A Film by Spencer Ludwig

‘Why don’t you wait until we stop somewhere. We’ll need to stop somewhere for lunch and gasoline.’ ‘I want a…a…’

‘Pen?’

His father spreads his arms out wide in his ignominy, touching the window with his right hand, the gear stick with his left.

Pylons surround their road. Spencer manages to drive one-handed and take a photograph of a line of them. Spencer finds pylons magnificent.

‘There’s one in the glove compartment,’ Spencer says, and he returns his phone to its perch above the dashboard and reaches over to wave towards the glove compartment.

Rather ingeniously, Spencer’s father uses the glove compartment door as a writing desk. He concentrates hard on forming the words, puffing out his cheeks as he carefully writes, before signing it with a flourish. He examines what he has made and hands the cheque over to Spencer, who has to struggle to take it while passing a truck that has lumbered on to the road from a strip of low-slung no-tell motels. (Air-Conditioning In Every Room! Free HBO! Daily And Weekly Rates. Mirrored Rooms Available!)

Spencer interprets his father’s assiduousness in trying to pay his son’s expenses as a way to expressing who might still be in charge, and also, maybe, if he offers to pay this then he won’t have to pay more.

‘Thank you,’ Spencer says.

‘You’re welcome,’ his father says.

If he were to make this journey into a film, Spencer would resist the too-obvious irony of the self-professed Garden State being a jumble of pylons and factory chimneys and desperate stunted occasional trees trying to make their leafless lives between iron bridges and car parks. Instead he might chart the journey in its road signs, exits to Jersey City, the Holland Tunnel, Bayonne, Newark Airport, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Seaport, the Verazzano Bridge. Improbably and unpersuasively, a billboard, half hidden behind a gas tower, tries to inform them that they are in The Embroidery Capital Of The World! He doesn’t see any signs for Atlantic City, which worries him.

‘What was the scenery like when you were growing up?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The countryside. When you were a boy?’ ‘In Poland? It was beautiful.’

His father sometimes permits himself to become sentimental about his childhood. It is a tactic that Spencer allows himself on occasion, to question his father about his youth in Warsaw. While his father’s memory has grown unreliable about recent events, it is sure on the distant past. And sometimes he will talk about the taste of pickles in brine when he and his friend Benny broke into the cucumber factory at night, or the fresh buttered bagels you could buy on the innocently pre-War street—or not so innocent: his father could also tell stories about the gangs of Polish youths who roamed the streets, whose ideal recreation was to find Jews to beat up. His father, this wasting-away man, who was fastidious with his Italian suits and restaurant cutlery (even if every suit of clothes wore a reminder of the meal he had just eaten), who had made himself at home in law courts and yacht clubs, had taken to carrying a bicycle chain wherever he went. On at least one occasion he had used it, slashing iron across the face of a teenaged Pole, whose cap he had taken away as a souvenir. One victory among many defeats, he had told Spencer.

‘Did you go to the water ever?’

‘Sure,’ his father says. ‘The lakes. In summer.’

‘All of you?’

‘Me, my brother and my mother. And some cousins. We rented a house on the water.’

‘Not your father?’

‘He was working.’

A tradition that Spencer’s father’s father had probably inherited from his own father—pack off the family to the lakes for the summer, while he stayed in the city to swelter and work and pursue whatever recreations grass-widowed men find to occupy themselves. Spencer’s father had followed the same tradition—in the time that Spencer had lived with both his parents, all his holidays were taken with his mother, flying back to England to join the company of her married, unchilded, older sister in dusty guest houses on the South Coast, Hastings, Bournemouth, Weston-super-Mare. And Spencer followed it too: he had never understood the notion of a family holiday; even in the happiest times with Mary and her mother, he had always resisted summers in Walberswick and Tuscany.

Exit 11 offers them the Amboys, Shore Point and the Garden State Parkway, North and South.

‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, that’s where he lived, Perth Amboy,’ Spencer says.

‘Left!’ says his father.

‘You remember? Danny Kaye was in it.’

‘Left! Left!’ wails his father.

‘You used to like Danny Kaye. You remember him?’ ‘For crying out loud!’

And his father grinds his dentures and reaches to grab for the wheel, and Spencer accepts the situation is an urgent one.

‘Oh. I get it. The Parkway? Which direction?’

‘North, sure. Why not? The same way we came,’ his father says, gaining articulacy through derision.

Spencer twists the wheel to the right, a triumph of bravado and fear, forces the Cadillac across the bows of an aged Toyota pick-up, and steers-veers the car into the exit lane.

He quietens his heart as he pays the toll to get on to the Garden State Parkway.

‘I need a leak,’ his father says.

All the rest stops, or at least the two that Spencer misses, timid again at the wheel of his father’s car, unwilling or unable to force a way through the traffic to get to the exit lane, are named for US presidents. He drives past, to his father’s woe, the Jefferson rest stop and then the Reagan.

‘I need a fucking leak! Why are you so dawdle?!’

Spencer eases the car into the slow lane, hunkers over the wheel; he is not going to miss the next exit.

Pulling, finally, into the car park of the pleasingly named Cheesequake Service Area rest stop, Spencer has hardly brought the car to a halt when his father has opened the passenger door and is already setting off for the journey across the tarmac past pick-up trucks and sedans, dragging his oxygen cylinder behind him. Spencer hurriedly secures the car and catches up with his father, who is walking at an impressive pace, arms behind his back, his right hand clutching his withered left wrist, his head down, chin to chest, his eyes glancing up from time to time to check on his direction. Spencer takes hold of the cylinder, opens the door to the rest stop.

‘Do you think there was a President Cheesequake? I don’t remember him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just trying to take your mind off your bladder.’

His father moves faster and shakes him off at the men’s-room door. Spencer hooks the oxygen cylinder over his father’s arm and waits for him in the corridor outside.

He looks at the cheque for the first time. The figure matches the correctly spelled words, which doesn’t always happen in the accounting system of his father’s decline. Except: his father has made the amount out for six thousand dollars instead of six hundred.

‘It’s too much,’ he says, showing the cheque to his father upon his unsteady return from the men’s room.

Spencer tries to return the cheque but his father waves it away. He rests for a moment, to gather strength, on the plastic saddle of a mechanical horse that would cost fifty cents to gently rock a child into amusement, before he dourly gets on with the business of wavering towards the café area.

‘Very generous, thank you,’ Spencer says.

He quickly folds the cheque away, as if there were something shameful about it, into the breast pocket of his jacket. Maybe he will keep it as a souvenir, the ironic symbol of the near-possibility of parental help.

Jimmy Ludwig ignores the woman who offers to steer him towards a table. He finds one himself, lowers himself bumpily into a chair and rests his arms expectantly on the Formica tabletop.

‘OK. Let’s go to work.’

‘The backgammon? I left it in the car.’

His father purses his lips. His son has disappointed him, again.