CORONA
by Daniel Buccieri
Victor showed me a framed photograph titled Cielito. It depicts the interior of an old van, perhaps a Volkswagen Bus, pre-1970 because the windshield is split into two segments. In the photo, on the dashboard, in the sharpest focus sits a delicate Virgin of Guadalupe figurine. A symbol of salvation. An endless blue sky beyond the windshield provides the richest wash of color. A little slice of heaven through the windshield of a Volkswagen, frozen in a photograph.
Anything Volkswagen reminds me of Big Steve. Interior of an old van in a photograph along a whiteboard sill at UCLA – Big Steve. The guy down the block in the VW auto club – Big Steve. The cover photo the album of Double Nickels on the Dime by The Minutemen, an interior of a VW Bug – Big Steve. That album even opens and closes with the fragile metal rumble sound of a Volkswagen engine rolling over. I only know that because of Big Steve.
He was obsessed with all things Volkswagen. So consumed that he got the VW logo tattooed on his calf. We called him the Volkswagen King. His crown an unkempt wave of brown curls. Sometimes slicked back tight with the grease. Other times, just tendrils reaching out for a small piece of sky. By the time he was 22, he had already owned over 50 cars, the majority of them Volkswagens. He would sift through the Auto Trader papers, searching for cheap, broken cars. Big Steve would buy them. Repair them. Sell them. He took a picture of every car he flipped and kept them in a photo album. Just like they were loved members of his family. Maybe they were.
He would reminisce about the cars he had nurtured and released. A ’66 Squareback in lima bean green. A ’63 Bus, the one with the tiny rear-view window. The ’72 Bug with the battery top exposed just beneath the backseat, and if someone were to bounce too hard on the seat, the spring could spark against the battery terminals and ignite a fire. I remember sitting in the back of that black bug. Whoever sat in the back had the responsibility of keeping their nostrils on stand-by at all times. Detect smoke, sound the alarm. Heading somewhere north on the 15 freeway out of Temecula, I thought I smelled smoke, despite a deviated septum and fucked up sinuses.
“I think we are on fire!”
Big Steve’s thick fists yanked the steering wheel, hard to the right. The black bug skittered across lanes, sliding when balding tires hit the loose dirt of the shoulder. Four of us exploded out of the doors and rolled onto the gravel. Big Steve grabbed the fire extinguisher from the bug’s trunk in the front of the car, pulled up the back seat above the battery. Then paused. He revolved to face the three of us. False alarm. I was relieved of my duties as human smoke detector.
I knew nothing about cars VWs or otherwise, but I was drawn to Big Steve’s infatuation with them. He never held on to a car for very long. He was always on the lookout for the next one. At a red light we would pull up next to Volkswagen and he yelled out the window, “Hey, wanna sell it?” That usually didn’t work. But it didn’t stop Big Steve from trying. When he was between cars, I would drive him around the old, empty, rural, sections of Riverside County. Nowhere places with names no one has ever heard of. Places maps forgot.
“Hey, slow down,” he would say with eyes fixated beyond the windshield, searching for the round fenders of the VW bug, or the rectangle panels of the Bus. Always hunting the circle with the V, a crown above the W inside. The emblem scratched into his calf for eternity. And when a Volkswagen was found, doesn’t matter the state it was in, running or not, containing wheels or not, even if it was just the hollowed out shell of a car, Big Steve would order me to stop my car and let him go knock on the door of a complete stranger’s house. I could never do something like that. I live with a sometimes paralyzing fear of awkward situations. Knocking on a stranger’s door, in the middle of an unincorporated expanse of tumbleweeds, trailers, transplants from another place, another time, and asking them if they were interested in selling the VW heap out in their yard–awkward. I remained in the driver’s seat and watched from behind. Big Steve, with one hand always pulling down on the wire curls of his exaggerated goatee beard. The other hand perched on the soft rolls of flesh that tugged at his t-shirt and fell beyond the grasp of his belt.
Most trips ended with no transactions. But Big Steve never let that deter him. It was the great finds of the past that drove him to continue searching out the next big VW score. The next photo for his album. The next member of his automobile family tree. He was 22. I was still in high school. I was happy just to tag along. I enjoyed following madness around. There was always something to new learn about life.
One searing Riverside County afternoon, out on the car hunt in the crags and ridges of Aguanga, Big Steve instructed me to stop at a ramshackle liquor store off of State Route 79. He hopped inside and came out armed with a six-pack of Corona and a smile of all teeth and sunshine. He directed me to a bluff, over-looking land that stretched out south and to the east until it was swallowed by the horizon. Land that looked untouched by the wheels of time. Riverside County now, but it was once Mexico. But it was once Nuevo España. But it was once Luiseño tribal lands. Then it became a prize to present to the King. A jewel for the crown given by the conquerors. Then it became a swathe of rural communities fighting against the desert for existence. Then it became a place to search through for discarded and forgotten Volkswagens.
We sat on the hood of my car, sweating under the sun, and split the six-pack. We took a break from the car hunt. I probably listened to a Big Steve car story, or a girl story, or a combination car and girl story and looked out at the terrain that lives beneath a blanket of endless blue sky.
BIO
Daniel Buccieri lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. He has taught World and US history in the Los Angeles Unified School District since 2003, twice being recognized as the district’s teacher of the year. His writing has previously appeared in various literary journals and in the UCLA Writing Project annual anthologies since 2009. He loves spending Sundays in the kitchen cooking dishes so exquisite that now his family just cannot eat Italian food anywhere else.
