saving my car and calling my grandpa
because relationships need tune ups too
Hi and welcome to Both Are True, a newsletter of “funny, deep, relatable stories from a dad to two, husband to one, friend to all (except himself who he doesn't like v much but is working on it but like how can you really like yourself knowing everything you know about yourself, you know?)” (I wrote that but it looks better when you put it in quotes).
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— Making the momentus decision to homeschool, the new fatherhood
Last week's piece started with a quick obituary of my gone-too-soon 2009 Prius, Onyx.
They hated you for how wacky you were, Onyx, and I’ll never forgive them.
I loved how many of y'all responded with stories of the weird ways you kept your old as shit cars going, especially this one from Ian:
Sam! A pitchfork! A large cookpot!
Anyways, it’s Onyx-week here at BAT, so I want to share a piece I originally wrote in October of 2022 about the then thriving Onyx, my still thriving grandpa Alik, and the strange realities of how moving to the US from Ukraine when I was seven years old made the people closest to me feel the most foreign.
Because of how time works, I only have one child in this essay. And I still live in Los Angeles. Do not be alarmed, that’s just classic time stuff.
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my grandpa, my car, and also me
On the 10th of February of the year 2022 at 2:30pm Pacific Standard Time, something is wrong.
I’m driving home on the phone with my dad who is not so subtly suggesting that I need to call my grandpa Alik: Alik is lonely in Milwaukee, why not just give him a call, it will take two minutes, what, you don’t have two minutes?
I want to explain that of course I have two minutes and I DO try to call, but often it feels like there’s nothing to talk about. Even if by some Soviet chudo (russian for miracle), my Russian speaking skills magically evolved from that of a first grader who hates school into a top Russian scholar, even then I would never be able to really explain how I’m doing.
There’s simply no way to explain “Hi just launched paid subscriptions on my substack so people can pay if they want to but they don't have to all the content I put out is still free and its going really well but I actually don't look at the numbers anymore because I was looking at them too much and it was making me depressed which, combined with my ocd and adhd, is a real dumper of a mental health trio."
Also, why can’t he call me!? I’m busy with shit and he’s…we’ll, he’s not doing a lot so…?
I can’t explain this all to my dad - he, along with Alik and the rest of my fam, live on one side of an invisible Berlin Wall that separates me, the English speaking American boy bred amidst democracy from them, the Russian speaking, Soviet family raised inside a failed Communist / Socialist regime.
As I’ve written about several times now, the gift my parents gave me by moving to America when I was seven was the inability to understand them.
So instead of arguing I just say, aspiring, “okay yea I’ll call him,” hang up, and drive on, wondering what rifts will soon exist between me and my ten month old baby son Wilder who, at this moment sits in the backseat, yawning dramatically, like jeez dude we get it, so I turn up the 88.5 K-Jazz to keep him awake before his afternoon nap.
But something is wrong. We are 0.2 miles from home when my 2009 Prius - color Onyx, name also Onyx - begins to sputter, then stutter, and finally putter, inching forward on fumes and fumes alone.
I push the gas, but nothing happens - Onyx does not go, so I scream “don’t you die on me you son of a bitch” (onlookers dispute this), and push the gas again, but still, nothing. We’ve got a little forward momentum drifting us forward, but will it be enough to get us home? I do not know. Slowly we make it to the right turn onto my street, going further still and, in a miracle the likes of which this world has not seen since the Chanukah oil lasting eight full days - Onyx makes it all the way up to the tip of my driveway and then, finally, he dies. Close, but there is no cigar.
I’m a visual person, so here’s a hyper realistic drawing of the scene. Do not be fooled, this is NOT a photograph.
After handing the blissfully unawares baby, still babbling to himself as if life is one giant jar of marmalade, to our babysitter, I approach Onyx, his ass out for the whole neighborhood to see1.
Then I try to give Onyx car CPR aka CCPR: ignite, damn it! Nothing.
He is no longer pro or against, he is N for neutral, which is also the only gear he’ll go into.
Luckily for us, my attitude is staying P for Positive because I know exactly what to do. Having been raised on a healthy diet of 90s sitcoms + rom-coms from the early aughts, I am of the firm belief that it’s super easy to push a real life car made of real life metal with my tiny little 155 pound human body! Sure there’s grunting and an absolutely classic 1,2,3, PUSH countdown, but the hero always gets it done, right?
NO not fucking right, very wrong actually. Believe it or not, pushing a car is HARD. Cars are HEAVY.
Within minutes, I’m drenched in sweat, pushing and heaving and grunting, all to no avail. I consider giving up, letting Onyx trample me and ending this charade as my son watches on, through the front window, uttering his first words “dang, dad really sucks.” But then I hear a voice.
“Hey man, you need help?”
Squinting through salty beads of sweat, I see a blob. Backlit by the sun, the blob approaches and morphs into a man - mid twenties with jet black hair, he says his name is Mosh, though to me, he is Jesus.
Jesus, ladies and gentlemen, has finally taken the wheel.
Well, sort of. MoshJesus (MJ) looks down at his sandal clad feet and goes “ah man I need shoes.”
I try to tell him that actually I’m pretty sure sandals are actually a big part of the OG JC’s brand, but I’m Jewish and he, well he’s MJC, so I say nothing and watch him go.
I wish I could say that right there, red pilled on the fragility of life, staring down the death of my car and best friend Onyx, I pick up the phone, tears and alsos sweat streaming down my face, and call Alik. I’d say everything I’ve ever wanted to say but couldn’t before, and so would he - we’d finally connect.
But much like the film Cars, that is an animated fantasy. And this? This is life, so I just sort of stand there, sweating and praying and crying (my big 3!) until MJC returns with some dope, very on-brand all white Nike’s.
I look to MJC and say (with my eyes): “hey remember the whole one-set-of-footprints-in-the-sand thing, when your dad (God) carried whoever wrote the ? this is that moment. Carry me.”
And he looks back and says “ready?” because I’ve said nothing and he cannot speak ‘eye,’ so I say “let’s do it “ and without even a 3,2,1 countdown (!), we push and push and push and I think, “man, I finally understand the pain of childbirth and feel as though I have gone through it myself, a fact that I am excited to soon share with the mother of my child!”
Then I black out.
I come to a few seconds later to find that, praise MJC, we did it: Onyx is in the driveway. MoshJesus walks on, ready to save the next soul, as I stand there, sweaty and near death myself, glad that at least Onyx died peacefully, in his own home.
The next morning I call my far away parents in a far away land (Rhode Island) and tell them what happened. They respond, calm as two cucumbers, “you have a cousin in LA named Lenia who runs a car repair shop called Citizen Collision that just so happens to specialize in priuses.”
I have lived in LA for 10 years. this is the first time I’ve heard about Len and his shop. The lord, father of MoshJesus, works in mysterious ways.
I get my ‘friends’ at triple A (AAA) to tow Onyx to my ‘family’ at Citizen Collision (CC). Then I pray.
Who is Alik really?
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