8

JIM  WRIGHT  VENTURES  INTO  THE  GALAXY

          Early in our marriage, my wife Eddie and I were blessed with three children. Two were lovely little girls, Marsha and Sharon.  Neither of them ever got jailed by an Arkansas sheriff, made a Congressman wish he were dead, or touched off panic aboard a U.S. Navy warship at sea.  And then there was our son, Charles.

            Don’t get me wrong.  I couldn’t be prouder of Charles.  Today he is a skilled carpenter and respected church and community leader.  Several times a week, even after an exhausting day of work, he serves as a nighttime volunteer driver for the local Emergency Medical Service.  A year or so ago, a woman bought a big newspaper ad to publicly thank him for saving her life.  Charles and his devoted family live in a house they themselves built with their own hands, plank by plank, beside the shimmering Frio River in a little hamlet in the Texas Hill Country.  Their home is so full of love and warmth and serenity I suspect that the guardian angel currently assigned to Charles must be a calmer, more sedate replacement for the madcap, frolicsome spirit who sat on his shoulder in his youth.

            I’m not saying, mind you, that Charles was a bad boy.  It wasn’t a question of malice.  It was just that he was adventurous by nature and, in his youth, had the judgment of a turnip.  Wherever he went, pandemonium erupted.  Whatever he did, chaos ensued.  Once while scrounging along the shore of the Potomac River above Washington, he nailed together a few waterlogged boards as a raft.  Then he pushed off, alone, down the sprawling, turbulent river.  As he was exulting over his voyage  past Georgetown and the Kennedy Center, the churning current tore apart the pitiful little raft.  Charles managed to cling to a plank and somehow reached shore.  His misadventures on dry ground were equally hairy.

            When he got a job as a construction helper on a high-rise apartment project in Virginia, several floors of the building collapsed.  Charles didn’t cause it, of course, except perhaps by his mere presence in the same neighborhood.  After those episodes, in what his mother and I naively thought was a positive development,  Charles turned his attention to automobiles.

            Hoping he had inherited the superb nuts-and-bolts mechanical craftsmanship of his grandfathers, we bought Charles a second-hand Ford van to tinker with.  After poking around under the hood and in the mysterious, oily recesses under the chassis, he concluded that the vehicle needed a number of replacement parts.   Within a week he scrounged up a similar model van that had been virtually demolished in an accident.  With the help of a few young friends, Charles managed to tow this greasy, weather-beaten hulk into the spotless concrete driveway we shared with our next-door neighbor in the prim suburban neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. 

            Then, for more convenience in scavenging replacement parts from the wreck’s grimy underside, Charles and his cohorts turned it upside down.  From its long-deceased engine, syrupy black sludge oozed down our pristine driveway.  These acts had what the State Department would describe as a destabilizing influence on our relationship with the neighbors.  They seemed to feel that the wrecked, overturned van perhaps would be better suited to a location in a far corner of  Joe’s Junkyard than to our scrupulously neat, well-manicured neighborhood.  Some nearby residents took their concerns to such worthies as the police and the zoning authorities.  But our closest neighbor, a gentlemanly old fellow who loved our kids, suffered in anguished silence.  Only years later did he admit his distress at having the cannibalized van, its rotting tires jutting skyward like a piteous plea for mercy, adorning our driveway.  “I just bit my lip,” he said.

            Later, when my own beloved conveyance, a 1960 Mustang, developed peculiar rumblings in the transmission, my wife admitted under questioning that Charles had sneaked it out several times to participate in drag races.   And once, just before leaving with another teenager to drive his van to Texas, Charles emphatically assured me three times to me that, yes,  he had his driver’s license securely in his pocket.  “Don’t you trust me, Dad?” he protested.

             Several days later, in my office in the Capitol, I received a call from the sheriff in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.  Did I know Charles L. Lynam?  He was under arrest for driving without a license.  It took three hours on the telephone to spring him from the Arkadelphia stir by getting Virginia authorities to wire confirmation that yes, somewhere on earth, there did indeed exist a valid driver’s license bearing the name of Charles L. Lynam.  In light of all these episodes, Eddie and I surely should have known better than to give Charles our old 1962 Ford Galaxy.

            But the old car had seen its best days, and since we were planning to get a new car, we figured, once again, Charles would enjoy tinkering with it.  We were right.  Only a few days after we gave him possession of the Galaxy, I came home to discover he had removed its seats--all its seats.  Where the driver’s seat had been, our son had placed a wooden box.

            If you’ve never seen a car whose complete interior has been replaced by a box retrieved from the trash bin behind the Safeway store,  it’s an eerie sensation. Charles couldn’t understand why I was so perturbed.

            “Are you out of your mind?” I demanded.  “Why on earth would you do such an idiotic thing?”

            “Oh, it’ll be all right, Dad,” he said.  “I’m going to put in a new interior.  You’ll like it.  You’ll see.”

            But, just as I expected, four weeks later the interior of the Galaxy was still untouched and bare, except for a few wisps of shredded upholstery dangling like crazed stalactites from the ceiling.  The new interior Charles had blithely promised consisted of a tattered stadium cushion on top of the driver’s steering box.  The neighbors snickered, but that wasn’t the worst part.  The worst part was the next Saturday afternoon when the phone rang.

            “Marshall, this is Jim,” came the Congressman’s voice.  “I just landed here at Dulles, and I can’t reach anybody at my house.  Can you run out here and pick me up?” 

            “Sure,” I said confidently.  And then, only after hanging up, did I remember that my Mustang was in the garage for a brake job.  It wouldn’t be ready until Monday.  Our new car wouldn’t be delivered for a week.  I thought about borrowing a car, but knowing that our neighbors had seen the results of Charles’s handiwork on our Galaxy, I decided not to ask.  I could have rented a car, but that would have taken an hour or so.  Jim Wright was a man not celebrated for his patience, and he was waiting at the airport.  I could visualize him, restlessly drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair and casting anxious glances at his watch.  I turned on Charles like a tiger.

            “Now what am I supposed to do?” I hissed.  “Jim Wright is expecting me to pick him up at Dulles, and thanks to you, I don’t have a car.”

            “Oh, you can take the Galaxy, Dad,” Charles said reassuringly.

            “Sure,” I bellowed.  “I’ll just drive out there and say, ‘Hop in, Congressman.  There’s no seats, but I’m sure you won’t mind sitting on the floor.”

            “I can put seats in, Dad.”

            “Don’t give me that stuff.  It would take you a week to put those seats back in--if you could do it at all.”

            Clearly unintimidated, Charles looked at me evenly.  “I’m telling you I can put some seats in the car.”

            I didn’t really believe it, but I had no choice.

            “Give me 10 minutes,” he said.

            I’m glad I didn’t watch what happened next.  Apparently our resourceful son  went down to the basement and uncovered a massive overstuffed chair which Eddie had long since ordered out of our living room.  Somehow he wrestled this monstrous piece of furniture out the back door and into the Galaxy, placing it squarely in the center of the car’s devastated interior.

            “Now, for you, I’ll get a straight-back chair out of the kitchen,” he said.

            “Never mind,” I growled, glancing anxiously at my watch.  “I’ll sit on your damned box.”

            When I found Jim Wright in the Dulles waiting room, I tried to prepare him. 

            “I want to apologize for the car I’m driving today.  It’s the only one I could get on short notice, and I’m not sure you’re even going to want to ride in it.”

            “I’m sure it’ll be all right.  I’ve ridden in your Mustang before.”

            “That’s the problem.  My Mustang’s in the shop.  I had to come in our old Galaxy.”

            “What’s wrong with that?”

            “It really doesn’t look so good.”           

            “Don’t be silly, Marshall,” he said.  “You know I don’t stand on formality.  Besides, I’m in kind of a hurry.  I’ve got to pick up some reports from my desk down at the Capitol.”

            “You’re going to the Capitol?” I asked weakly.

            “Got to,” he said, picking up his suitcase. 

            Now  I really had a problem.  It had been my plan to sneak him along some remote route to his home in suburban Virginia.  Now he needed to go directly to the Capitol--a trip which would expose my increasingly well-known Congressional leader to public guffaws along one of the busiest routes in Washington--along the George Washington Parkway and across the 14th Street Bridge to the Southwest Freeway.  I wanted to throw up.

            When I opened the door to the car, Jim Wright glanced inside and then turned to me as if to say something, but didn’t.  As resigned as a person climbing into a dentist’s chair for a root canal, he stepped inside the Galaxy and eased himself gingerly into the mammoth chair.  Still he said nothing.

            At this point I had no idea what to say, but I felt compelled to say at least something.  Finally, knowing that he had a son about Charles’s age, I tried to pass off the chair as merely one of the indignities that fathers must suffer.

            “Charles is going to put in a new interior,” I said.

            “I see,” he said.

            On the drive back to town, I kept as far as possible from other traffic.  But as cars passed us, it was obvious that my fears were well grounded.  People’s  reactions came in two separate and distinct stages.  At their first glance in our direction, they looked startled--clearly unprepared to see a faded 1962 Galaxy, its passenger compartment bare except for random strips of ceiling upholstery gently undulating over a sickly green chair almost the size of a throne. 

            More surprising still, passersby could see, immersed in this monstrous chair’s billowy cushions, a rather distinguished, bushy-browed man in a nattily tailored suit, staring grim and unblinking at the highway straight ahead.  Some of them surely recognized him as someone seen occasionally on the 7 o’clock news.  I took comfort in the hope than they could not remember his name. 

            After their initial shock, people in passing cars would go into a second stage of reaction.  Now  certain what they actually were seeing, they burst into convulsions of laughter, pounding their steering wheels and dashboards in wild exhibitions of glee.  In their mirth, some honked and waved, particularly as we negotiated the crowded 14th Street Bridge.  Somber and unblinking, Jim Wright stared relentlessly at the road ahead, hoping,  I suppose, that by sheer will power, he could shorten it.        

            After years of dealing with members of Congress, staffers and constituents on the Hill, I felt pretty smug about being able to discern people’s true feelings.  Even if a fellow were saying one thing, there were often subtle signs he actually felt quite differently.  Now, as I drove toward the Capitol, I glanced in the rearview mirror.  Sure enough, my skills allowed me to read Jim Wright’s expression very clearly.  It said:  I wish I were dead.

            Actually, I suppose, we were pretty lucky that there were no lives lost that day.  Since people in passing cars were already in virtually uncontrollable spasms of glee at the scene in the Galaxy, it’s a good thing they couldn’t see the rest of the car’s interior.  If they had seen, for example, that the driver’s seat consisted of a Safeway box, they might have lost control of their vehicles, with possibly fatal results.

            The trip finally ended in the most secluded parking spot I could find at the Capitol.  If Jim Wright minded my letting him off some distance from where his colleagues were likely to be, he didn’t complain.  

            Never in all the years since then has Jim Wright ever given any hint that he remembers that awful day.  Even though I am sure he has tried to put the episode out of his mind, I suspect it may have been a factor in his decision to run for Majority Leader.  The Majority Leader of the United State House of Representatives is, of course,  provided with a driver and own government car--one whose interior has been professionally installed.  

            But however chaotic that trip from Dulles, it stands as a paragon of orderliness compared to the day the United States Navy happened to put Charles in control an 8,000-ton warship in one of America’s busiest waterways.  I’ll tell you about it in the next chapter.