Lights in the Lincoln

Personally, I love a foreign model

image via curbsideclassic.com

My dad had/has a real thing for Lincolns. I don’t know if I’ve seen him drive anything else. He might’ve had a truck recently, before he went blind and couldn’t drive. But it was not “him.” Unlike so many of the men I grew up with in Oklahoma and Texas, Burl was never a truck guy.

“He drives a 1960 Lincoln Continental,” he would say to identify a man as a success. I don’t know if it was the best American made car during his youth, or if he knew someone he wished he could emulate, but the man was myopic when it came to many things: blondes, cuts of beef, and Lincolns.

My brother and I spent a lot of time in the back seat of my dad’s various Lincolns, and I have specific soundtracks to go with those long haul rides. One summer he decided to run for District Attorney and we criss-crossed Southern Oklahoma, wearing t-shirts saying “Vote for My Daddy” and listening to Billy Joel’s The Stranger on 8-track. I remember coolers with sandwiches and sodas in the trunk. It was the summer of Fresca as my stepmother was drove the Lincoln for hours while cheerleading my father’s doomed candidacy. Given he had always worked on the other side, as a defense lawyer, his loss wasn’t surprising. But if you ask him, he’ll tell you he won and not only that, he served and can get you out of anything from a speeding ticket to a manslaughter charge.

Another summer we drove from Oklahoma to Virginia Beach to visit his sister, my Aunt Peggy, and my uncle and cousins. The 8-track on repeat then was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and I became obsessed with “The Chain.” My older cousin, Christa, also played the album, and so it was instantly and forever cool.

But mostly we were in the back seat of the Lincoln as it raced to get us back to school on Monday mornings after my dad had kept us past our return time on Sundays. By the time he had left El Paso and was living a little bit closer to us in Dallas, or Tishamingo, or Sulphur, we didn’t fly back and forth but would be picked up and dropped off for weekend visits. I much preferred the precision of Southwest Airlines.

I tried to summon up a memory of my father driving me around in one of his beloved Lincolns and I could not. Not much of a driver, whether due to intoxication or his love of being chauffeured around, my dad was rarely in the driver’s seat. Sometimes my stepmother drove us, sometimes a random “associate” did while he sat in the passenger seat spinning yarns and giving detailed directions to whomever was behind the wheel. His need for veneration being as strong as his need for being under the influence meant my father wasn’t usually the back of the neck I was staring at, willing the person behind the wheel to drive fast enough so I wouldn’t be late, again.

Those frantic Mondays are the reason I have a phobia of being late today, I’m sure of it. While I think my own kids would react to missing a morning, or a even a day of school with an enthusiastic, “Whoo-hoo!” I did not. When you don’t know if you’re going to make it home at all, and you wonder how your mother will ever know what happened to you, it hits different, as my kids would also say. I remember praying that stop lights would turn green faster, and the gas tank would be full, so there wouldn’t be any unnecessary station stops. Would we have to stop to get the driver coffee? To drop off drugs? If that one time we stopped at a ratty, damp, apartment with brown shag carpet that reeked of cigarettes, where everyone was holding a firearm at my dad until he placed a package on the table, yeah, if that place was any indication, dropping off drugs. Seconds seemed to matter when I had no idea if I would live to see a math class I hated. And oh my god, I hated math. (The one benefit of leaving my dad’s house on a Monday morning though, was culinary. My stepmother could make a mean lunch out of the high end groceries my father insisted upon, and my mother could not afford. Maybe we can unpack my love of expensive food in another post.)

The last time I saw the Lincoln though, my dad was driving. Or rather, sitting in the driver’s seat, door propped open, overhead light on. At that point my stepmother and most of his associates, or co-defendants as I didn’t realize they were being called at that time, had taken off. When I wandered outside of the high school that night and saw him sitting in the front seat I couldn’t see what he was doing. And years later I can only speculate. That was the night of my older brother’s high school graduation, and the last time I would see my dad for many years, until we visited him in prison almost six years later.

I don’t remember why I had found myself behind the school, while everyone was still in the gym where the graduation had just taken place. It’s possible I was looking for the Coke machine nearby. Or putting away my clarinet in the band room after having performed the graduation march alongside the rest of the high school band. Either way, I found myself drawn to the lights and so I watched my father from a distance. It was weird that he was there by himself. My father was never without a lady on his arm and it felt wrong. Whether due to the weirdness of seeing him alone, or the fact that he had already said goodbye to us, I didn’t go over.

That summer there was no visiting. I’m sure I had booked as many summer camps as I was able to (I was partial to my friend’s Catholic camp because there was dancing, but would also dip into the Baptists, the Methodists, the 4-Hers, all of them), but had not heard from my father at all. Before school began, we all discovered why I had not been called to visit my dad.

My mother was devastated that my father’s arrest, and trial, were all being covered in The Daily Oklahoman, the Oklahoma City newspaper that served most of the state. I don’t remember if I was embarrassed because truthfully, I was relieved to not have to go visit any more. It was the first time, but absolutely not the last, that a tragedy upended my life and I felt relief, instead of or alongside the pain of the event. Again, another post for another time, perhaps.

There was an enormous burden lifted with the announcement that my father would be tied up in court, and then later, imprisoned and so I did not have to sit in the back of the Lincoln anymore, hoping I would get home. Instead, that night was the last time I would be beholden to it, and to my father, for a very long time. No wonder I didn’t want to go too near, for fear I would be tossed in the back and driven away for who knows how long. I do wonder if someone drove him in the Lincoln straight to jail, not passing go. He probably would have liked that.