Notes on fatherhood and petroleum
By Matthew Moore
“How do you forget,” my father asks, “to put gas in your car?”
This is not the first time that he’s asked me the question. Although, it could be the last—thankfully or unfortunately, I haven’t decided. Few are the occasions when a son can say that his father reminds him of a younger version of himself, but that’s how uncanny it feels as I watch him dangle his brawny arm from the passenger window, tapping his calloused fingers against the truck door as the station clerk rings up the red gas canister. The drive there was quiet, as all drives have been with my father. He had driven from Missouri to Iowa to help me pack the UHaul as I prepared to relocate for a PhD. My 2001 Taurus Wagon dead in the drive, the gas gauge reading empty. He tosses me the keys to his truck. “Let’s go get some gas.”
The first time I ran out of gas I’m probably seventeen. In a last-ditch effort to beat the 8 AM bell at my rural high school, I’m gloriously exceeding the speed limit—or maybe because I delusionally think that I can outrun the dire truth of the fuel gauge. I won’t make it this morning. A sound that will come to portend truancy and a call to my father, the engine peters in a clunking rattle of a paroxysm. The tires crunch earth as I pull off of the cracked macadam of highway T.
Since being initiated into this rite of way—formally christened when the DMV handed a license emblazoned with the bloodshot photograph of my bleary mug—a blur of freewheeling weeks with my ragtag friends had only just slipstreamed by. Fusillading jocks in firecracker drivebys, assailing freight trucks with barrages of powdered donuts, stowing various assortments of paraphernalia and contraband under the spare tire. My trunk usually pay dirt for an ATF agent. There was just one glaring problem preventing me from becoming the trusted getaway driver: my recurring neglect of the fuel gauge.
Enter my father. It’s an austere, marrow-quaking December—because it’s Missouri, because he’s my father. His nostrils emit breath like exhaust pipes. I cannot unsee him framed in the rearview mirror of the 1995 Jeep Cherokee that I drove then. Though cosmetically it wouldn’t score me any points in the teenage popularity contest, my father knew it was a beater car designed to withstand even the most turbulent of vehicular misadventures of the newly licensed (aka, me). Practical, like him. The fleece-lined flannel, and the denim overalls he wears beneath it, grubby and grimed. He slides out of his Dodge pickup, the red jerrican in hand. All is hushed and suspended except the grumble of the pickup idling. The clouds limned gray with a rumor of snow. Fractaled ice clings to the windshield, and what’s left of the residual heat is too quick to escape the interior. Potholes pockmark the blacktop. Beyond the barbed wire, turkeys trot the frost confected senescent stalks of last year’s harvest. Then the gravel in his voice jumpstarts time: “how do you forget to fuel up?” He tips the jerrican into the Jeep’s tank, the miasma of gasoline fumigating the air between us.
Usually found in his garage, head ensconced under a propped hood, or lying greasy under the chassis working a wrench as oil exsanguinated, he would be at work. The fruits of his labor were routinely spent on maintaining the many used cars and lemons we owned that peeled out of our driveway before being driven into the ground, my motorsporting abandon not least to blame (though my parents’ learned fast: when life hands you lemons, you buy triple A). Like my mother’s Little Debbie cache from which she would volumetrically compact into my mouth some cloying, cakey substance as a way of treating my hypoglycemic attacks, I was daily inculcated with the virtue and volatility of fuel. Cheap processed lunch meats, Diet Coke, food stamps, high-interest payday loans for Christmas gifts. Upon completion of a job he deemed satisfactory, my father would consecrate it with his usual incantation: “now we’re cooking with gas.” My habit of driving on an empty tank—my unrepentant, self-sabotaging psychology—ran afoul of his belief in maintenance. That is, that proper care and dutiful repair ensured a thing for the long haul.
Before encountering Freud in college, I learned a different kind of analysis. My father’s world was a crash course in drive theory. “Always check the tire pressure,” he’d tell me. “Always check the coolant level.” “Always put in 5W-30 in winter,” and a different oil type in summer, but I wasn’t paying close enough attention to recall. There was such a flurry of these non-negotiables to warrant stone tablets as if he exhorted them from the summit of Mount Sinai, as if Jesus really could commandeer the wheel. And don’t even get me started on our stops for fuel, occasions for mechanical edification as he wiped away the splattered locusts plastered to the grill and serviced all that liquid liturgy under the hood. Notwithstanding these many edicts, I was a poor student, and maybe a worse son.
More than an embarrassing quirk, my petrolic problem amounts to what some may categorize as a compulsion to repeat. How did I end up here, I think to myself, shivering cold on the shoulder, glowering at the niggling gas light left unheeded for days. Preparing my wistful face for when it has to look my father in his welder-burnt eyes as he brings me gasoline. To be sure, I exercise an equal indifference towards the other lights—the red oil light, the diagnostically elusive check engine light. But the frequency with which I disavow the gas light, like Marlboro packs or McDonalds bags that have to first make a landfill of the floorboard before you reckon with your own revolting habit, suggests a compulsion deep seated and self-sabotaging. It is my problem as much as it has become my father’s whose handyman wherewithal I’ve used, and abused, to pull me out of numerous binds that I have neither the patience nor humility to enumerate here. Forty more miles, I reassure myself, putting the road behind me, refusing to learn from the past.
I’m probably twenty-one or so when it happens again on my commute to college, on the backroad of highway N—two narrow lanes of curvaceous, undulating, centrifugal peril. The Dodge pickup arrives just as the spring fog lifts and an old barn fades into view. Gauzy bulks of cattle grazing for the perky patches of sprouting grass. “I did it again,” I tell my father as he puts the jerrican into the Jeep, that sweet, sickly tinge biting the air. “Tell me,” my father starts, “how does a college student forget to put gas in his car?” He asks tongue-in-cheek, but also not a little bit peeved. And he won’t be able to help himself but chastise me in the only language he knows: “you dipstick.”
Into my college years, my father began bristling at my driving. “Nothing is worth driving this fast for,” he’d reprimand me, bracing himself by white-knuckling the door grip during our ride-alongs to a doctor’s appointment or to the one Mexican restaurant where we ate together in a reverential if not awkward silence. He was a glacial driver. The plains states unspooled at his leisure; tractors poised to pass. With no hat to doff, he’d offer the passing motorist an obligatory forefinger lifted gingerly from the wheel. I, on the other hand, was a lead foot, a bat out of hell, a Speedy Gonzales, as my father described me, not afraid to raise a different finger at a not totally deserving driver. Though it seemed terminal velocity could not break the gravity well of rural Missouri, I was hellbent on my flight out of flyover country. Not even the gas light flashing on, as so often as it did, could stop me. Until it did. And then I found myself stranded again, my waxen wings dripping in descent as the gas gauge fell into the red. Ringing Daedalus to rescue me.
Never counting on things falling into his lap, my father was doggedly matter-of-fact when it came to earning what he had. He wasn’t afraid to burnish with spit his brass tacks—to clean every gun on his rack, whetstone a dull knife, anoint with mink a pair of parched leather boots. This kind of work, maintenance work, felt invisible to me—invisible as gasoline that flowed from earth, to refinery, to tanker, to tank, from pump, to car. Freud’s whole point is that so much has to be repressed, rendered invisible, albeit not unfelt, before we capitulate to the law of our father. But, what about the father? The wrenches thrown in the garage. The words yelled at your mother: “I’ll get in the car and leave.” The rarest tear that breaks the lip of the lid and streaks the stubbled cheek like a comet no one sees? This is not to say that the road my father laid down for me was not paved with good intentions, but that it could only ever be paved and unpaved and paved again ad infinitum, like Theseus’s ship that would run aground on a cul-de-sac.
Underneath his gritty, no-nonsense work ethic was a white, blue collar, masculinity resenting the loss of its security and the privileges of its right of way. My way of being a man was ride or die, shut up or buck up—and never buckled up. Doing donuts, rolling coal. And, as a compulsive pyromaniac, igniting not inconsequential bonfires with a gratuitous dousing of gasoline spilled from the red jerrican I purloined from my father’s garage. It’s just that, back then, I understood this masculine performance as the antithesis of my father’s puritanical frugality and political conservatism instead of as its shadowy double. It’s Mr. Hyde.
My friends and I were not so much warring against our fathers as we were, unwittingly, warring on their behalf and against the ruins of a world that had left them emasculated, if not totaled. Unsalvageable write-offs. If oil is extractive capitalism’s lifeblood, desiccating the earth into a shriveled husk of a tinderbox, then it was also the life of the party for my adolescent antics fueled by cars, substance abuse, and a culture that emerged from a sense of feeling abandoned on the shoulder as the rest of the world passed us by.
They say that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of stupidity. But this drive to repeat, as Freud also tells me, enacts mastery in the wake of traumatic loss. That in itself is not stupid. it’s a reasonable response to a world screeching out of control, even when that response is uncontrollably stupid, rationally irrational. Lest self-sabotage becomes a pathologized scapegoat for explaining away people who act, if not vote, against their best interests, I saw self-sabotage as neither a drive towards death nor benighted ignorance, but a life-affirming white, masculine, working-class culture rallying against the incursion of economic precarity and, more problematically, the loss of racial and gender privileges. I’ve known too many men who flipped their trucks and died, crushed like the beer cans they’d emptied only moments before. A teenage boy who shot himself in his pickup. A man who, while intoxicated, drove his truck off of a bridge and drowned. Driven to the brink.
By 2050, scientists predict, the world will run out of gas. I hope the world is better than me, that it doesn’t require running out in order to reckon with the wreck we’ve piled up. When the engine growls its death knell and you know you’ll be late, that it’s too late and will never again be early enough. Because maybe all along, and in ways he could never have foreseen, my father taught me how to steward this doom—to tend and mend the present for a future denied to you. To not forget the history you’ve put in the rearview mirror, always a little closer than it appears. Which must be the most devastating part of being a parent. Not the letting go, but the gift of wings to the child who will use them to escape you. Though not without the prospect of plummeting, of breaking down. A bittersweet reunion.
Maybe it’s too obtuse to reduce my gas problem to a lifelong game of fort-da between my father and me. The first-generation-student-who-got-away in me wants to trace the etiology of my compulsion to a culture that glorifies bootstrap burnout, a running on fumes that sometimes feels like the only recourse to outrun outright poverty. But I also want to believe so badly that there are inscrutable pistons and valves in me, as there are under the hood, that only my father can divine. Perhaps these are not mutually exclusive hypotheses. I watch him titrate the Taurus with the gasoline I’ve purchased. He turns the ignition, the engine turns over. But, as he pushes the gas pedal down, the car revving, going nowhere fast, the smell of rubber and the noxious pall of exhaust in the air, I observe him attuning his ears to the roar of it before he turns to me and says, “it’s more than just a gas problem.”
Matt is a first-generation student and writer from the rural Midwest, currently a PhD student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. His essays can be found in Of Rust and Glass and Sublation Magazine. Find him at mattmo-washu.bsky.social.
