnertime and start chopping vegetables, making a nice stew for the crew. Maybe they’ll catch on eventually that I’m a stowaway, but by then I’ll have earned my spot. Sure, they’re not paying me anything, but by this point I’ll have a totally self-sufficient life, just sailing, eating, more swabbing the deck, a real marine life for me.

What I really want though is just to play a ton of video games. Like every time I go to a video game web site, all I hear about are all of these amazing games out, stuff I’ve never heard of, with fully immersive single-player stories, all backed up by massive online multiplayer fun. I don’t have enough time for video games. But that’s what I really want, nothing but time for XBOX and PlayStation. You’ll never find me in anything but pajamas. But it won’t be weird. Like when I order delivery from the diner, I won’t have to be ashamed to open the door looking like I haven’t been out of the house in weeks. I’ll just be like, “This is the best man, I am living the dream, all the time in the world to play all of the video games I want.” And the delivery guy is going to be like, “Yeah man, looks like you’ve really got it all.”

But that can’t be all there is to life. No, I’m still young enough to make something of myself physically. Wasn’t there a Disney movie about a guy in his fifties that became a rookie professional baseball player? I don’t know, all of those inspirational based-on-a-true-story movies kind of blend into each other after a while. But that’s what I’d really want to do with my life, if I could drop it all right now, I’d choose professional hockey player. Like, send me to hockey boot camp, get me hands-on training with the best hockey coaches in the world. I’ll give it my all, twenty-four seven, I’ll work like you’ve never seen anybody work before. I’m not looking to be a star, OK, but I’ve got to be of some value somewhere, a minor league franchise even, or somewhere in Russia. And then years from now they’ll make an inspirational Disney movie about me, and then an ice-capades meta-version of that movie.

I’m not asking for much out of life. Just the ability to dream. And then also the ability to wake up and make those dreams a reality. And I want them all, conflicting dreams, impulse dreams, I just want to do it, I just want somebody to give me all of these things. I want to be the first person to eat a thousand hot dogs in one sitting. You’ll see the Nathan’s Hot Dog championship scoreboard, it’ll be like 2012, some guy with 70. 2013, some other guy with 73. 2014, Rob G. with 1,000. 2015, some other guy with 75. And nobody’ll ever come close. I’ve just got to get out there and do it. I’m spending too much time sitting here writing about the life beyond my wildest dreams and not enough time actually making it happen. I’ve got to make it happen. All of it.