My Love Bug

On the fucking amazing police drama "SouthLAnd" (only two more episodes left this season! TNT! Tuesdays at 10EST!) Cooper, the hard-headed, square-jawed FTO (Field Training Officer) kicks ass and takes names during his shift in the ubiquitous black-and-white Crown Vic. At day's end, he kicks back and opens up the throttle on a black Dodge Challenger.

As Mrs. Apron and I were on our way back from this weekend's ski trip, a black Dodge Challenger with pro-police bumper and window stickers passed us by at a high rate of speed. As it came up on my rearview, I noticed that it bore the Thin Blue Line license plate, favored by the po-po for their civilian vehicles.

"Now, we're assuming that's being driven by a cop," my wife said to me, out of the blue.

"Mm-hmm. Most definitely."

"Do you think he watches SouthLAnd, and do you think that, if he does, the fact that uber-cop John Cooper drives that car influenced his car-buying decision in some small way?"

"No, not at all," I replied, "I think it dictated it in a huge, Hemi-powered way."

We're so susceptible, some of us, when it comes to mass media and cars that it's not even funny. Look at my sister. An ardent football lover, she takes her automotive cues from what the big, bad sumbitches on the field drive away from practice in: huge, black SUVs. Is it any accident that her last car was a huge, black Chevy Tahoe? With a $1,000 auxiliary deer guard? I think not.

Is it any accident that my first car was a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle?

No. That purchase was fated since 1984, when my aunt, visiting from Israel, babysat us and decided to pop "The Love Bug" into the Betamax player. She might as well have surgically implanted the VW logo into the very center of my heart and branded the number 53 onto my forehead.


I'm glad she didn't really do that, though. High school was awkward enough for me.

The Oscars are coming up this weekend. I won't be watching (I admit that I'll be quietly rooting in my heart of hearts for "The King's Speech") but I thought it would be a fun time to recognize and celebrate the film that changed my life forever. The film that spawned the longest-lasting obsession of my life (sorry, Mrs. A, you're a relative newcomer to the scene when compared to Herbie-- and you know it, too), the film that is more responsible for who I am than Gilbert & Sullivan combined (as they usually are), Monty Python, or any of my other fetishes/hobbies/interests.

What?! "The Love Bug" in the same breath as "The King's Speech"? Don't forget, Herbie didn't just rake in good mile-per-gallon ratings. He grossed the highest of any film in 1969.

When planning the film, the Disney folk didn't know they were going to rock and roll with a Pearl White 1963 sunroof edition Volkswagen Beetle. They set up a "casting call" and lined up a dozen vehicles, which were summarily inspected by officials involved in the planning of the film. How did they settle on the Beetle? It was the only car that grown men approached, and pet.


Wouldn't you just eat it up, if German engineering wasn't so bad for your teeth?

The car is undeniably adorable. The film, if you give it a chance, is charming, deftly acted by the, *ahem* human participants-- a first-rate cast of humanoid actors including Dean Jones, Michelle Lee, Buddy Hackett, and the fantastically dastardly David Tomlinson. The script is taut and clever. The racing sequences are convincing-- and why not? After all, they did substitute the 1963 Beetle's stock 40bhp engine with one liberated from a Porsche.


Zoom Zoom.

I don't know that there are too many people out there who can legitimately say they don't know who they'd be if they hadn't seen a certain film when they were four. I don't know who I'd be. I don't know what I'd pine for on ebaymotors. I don't know what I'd dream about gracing my driveway once I'm retired. I don't know what chrome and paint mystery I'd be lusting after if my heart hadn't been set so firmly aflame way back when. I don't know what movie I'd show to potential mates to judge their reaction to me-- to see if they'd accept loving a man who is in love with a child's film, and who has been so badly bitten by the Bug that it may very well one day consume him, and his bank account.

Mrs. Apron clearly passed the test.

"One day," she said, "you will have it, and I will help you get there. I just want you to learn how to fix it yourself first."

I thought about that for a little while.

"Fair enough," I said.

And, for one special occasion, she bought me the immense tome, "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot."

And, at once, I knew instantly that the love of a boy and the love of a man had intersected and would live forever in perfect, air-cooled harmony.

Up Go the Trolley Cars

There’s a lot of shit on the desk.

Our computer desk is a repository for the randomest junk imaginable. Most of the time, I don’t even see it anymore. My eyes just kind of glaze over it, drifting listlessly from our real estate tax bill (not due until August 31st, thank you) to the black pen to the red pen to the pen with flowers all over it to the pair of orange-handled scissors to the orange camera case to the “Peter Pan” program to the pink scrap of fabric with dress mannequins on it.

There’s one item here that really stands out. It’s a 1/24th scale silver Volkswagen Beetle with a long piece of wire sticking out from the center of its hood, right where the VW medalion would be, you know, if it were a real car, and, at the end of the piece of the wire is a curly-q and, shoved into that curly-q is a photograph.

Like, an actual, real, no-bullshit photograph that's 4x6ish. It's me & the Mrs. The Mrs. & I. The Apron-heads. In this picture, it's 2005. She's wearing the same eyeglasses she's got on today. Mine have changed approximately six times since then. Her hair is shortish, and a wisp of it is flying clear across her fair forehead. She's got on her red "Elmo" fleece. I'm wearing a red, blue, and gray bowtie she handmade for me. I've got on a parka. Do people still call them "parkas?" I am out-of-touch-- with style. Reality. A lot of things.

We're sitting on a bench, but you can't see it in the picture. All you can see is us, in front of a brick wall. Beautiful, blood-red bricks-- bolder and stronger than your average brick, because they were hand-commissioned for a man who was bolder and stronger than the average man.

"I am not an American," he said, "I am the American."

We're sitting on a bench on Mark Twain's porch. The Hartford Home. 351 Farmington Avenue. "Up go the trolley cars for Mark Twain's daughter. Down go the trolley cars for Mark Twain's daughter." That's what his daughter, Susy, said, over and over again as she watched the traffic go by from her bedroom window, in the final hours of her life, her brain ravaged by spinal meningitis-- hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the family that loved her. Susy Clemens was 24.

The picture of us was taken on October 9th, 2005-- Mrs. Apron's birthday. She had just turned 24. Moments before this picture was taken, I proposed. I was behaving like a whackjob all during the tour. I kept putting my hand inside my pocket to make sure the box with the ring was still in there. Because I would lose it. Because birds shit in my eye. Because I am incapable, incompetent, in...conclusive. But never inebriated.

Thankfully. Wouldn't help.

When my wife asked me later why I decided to propose to her at Mark Twain's house, I didn't have an immediate answer at the ready. It took me a little while to figure it all out. It was a house that had seen so much sadness-- Twain nearly drove his family to financial ruin, and to save on expenses, he was forced to shut up the Hartford Home he and his family loved so and travel like a vagabond. He lost the love of his life, little Susy, in that home, and he didn't even make it back for the funeral. But, it was a house that Twain had specially built to surround his family in peace, opulence, and love. It was a house, he said, that would "celebrate this kind of love." The love he had for his wife, Livy.

The Hartford Home is the epicenter of Victorian beauty, grace, delicacy, extravagence, and refinement. Being in it, for me, is like being hugged by the past-- and I like that. More than that, I suppose, and I was finally able to articulate this to my wife after some inevitable Apron-style fumbling-- I wanted to propose to her in a spot that I was sure would always, always be. Yes, there was a time in the past where the future of the Hartford Home was uncertain-- it was unceremoniously chopped up into apartments in the 1940s, I believe, before it was rescued and rehabbed. But, it was Mark Twain's home, and, therefore, it will survive. It will endure. There will be literati and philanthropists who will swoop in and save it from ruin. They will hug it back. I was worried that, if I proposed to her in some place of perhaps lesser significance that, some day, that place will not be there anymore.

And, if our love is to go on forever, well, I'd kind of like the locale of the proposal to go on forever, too. Or as close to forever as we can reasonably expect.

This past weekend, when we were playing in the ocean together in Brigantine, the waves were breaking over our backs and, sometimes, our heads, and as my wife squealed (totes) with delight, and as I held her around her waist, I felt the euphoria and exhilaration I felt in June or July of 2005 when we did the same in Ventnor in the ocean, laughing and loving atop the shell-coated sea-floor together, the waves crashing all around us-- us jumping around like children.

"I almost proposed to you there, in the ocean, that day," I told her later, "and I know that the Atlantic Ocean will always be there, but how could we be sure that it was that exact spot-- by that rock jetty, or was it that one half-a-mile down? How would we know for sure?"

Besides: people pee in there, you know.