“I did something right outta your bag of tricks,” Joe announced.
“I got a bag of tricks?”
“Yeah, ya do.”
“So what did ya do?”
“You know that Model A guy Warren?”
“Sure, is he looking for help with bodywork and you said you’d do it as a favor?”
“You’re the favors guy; if I fix a fender on somebody’s A I’m getting paid.”
“You said you did something out of my bag of tricks.”
“Yeah not that trick. Different one. I started a club with him.”
“A club? Whattaya mean?” John was more interested; this was real news. Joe might join a club, but start one?
“It’s for A guys, like him and us. You know where to find everything, I can do the body work and paint, but remember that bearing problem yours had last spring? We had to ask around for a couple weeks to find that guy Leon who knew about it.”
“Yeah…”
“Warren’s A has some damn screwball spark problem, and he’s been trying to find somebody who knows about it. He was over at the barn Tuesday and said if everybody was just in a club, on a list, it wouldn’t take so long to find the right guy at the right time. You’d get so ya know all those guys already when ya need some help.”
“Warren said that?”
“Yeah, an’ I said it was a good idea and let’s start a club. So we did, right then. That was the first meeting.”
“When’s the next one?”
“Yeah, well, dunno about that yet. But you know those junk office machines ya got in your basement?”
“The Addressograph stuff from work? Those are all the old units; they get replaced and just junked. I grab the ones that aren’t too bad.”
“They still work?”
“Yeah they work. I can keep ‘em working.
“So if we get a list of names and addresses together, you can stamp the addresses on envelopes? So we don’t have to write ‘em all out?”
“That’s what they do. I even just got the nameplate embosser; it’s the old manual one but it works fine. See, it’s like a typewriter that uses these little aluminum plates…”
“That’s great, write down all the A guys you know and we’ll put our lists together and send ‘em all a notice.”
—
One of the things John held close to his heart was helping friends. He might even have taken it a little too far sometimes; he’d go out of his way — sometimes far out of his way — to help fix somebody’s car or shovel out their driveway after a New England snowstorm.
He didn’t have a lot of money, but was good at finding clever, less expensive alternatives. He couldn’t afford one of the big snowblowers, but he found a small ‘power shovel’ that was light and small enough to carry in the car when there was a snowfall — over to his parents’ house to help shovel them out, and even to help the neighbors.
Sometimes seeing himself as not quite the equal of the folks he knew, or met, affected his family. Liz picked up on it, and since she often felt that way herself, they amplified each other. One day Jimmy, for some reason, got into some sort of argument or fight with Paul, the kid from across the street. Paul started hitting Jimmy with…something. Jimmy felt like he was being whipped, and he flailed blindly with his hands out just to get it to stop. He happened to hit Paul, mostly by accident, and ended up bloodying his nose. Paul freaked out, “Aah! Blood!” and ran home. Jimmy didn’t see what the big deal was; why get upset about blood? And anyway, he’d just been defending himself. he went in the house where his mom had promised him a trip to the shoestore for a new pair of sneakers. Probably not the ones he really wanted, that he’d seen on TV, but he was looking forward to it anyway.
But Paul’s mother must have called, so the trip to the shoe store never happened. Instead they went shopping to buy a special gift for Paul, which Jimmy had to present to him in Paul’s own house. It was humiliating, somehow. Nobody ever asked Jimmy for his side of the story. And he never got those sneakers. But he learned that nobody was going to be on your side. Nobody was going to care enough to ask you what happened. Nobody was watching your back. Ever.
Later in life, when Jimmy was grown and had a family of his own, he occasionally tried to stand up for his children or his wife — only to be shocked when they turned against him. It really was true; nobody was going to be on your side. Nobody was going to care enough to ask you what happened. it was another step in the lesson he’d been learning his whole life: the people around you would tolerate you, but only as long as you behaved the way they wanted you to. It was all very conditional.
And seeing in himself the same doubt about his own worth that he saw in John, he found himself working hard to stay in the good graces of the people he lived with, who depended on him for everything, and yet who he felt only tolerated him as long as he didn’t step outside the lines they’d drawn for him, but that he could only guess at.
