The car. The one with the personalized license plate. Metallic blue and shining like a Tony award he gave himself for best performance in a sexist role. Under the driver’s seat, its sheepskin cover worn by his girth, was a box of condoms and the Hooked on Phonics book you gave him for Xmas in the late eighties. The tint he applied himself was peeling from the windows like black fruit roll ups. Like the tight jeans he wears to show off his package.
The interior was the color of weak coffee at highway rest stops. The dashboard a fake hard wood with plenty of veneer and a Puerto Rican rum shine. Every Sunday after he Windexed the seats and the windshield, he’d replace the pine tree freshener hanging from the rear view mirror. Got so stinkin’ woodsy, you felt like a fucking forest ranger.
Like many men who think loud is masculine, Vernon installed a stereo system that little kids who want to be rock and roll roadies dream about during math class, or detention. Probably detention. He'd to park down by the river on hot days blaring eighties glam rock riffs, stroking his air guitar while you feigned interest.
Occasionally, when the stars aligned, usually after a hand release or a blowjob, Vernon would let you shift gears while he worked the pedals and checked himself out in the rear view mirror. Making sure his ink black hair was parted the right way, and clearing his teeth of any nicotine filaments that snuck through his camel non-filters. You’d always tell him he might as well put his mouth around the smokestack at the local wire mill. He'd shrug his shoulders, as if it wasn't the worst idea you'd ever had, but then admit "it wouldn’t fit.” He did, after all, have an unusually small mouth. About the size of a regulation ping pong ball when wide open.
This never bothered you much. Vernon somehow managed to chew with his mouth closed, sing your favorite John Mellencamp songs at Karaoke on Tuesday nights, and was a decent enough kisser. It was his nose you wished would get recalled by someone at the factory who realized the hazards of that particular model. You were always afraid he’d poke your eye out with its sharp right angle. But you also sort of envied its obvious power. Those weren’t nostrils. They were Lincoln Tunnels, finger holes in a size 15 bowling ball. You imagined this kind of vacuum advantage afforded Vernon more pleasure and more disgust with the world, simultaneously.
You’d constantly tell him if nothing else panned out, he could get a job at the Denver Airport sniffing for narcotics. To that he’d say he "didn’t want to have to arrest any your family members.” Which, for Vernon, was a pretty good comeback. Given his intellect and the fact that your father and uncle both had arrest records that included possession with intent to sell.
It wasn’t Vernon's nose, or his marginal smarts that gave you the static cling attachment to him. It wasn’t his hockey teeth or his Smurfy build. But rather, three things: his eyes (which would then make four things on account of there being two), his butt (which sort of also has two parts), and his “can’t everything just be okay” attitude.
Because what you had come to realize, is that everything is very rarely okay. It’s not okay when your dad drives his car into the school cafeteria cause he’s late and drunk for a PTA dinner. It's not okay when the Good Humor man sticks his hard-on through the clown mouth trash hole and tells you to "have a lick." It’s not okay when the president of the “United States” really is a crook. And under the definition of "okay" you won’t find the story of your mom burning the neighbor’s house down. Somehow though, Vernon Wingfield managed to make everything okay for you. At least in the beginning.
In the beginning he dazzled your Catholic ways with his belligerence and contempt for the law. He stole you magazines and Fruit Stripe from the supermarket and tried to lift your skirt in the baseball dugout while you chewed the gum like cud.
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