White Knuckle Ride
by Ronnie Smith
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A few strong ones.
Description: A student goes to his summer vacation job with his father and begins the long process of acceptance.
_____________________________________________________________________
In mid-Spring the sun is already warm in the East, even early in the day. The sparrows are arguing frantically in their hedge-row nests, the dogs are patrolling their borders sniffing for night-time intruders and the cats… well they are looking for sunny spots in which to begin their lounging. Except for the rough boys noisily delivering milk, the human race is well behind the animal kingdom on this and every other morning.
It's seven thirty five and I think, no I know, we are late but my dad always cuts things fine; living on the edge every day, barging with elbows out, testing himself against everyone else and the clock, looking for more ways to prove that he is still on top. Always on my shoulder, always counting, always…waiting for the slip-up. He knows he will get us to work on time, bang on time but bang on time is too stressful for me. I liked it better when he worked up north, hundreds of miles away. Unseen and unheard for one peaceful and stress-free month, then another and then another.
In those days I got a lift to work from a more civilised crew who enjoy humorous conversation, are not tightly wired and prefer to arrive twenty minutes early with plenty time for coffee and a fag and without permanent psychological damage. My Dad and I have different metabolic rates and that medical fact seems to lie at the heart of the many things that create a lot of friction between us.
I love soft packs and I didn’t know you could get them here when I started smoking. Guys like Sonny Crockett in the early Miami Vice episodes had them but they weren’t for the likes of me, this is Ayrshire not the steaming flesh pots of South Florida.
Then I found a regular supply in the classic wood-panelled tobacconists in the main street, with its powerful aromas and lean smiling owner in his pale blue cardigan.
One of the unexpected bonuses of growing up, a beautiful shop that I had only passed by when I was small, exotic and full of the promises of other hemispheres; islands off the coast of Africa or the depths of India or South America. The same promises hinted at by my mother’s stamp collection when I used to pour over all its pages as a small boy, the stamps resting on their sticky hinges like dead butterflies in a lepidopterist’s glass case. I sometimes go to the tobacconists now just to smell the rest of the world. They don’t have the stubby, smelly, white Gauloise that I smoke at university, just as well as they would really piss my Dad off, but they do have Marlboro soft packs for cool guys.
Gauloise are, of course, the coolest and the tastiest fags on earth but where I live people think you are a poof if you smoke them. I understand perfectly why the guy doesn’t stock them when there is such an obvious lack of demand. The ‘big’ city and its universities provides an agglomeration of cool guys from smaller towns where there are only a few of us in any single school year. The commercial limitations are obvious.
Since my last birthday I get to light my fags with the Zippo lighter my Gran gave me. I’m still amazed by that, the best present I’ve had since the beginning of the pyjamas, hankies and socks era, given to me by an old woman in her seventies. She ought to be telling me to stop smoking before it really gets a hold but she has always been the one who listens and smiles and whose eyes sparkle. There are very few people like that around.
‘Still on that Camel shite!?’ He manages a smile, now that he is out of the house. A smile to himself accompanied by a shake of the head. And so we begin the daily joust.
‘Yes Dad, I like the taste and the way the paper burns and makes that fizzing sound.’
‘Fucksake!’ He mimicked me, ‘The way the paper burns…’ How many are you on a day?’
‘Dunne, maybe 10 or 15.’
‘Fucksake! You’ll never be a real smoker, you’re just poncin aboot. As usual.’
One day I’ll ask him what a ‘real smoker’ is but I don’t think I’ll like the answer as the inevitable conclusion will be that I’m a ‘fuckin pansy’ because I’m not measuring up to his set of masculine criteria. Anyway, ‘real smokers’ seem to cough quite a lot first thing in the morning.
Actually, this seems to link very well with a similar conversation that I often have with my mother concerning my relatively laid-back demeanour. It usually ends, strangely enough, with her smiling to herself and shaking her head as she expertly pronounces, ‘You’ll certainly never have an ulcer, will you?’ That I may never have cancer, a heart attack or a nervous breakdown seems to be a constant source of anxiety for my parents.
I settle gratefully for silence as we get into the car and think about smoking on a more industrial scale, two at a time perhaps, to increase my productivity.
You know the real problem, the real mind-fucking frustration, is that I could rip him to shreds. I’ve been doing it to other kids for years, I do it now at university. I am the acknowledged master of devastating argument. Sensitive types fear my unrelenting aggressive sarcasm. Even the lawyers keep away from me. I write political pamphlets, speeches, instant rebuttals of campaign attacks that have not yet been made by our enemies. I enjoy conflict. I anticipate and prepare for it. I truly live for it. But I won’t deploy all the firepower at my disposal on my Dad. You know why? Because he’s lost as soon as he attacks me. Who attacks their own son all the time? Who displays that undignified level of jealous loathing? Note for the future – your kids are never the enemy; pains in the arse maybe but never the enemy.
My Dad has a silver Alfa Romeo leased from the company, a perk of being a staff foreman, two litres of gleaming Italian power that we couldn’t otherwise afford. I put my window down to hear the engine growl beautifully in the empty street, knowing that neighbours dozing in their beds are noting our departure with a smile, or a grimace and a muttered curse. They tell Dad that they set their clocks by our departure, I suppose they have no choice.
Our drive to the site is never a social occasion. My Dad takes on the persona of an American fighter pilot in the Korean War, whizzing along the road looking for MiGs coming out of the sun. I say this because I remember guys like Robert Mitchum, William Holden, Richard Egan and Robert Wagner in Korean War films with oily hair and desperately hungry looks. I am the redundant navigator keeping my tortured thoughts to myself, drafted by some terrible mistake back in the States, terrified in the second seat like the worthless ponce that I am, nervously watching my Marlboro burn sensually between my fingers. Fingers, by the way, that remain white at the knuckle throughout the journey, clenching the front of my seat. You see my Dad is hyperactive, in addition to his ADD and OCD, and his barging becomes something even more urgent and deadly in a car with a two litre engine and five gears.
We roar through the side streets of the town waking those residents who are too weak to wake themselves. The sun sparkles on passing chrome bumpers and hub caps, forcing me to wince as it reflects blindingly from parked windscreens. We honk our horn menacingly at the bin men, the bread delivery men, the milk men and the paper boys as they chatter and smile at each other dangerously close to the kerbside. Their youthful and entirely masculine morning community made happier by the euphoric freedom afforded by the fresh air, the sun and the warmth. How I used to enjoy my serene paper round, before this crazed daily rush.
In the town centre, small groups of builders, office and factory workers stand around talking and laughing outside the newspaper shop and the dairy, having bought their supplies of fags, rolls, colourful tabloid newspapers and milk. Blue clouds of cigarette smoke hang above them in the still air as they wait to be collected by a hectic convoy of cars and mini-buses. The same guys, every morning, waiting in the same place for the same other guys. Some of them wave at my Dad, he is well known in the town, but they don’t expect any response. They know that he is already focused on his search for MiGs. Like I said, he is well known in the town. So we zoom past the throng, purposefully growling up the gears, heading south east towards the sun and our objective.
With the window still down I can enjoy the deep roar of the Alfa as we climb through the short, steep and twisting pass that takes us up and out through the end of the town. Emerging from a shaded wood, the sun lights our world as we crest the hill heading east. Dad changes up into fifth gear for the race along the quiet country road and I close my window. It is painfully beautiful up in the hills, impossibly beautiful, incredibly beautiful, a truly spiritual place.
I have spent a large part of my childhood here, exploring, playing commandos with my friends, walking, learning peace and coming to understand that we only share the earth, we don‘t own it. On either side of the road, in the hillocks beyond the ancient drystane dykes, sheep stop eating and lift their empty heads to stare at us. Their lambs panic and bounce across the grass and up the hillside to avoid being mistaken, by my Dad, for gorgeous white mini-MiGs.
The grass and the yellow-budding gorse bushes gleam in the sunlight, covered in dew. Numerous waterfalls coming from the moorland plateau above and usually raging in winter, continue their silver gurgling over exposed scars in the rocks. Along the telephone wires hawks sit perfectly still, waiting for their first prey of the day to appear carelessly from holes in the ground.
Seeing and feeling all this life and never tiring of it, always seeing something new, I’ve missed the MiG coming up ahead. Actually it’s an old dull-blue Ford that is evidently not going fast enough and which must be taken on a blind bend at maximum speed. I instinctively grab the front of my seat tighter and stare straight ahead until the danger has been passed.
‘Fuckin idiot’, my Dad mutters. I’m not sure if he means me or the normal guy driving his normal car in a perfectly normal way.
The rest of the journey is high-speed, peaceful and without incident and I manage to place myself in a kind of cryogenic trance. I gaze up at the faultless blue sky again. A late squadron of geese are heading north in a V. Strange that I am so much in control of my university life in the crowded and frantic city and yet here… Here in my countryside, I feel as I did when I was twelve years old. Seeing the geese and all the other signs of seasonal stability provide me with the only moments when I know everything is OK in the world.
And then I realise why, in spite of my arrogance, I am actually no match for my Dad.
We inhabit two different worlds and have done since I was about thirteen. You see where we are right now in the countryside, coming from his house, going to the work that he found for me in the summer and which he dominates with his raw, violent power; none of that is mine. Some of it was for a while but now my world is up in the city, on campus, in the library, in the bars and meeting rooms, at concerts and parties, in strange bedrooms and in the Students’ Union. I am powerful there but I simply have no power here anymore and I feel it, I feel weak, like Samson after his haircut.
Every October I see the geese heading south to avoid winter in northern Europe, I envy them. Then every Spring they head back north to mate and feed. A natural and ancient pattern of behaviour that gives a framework of stability to the endless human chaos that I’ve become part of. My Dad’s insane driving means nothing in the context of these birds. I imagine standing on the hillside listening to their conversation as I used to do, ‘Right here then straight on after that mountain…’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yip. It’s the same mountain as last year.’
Very soon we are descending from the hills and heading for the sprawling construction site in the glen below. Every day we make the concrete factory blocks that we are working on, like two thousand ants, grow taller and we can clearly see how we are all working ourselves out of a job. At the moment our buildings look like huge broken teeth thrown against the hillsides but they will be completed soon enough and full of different ants making chemical compounds for industry.
We bounce and squeak into the site workers’ car park, a field of allegedly levelled out rubble on the outside of a high barbed wire fence. The thousands of us who work here know we are building a chemical factory but the site looks very much like how I imagine a Soviet or Nazi labour camp would, with its razor wire, security cameras and patrolling dogs at night. To complete the scene we have stark wooden huts in which to change, store our clothes and to eat, neatly set out in rows and surrounded by deep mud when it rains. This is the west of Scotland and it rains often.
We all wear blue boiler suits but I think it would be more appropriate if we were given striped pyjamas to trudge around the huge, almost dystopian space that the site occupies. Yes, we trudge around filthy and bleeding, carrying our picks and shovels, wrestling with compressors and pneumatic tools, digging holes and pouring concrete, pulling large structures out of the ground. Of course, there are no watch towers with machine gun nests and no SS or NKVD guards, but we do have the time-keepers to worry about.
It is eight a.m. and as I feared, we are exactly on time. That’s no good to me as I should be starting work now. I should be at my station ready to dig far away at the other end of the site and not simply arriving at the main gate. I am late. My Dad is a senior staff foreman and he can turn up when he likes, I am a labourer with no rights whatsoever. The time-keepers are waiting for me and no matter who my father is, they are holding their pens at the ready and my pay will be docked.
‘See ya later’, Dad says as he saunters off to the Staff hut for his coffee.
Swearwords: A few strong ones.
Description: A student goes to his summer vacation job with his father and begins the long process of acceptance.
_____________________________________________________________________
In mid-Spring the sun is already warm in the East, even early in the day. The sparrows are arguing frantically in their hedge-row nests, the dogs are patrolling their borders sniffing for night-time intruders and the cats… well they are looking for sunny spots in which to begin their lounging. Except for the rough boys noisily delivering milk, the human race is well behind the animal kingdom on this and every other morning.
It's seven thirty five and I think, no I know, we are late but my dad always cuts things fine; living on the edge every day, barging with elbows out, testing himself against everyone else and the clock, looking for more ways to prove that he is still on top. Always on my shoulder, always counting, always…waiting for the slip-up. He knows he will get us to work on time, bang on time but bang on time is too stressful for me. I liked it better when he worked up north, hundreds of miles away. Unseen and unheard for one peaceful and stress-free month, then another and then another.
In those days I got a lift to work from a more civilised crew who enjoy humorous conversation, are not tightly wired and prefer to arrive twenty minutes early with plenty time for coffee and a fag and without permanent psychological damage. My Dad and I have different metabolic rates and that medical fact seems to lie at the heart of the many things that create a lot of friction between us.
I love soft packs and I didn’t know you could get them here when I started smoking. Guys like Sonny Crockett in the early Miami Vice episodes had them but they weren’t for the likes of me, this is Ayrshire not the steaming flesh pots of South Florida.
Then I found a regular supply in the classic wood-panelled tobacconists in the main street, with its powerful aromas and lean smiling owner in his pale blue cardigan.
One of the unexpected bonuses of growing up, a beautiful shop that I had only passed by when I was small, exotic and full of the promises of other hemispheres; islands off the coast of Africa or the depths of India or South America. The same promises hinted at by my mother’s stamp collection when I used to pour over all its pages as a small boy, the stamps resting on their sticky hinges like dead butterflies in a lepidopterist’s glass case. I sometimes go to the tobacconists now just to smell the rest of the world. They don’t have the stubby, smelly, white Gauloise that I smoke at university, just as well as they would really piss my Dad off, but they do have Marlboro soft packs for cool guys.
Gauloise are, of course, the coolest and the tastiest fags on earth but where I live people think you are a poof if you smoke them. I understand perfectly why the guy doesn’t stock them when there is such an obvious lack of demand. The ‘big’ city and its universities provides an agglomeration of cool guys from smaller towns where there are only a few of us in any single school year. The commercial limitations are obvious.
Since my last birthday I get to light my fags with the Zippo lighter my Gran gave me. I’m still amazed by that, the best present I’ve had since the beginning of the pyjamas, hankies and socks era, given to me by an old woman in her seventies. She ought to be telling me to stop smoking before it really gets a hold but she has always been the one who listens and smiles and whose eyes sparkle. There are very few people like that around.
‘Still on that Camel shite!?’ He manages a smile, now that he is out of the house. A smile to himself accompanied by a shake of the head. And so we begin the daily joust.
‘Yes Dad, I like the taste and the way the paper burns and makes that fizzing sound.’
‘Fucksake!’ He mimicked me, ‘The way the paper burns…’ How many are you on a day?’
‘Dunne, maybe 10 or 15.’
‘Fucksake! You’ll never be a real smoker, you’re just poncin aboot. As usual.’
One day I’ll ask him what a ‘real smoker’ is but I don’t think I’ll like the answer as the inevitable conclusion will be that I’m a ‘fuckin pansy’ because I’m not measuring up to his set of masculine criteria. Anyway, ‘real smokers’ seem to cough quite a lot first thing in the morning.
Actually, this seems to link very well with a similar conversation that I often have with my mother concerning my relatively laid-back demeanour. It usually ends, strangely enough, with her smiling to herself and shaking her head as she expertly pronounces, ‘You’ll certainly never have an ulcer, will you?’ That I may never have cancer, a heart attack or a nervous breakdown seems to be a constant source of anxiety for my parents.
I settle gratefully for silence as we get into the car and think about smoking on a more industrial scale, two at a time perhaps, to increase my productivity.
You know the real problem, the real mind-fucking frustration, is that I could rip him to shreds. I’ve been doing it to other kids for years, I do it now at university. I am the acknowledged master of devastating argument. Sensitive types fear my unrelenting aggressive sarcasm. Even the lawyers keep away from me. I write political pamphlets, speeches, instant rebuttals of campaign attacks that have not yet been made by our enemies. I enjoy conflict. I anticipate and prepare for it. I truly live for it. But I won’t deploy all the firepower at my disposal on my Dad. You know why? Because he’s lost as soon as he attacks me. Who attacks their own son all the time? Who displays that undignified level of jealous loathing? Note for the future – your kids are never the enemy; pains in the arse maybe but never the enemy.
My Dad has a silver Alfa Romeo leased from the company, a perk of being a staff foreman, two litres of gleaming Italian power that we couldn’t otherwise afford. I put my window down to hear the engine growl beautifully in the empty street, knowing that neighbours dozing in their beds are noting our departure with a smile, or a grimace and a muttered curse. They tell Dad that they set their clocks by our departure, I suppose they have no choice.
Our drive to the site is never a social occasion. My Dad takes on the persona of an American fighter pilot in the Korean War, whizzing along the road looking for MiGs coming out of the sun. I say this because I remember guys like Robert Mitchum, William Holden, Richard Egan and Robert Wagner in Korean War films with oily hair and desperately hungry looks. I am the redundant navigator keeping my tortured thoughts to myself, drafted by some terrible mistake back in the States, terrified in the second seat like the worthless ponce that I am, nervously watching my Marlboro burn sensually between my fingers. Fingers, by the way, that remain white at the knuckle throughout the journey, clenching the front of my seat. You see my Dad is hyperactive, in addition to his ADD and OCD, and his barging becomes something even more urgent and deadly in a car with a two litre engine and five gears.
We roar through the side streets of the town waking those residents who are too weak to wake themselves. The sun sparkles on passing chrome bumpers and hub caps, forcing me to wince as it reflects blindingly from parked windscreens. We honk our horn menacingly at the bin men, the bread delivery men, the milk men and the paper boys as they chatter and smile at each other dangerously close to the kerbside. Their youthful and entirely masculine morning community made happier by the euphoric freedom afforded by the fresh air, the sun and the warmth. How I used to enjoy my serene paper round, before this crazed daily rush.
In the town centre, small groups of builders, office and factory workers stand around talking and laughing outside the newspaper shop and the dairy, having bought their supplies of fags, rolls, colourful tabloid newspapers and milk. Blue clouds of cigarette smoke hang above them in the still air as they wait to be collected by a hectic convoy of cars and mini-buses. The same guys, every morning, waiting in the same place for the same other guys. Some of them wave at my Dad, he is well known in the town, but they don’t expect any response. They know that he is already focused on his search for MiGs. Like I said, he is well known in the town. So we zoom past the throng, purposefully growling up the gears, heading south east towards the sun and our objective.
With the window still down I can enjoy the deep roar of the Alfa as we climb through the short, steep and twisting pass that takes us up and out through the end of the town. Emerging from a shaded wood, the sun lights our world as we crest the hill heading east. Dad changes up into fifth gear for the race along the quiet country road and I close my window. It is painfully beautiful up in the hills, impossibly beautiful, incredibly beautiful, a truly spiritual place.
I have spent a large part of my childhood here, exploring, playing commandos with my friends, walking, learning peace and coming to understand that we only share the earth, we don‘t own it. On either side of the road, in the hillocks beyond the ancient drystane dykes, sheep stop eating and lift their empty heads to stare at us. Their lambs panic and bounce across the grass and up the hillside to avoid being mistaken, by my Dad, for gorgeous white mini-MiGs.
The grass and the yellow-budding gorse bushes gleam in the sunlight, covered in dew. Numerous waterfalls coming from the moorland plateau above and usually raging in winter, continue their silver gurgling over exposed scars in the rocks. Along the telephone wires hawks sit perfectly still, waiting for their first prey of the day to appear carelessly from holes in the ground.
Seeing and feeling all this life and never tiring of it, always seeing something new, I’ve missed the MiG coming up ahead. Actually it’s an old dull-blue Ford that is evidently not going fast enough and which must be taken on a blind bend at maximum speed. I instinctively grab the front of my seat tighter and stare straight ahead until the danger has been passed.
‘Fuckin idiot’, my Dad mutters. I’m not sure if he means me or the normal guy driving his normal car in a perfectly normal way.
The rest of the journey is high-speed, peaceful and without incident and I manage to place myself in a kind of cryogenic trance. I gaze up at the faultless blue sky again. A late squadron of geese are heading north in a V. Strange that I am so much in control of my university life in the crowded and frantic city and yet here… Here in my countryside, I feel as I did when I was twelve years old. Seeing the geese and all the other signs of seasonal stability provide me with the only moments when I know everything is OK in the world.
And then I realise why, in spite of my arrogance, I am actually no match for my Dad.
We inhabit two different worlds and have done since I was about thirteen. You see where we are right now in the countryside, coming from his house, going to the work that he found for me in the summer and which he dominates with his raw, violent power; none of that is mine. Some of it was for a while but now my world is up in the city, on campus, in the library, in the bars and meeting rooms, at concerts and parties, in strange bedrooms and in the Students’ Union. I am powerful there but I simply have no power here anymore and I feel it, I feel weak, like Samson after his haircut.
Every October I see the geese heading south to avoid winter in northern Europe, I envy them. Then every Spring they head back north to mate and feed. A natural and ancient pattern of behaviour that gives a framework of stability to the endless human chaos that I’ve become part of. My Dad’s insane driving means nothing in the context of these birds. I imagine standing on the hillside listening to their conversation as I used to do, ‘Right here then straight on after that mountain…’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yip. It’s the same mountain as last year.’
Very soon we are descending from the hills and heading for the sprawling construction site in the glen below. Every day we make the concrete factory blocks that we are working on, like two thousand ants, grow taller and we can clearly see how we are all working ourselves out of a job. At the moment our buildings look like huge broken teeth thrown against the hillsides but they will be completed soon enough and full of different ants making chemical compounds for industry.
We bounce and squeak into the site workers’ car park, a field of allegedly levelled out rubble on the outside of a high barbed wire fence. The thousands of us who work here know we are building a chemical factory but the site looks very much like how I imagine a Soviet or Nazi labour camp would, with its razor wire, security cameras and patrolling dogs at night. To complete the scene we have stark wooden huts in which to change, store our clothes and to eat, neatly set out in rows and surrounded by deep mud when it rains. This is the west of Scotland and it rains often.
We all wear blue boiler suits but I think it would be more appropriate if we were given striped pyjamas to trudge around the huge, almost dystopian space that the site occupies. Yes, we trudge around filthy and bleeding, carrying our picks and shovels, wrestling with compressors and pneumatic tools, digging holes and pouring concrete, pulling large structures out of the ground. Of course, there are no watch towers with machine gun nests and no SS or NKVD guards, but we do have the time-keepers to worry about.
It is eight a.m. and as I feared, we are exactly on time. That’s no good to me as I should be starting work now. I should be at my station ready to dig far away at the other end of the site and not simply arriving at the main gate. I am late. My Dad is a senior staff foreman and he can turn up when he likes, I am a labourer with no rights whatsoever. The time-keepers are waiting for me and no matter who my father is, they are holding their pens at the ready and my pay will be docked.
‘See ya later’, Dad says as he saunters off to the Staff hut for his coffee.
About the Author
Born in Glasgow, Ronnie Smith has lived and worked in Romania for the past eight years and is getting back into the writing of fiction after a long break. He publishes in Romania, in English and Romanian, and hopes to be published more in Scotland in the future. He is currently working on a novel set in post-independence Scotland.