Life on the Line Read online

  “Yep.”

  “Well, what’s in ketchup, Grant?” He said this with a swooping voice, emphasizing that he was stating the obvious.

  “I don’t know, tomatoes?”

  “Well, yeah, but what else? There’s a ton of shit in there, right?” He walked over to the shelf and grabbed a bottle of Heinz. “Here, read the label, little man.”

  “Tomatoes, corn syrup, vinegar, salt, sugar . . .”

  He cut me off, “Right. And what is in pickles?”

  He grabbed the five-gallon bucket of “burger blanket-style” pickles and put it down on the stainless-steel counter with a wallop for emphasis.

  “Okay. Now read these ingredients to me.”

  I started, “Cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, sugar . . . hey, what is that?” I pointed to the calcium chloride.

  “No idea! Come on. See what I’m getting at? All the same stuff in there. They just swapped out the mashed-up tomatoes for some cucumbers, and bam, you get a pickle. In London they shake vinegar on their fries.”

  “Really? Gross. But this tastes good!”

  “Of course it does!” he bellowed as he flipped his side towel off his shoulder, twirled it up, and snapped me in the thigh.

  By the time I was nine the Achatz Depot had settled into a steady and more predictable pace, and my dad put the systems in place that allowed him some free time. He was still working eighty hours a week, but he found time to spend with me outside the restaurant.

  He enrolled me in karate, and every Tuesday night we’d go together to the dojo.

  We’d strap on our helmets and I’d jump on the back of his Honda V65 Magna, wrap my arms around his torso with a death grip, and we’d shoot down St. Clair Highway. He would yell over the noise from the air whizzing by our heads about how to improve my form or the strategy needed for an upcoming sparring session.

  One night he was explaining how you don’t have to hit someone hard to take them down.

  “Aim for the nose or the solar plexus, and down they go.”

  He was midsentence when he stopped instantly. In the newfound silence, he pointed out a deer standing in a cornfield. The man noticed everything. He was aware. He had an attention to detail that I marveled at.

  I loved the competitive environment of karate, but more than anything I was just trying to find something that I was really good at. Success in karate seemed simple to me—you trained, learned the required forms, and tested for belt advancement. It was clear at a glance who was better than you were because they were wearing the proof around their waist.

  On sparring days the goal was even simpler, if a bit more brutal : beat your opponent. Victory provided instant gratification. I was fiercely competitive, accepting challenges from older kids, knowing that I would get my ass kicked, but knowing too that I would get in a few good blows.

  I also knew that my dad was watching.

  With the Achatz Depot thriving, my parents tried to buy the building, but the owner refused repeated requests to sell. Minor problems that could be easily fixed turned into bigger problems, and the irritation of having a landlord took a toll, even though the rent was cheap.

  Once they realized that the purchase would never happen they began looking for a bigger space to capture the excess demand. A co-op-owned restaurant that was inside of a 95,000-square-foot farmers’ supply store a few miles away presented an opportunity to expand.

  My parents made the move.

  When we took over the new space it was a complete disaster. The owner wanted to be gone in a bad way, so he literally walked out to the parking lot and handed my parents the keys, leaving garbage in trash cans and food in the refrigerators. A small team was hired to begin the cleanup while the current crew kept the Depot running until the new restaurant opened. I helped my parents clean the filthy kitchen and declared the walk-in refrigerator my personal project. I went in armed with rubber gloves, a bucket of soapy water, and a jug of bleach. The previous owner had only been gone one day, but what I found there made it seem like it had been months. Five-gallon pickle buckets sat one-quarter full of tomato sauce with a thick moldy crust on the surface. Iceberg lettuce heads were liquefying in the cardboard box they came in. Then I came upon a partially unwrapped hotel pan of what seemed to be a meatlike substance that smelled so bad I ran out of the cooler to keep from vomiting. I took a deep breath, ran in to retrieve the pan of rotting flesh, and ran out to the Dumpster as quickly as I could. It was the single most disturbing thing I have ever seen in any kitchen, and the smell haunts me to this day. Some people just don’t have standards. I learned that at an early age, spending the better part of three days scrubbing down that walk-in until the smell lingered no more.

  The Achatz Family Restaurant opened one month later in March 1983 to a flood of business. Revenue grew 30 percent that year and the next, and when, after two years, investors bought out the co-op, the opportunity to expand presented itself once again.

  My parents borrowed $175,000 from a local bank at the stratospheric interest rate of 17.5 percent, signed a ten-year lease, and expanded to 4,000 square feet. The dining room was gutted and all-new booths, fixtures, carpet, and wall coverings were added. After a major six-week renovation, the place could now accomodate 165 people. Our little diner was not so little anymore.

  When the restaurant reopened, the whole town showed up and pretty much never left. My parents had to hire nearly every one of our relatives to keep up with demand, and the Achatz Family Restaurant had its first $1 million gross revenue year.

  Things were good in the Achatz household.

  I arrived home from school one afternoon when I was eleven to see what looked like a spaceship parked in my driveway. The sleek silver object glistened in the afternoon sun. The doors, hatch, and hood were all open. I ran up to the car, stuck my head in the window, and was struck by the smell of new-car leather. As I was pulling my head out to run around back, I heard my dad say, “Pretty cool, huh? Nineteen eighty-five Corvette. Check out the gauges. They light up like Knight Rider.”

  My dad closed down the doors and the hood, and I hopped in the passenger seat. The engine rumbled. I was in heaven. He slowly backed out of the driveway and I heard my mom yell from the house, “Put your seat belts on! Don’t drive crazy!” We both laughed. My dad crept down the street away from our house and turned the corner—he was taking it easy while my mom could still see us.

  And that moment, blasting down the road in a brand-new Corvette . . .

  CHAPTER 2

  My paternal grandfather died at forty, when my father was very young. I think my dad was determined to enjoy his success—after all, it was hard-won from hard work. Nothing was given to us, and we all contributed.

  But my dad had a hard time with success.

  My mother and father were married in August 1973, exactly eight months before I was born. It isn’t hard to do the math. My family was stable as long as the work was hard and steady, but marital turbulence was frequent during my childhood. My dad’s drinking was the source of many temporary separations between he and my mother, although I was largely unaware of the problems.

  By 1986, three years after my parents’ restaurant opened, the stresses of running a demanding business coupled with my father’s increasingly heavy drinking led to a split that became a divorce. By this time I had graduated to working the line during the weekends, but once my parents separated, my mom stopped going to the restaurant, and so did I. The weekends that were normally filled with flipping pancakes, French toast, and hash browns were now consumed with riding dirt bikes and hunting with my cousin Tim at his house in the country. These were my first real idle weekends of just hanging out with friends in the neighborhood. But it didn’t seem as satisfying.

  Throughout my parents’ separation and divorce, my mom shielded me from the issues surrounding my dad’s drinking. I didn’t know quite what was going on, I only knew that they still talked, that the restaurant still existed, and that my dad wasn’t around the house. In fact,
I never saw him during the times he wasn’t living in the house. He visited rarely. He was either in or out, and when he was out he simply vanished.

  Nearly a year later my father returned. Suddenly he was back, and we didn’t talk about the time away from each other. And for my part, I was just happy he had come home. As quietly as my parents divorced, they reconciled and were quickly remarried.

  Everything became remarkably normal again.

  In the spring of 1988, when I was fourteen, my dad asked me what kind of car I wanted when I turned sixteen. He loved cars, and he wanted me to love them too.

  “A fast one,” I said.

  My dad had the idea of buying an old muscle car and restoring it with me. I couldn’t have been more excited. I read about cars often and had a fairly good knowledge of the different makes from building 1:24-scale plastic models with my dad. He would guide me through the building process, but I was in charge of figuring out the instructions and doing the assembly. A dozen of these projects were lined up on my dresser, and you could see the progression of build-quality from early childhood on. The first one was the “General Lee” from the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard. It had crooked decals and thick, drippy paint. The roll cage looked like it was melted because of the thick globs of glue that hung off of it.

  Eager to find the first real car that I would build with my dad, I would ride my bike every week down to the Speedy Q gas station to pick up an Auto Trader. After searching for a few months we settled on a 1970 Pontiac GTO that was about a two-hour drive away in Flint, Michigan. My dad called the owner, who had a pole barn full of old muscle cars, and they haggled out a price of $1,400.

  The GTO was not really a car at this point. It was disassembled and in about fifty boxes, but the guy promised my dad that all the parts were there. Sight unseen, we arranged for a flatbed wrecker to follow us to Flint to pick up the car, and Uncle Norm came along for the ride.

  Just before we got there my dad looked at me and said, “Now don’t be disappointed when you see it, Grant. Remember, this thing is not even going to look like a car. It’s in a million pieces and the back fender is smashed in. I promise you, we are going to make this thing look like new, but it’s going to take real time and effort.”

  As we hopped out of the pickup truck the owner of the pieces came out of his house and greeted us with a firm handshake. As we walked back to the barn he looked at me and said, “So, son. Is this going to be your car?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  “You know what kind of car it is?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. It’s a Goat. This one should have a ‘YS’ stamped 400, right?” That referred to the code on the engine block with a 400-cubic-inch, 350-horsepower automatic. Over the past week I had read everything I could find on Goats and was trying to act smart.

  “Well, I guess you do know then! You’re a lucky kid, but I hope you’re good with a wrench, too.”

  “I think we’ll be fine,” my dad said as he shot me a wink.

  We shoved the front fenders inside the empty chassis shell and the flatbed started to pull the car up the platform. We loaded the doors, boxes of parts, and bags of unknown stuff into the back of the pickup and headed home to St. Clair.

  My dad knew that this would be a fantastic life lesson on organization, hard work, and persistence. You want a great car? Build one.

  At first my motivation waned. The car didn’t look like anything I wanted to drive, and it was difficult for me to visualize the end result. It was also really hard work to build it.

  The first step was restoring the frame to its original condition and that meant the miserable task of sandblasting years of rust, grease, and tar from the skeleton. I would suit up in a thick ski-coat with gloves, put the hood up, and drop a shield in front of my face so the sand wouldn’t get in my eyes or rip off my skin. As the sand whizzed out of the nozzle it would bounce off the frame and scatter everywhere—down my shirt, and in my pants and my hair. I would shower twice after finishing but still find sand behind my ears the next day in school.

  My dad sensed when my motivation wavered and kept me interested by letting me choose cosmetic improvements: a chrome air filter, metal-braided plug wires, and eventually the wheels. He gave me books and encouraged me to learn about everything we were doing. Before work began we talked about what we hoped to accomplish that day, and he’d hand me the giant builder’s manual to look up the procedures. We then carefully grouped, labeled, and boxed up all the loose parts in the order they would be needed.

  It was a lot like organizing a kitchen.

  The deeper we got into the project, the more it grew. I don’t think my dad realized how involved it would become. We converted the garage into a miniature body shop and my dad took crash courses on painting, bodywork, and welding. Before long we had giant air compressors, a host of specialty tools, and were as adept at talking the lingo as mechanics.

  For Christmas my parents got me a complete Alpine sound system for the half-built car: equalizer, six-disc CD changer, and radio. I opened the presents in rapid succession and the signature black and green boxes piled up. I was shocked that the biggest of the bunch read ROCKFORD FOSGATE.

  “Wow! You guys got me Rockford Fosgate subwoofers? Unbelievable! But where is the box?” I asked, referring to the enclosure for speakers.

  “You’re going to build the box, Grant.”

  “Build it? Build the box?”

  None of the prefabs would fit level in the trunk—they were all made for flat trunks. My dad thought that if we studied the way the boxes work, we could make one that was louder—and cooler—than anything we could buy.

  At the two-year mark we were nearly done. We took the entire body off the frame and disassembled the main pieces, painted and cleaned each one, and put them back together. My dad painted the body bright red, the original color, and I helped him stretch and glue down the black vinyl top. We bought reproduction material for the seats, brand-new premolded carpet for the floor, and had the dashboard and rubber bumper sent out to be re-dipped so that they’d look like new. Then, at last, we bolted on the oversize centerline wheels.

  On my sixteenth birthday we stood in front of the car and my dad dropped the keys into my hand. We looked at a show-quality 1970 GTO that my dad and I had built together.

  “Let’s go for a ride.”

  I was making dinner at home one evening in 1995, chatting with my mom and waiting for my dad to return from his weekly golf league outing when I heard the phone ring, watched my mom answer, and could tell immediately that something was wrong.

  “That was the golf course. They want me to come get your dad.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Apparently he’s too drunk to drive.”

  I offered to go, but my mom refused. Instead, I rode with her. Anticipating his reaction, especially when he saw me, I suggested we make sure he was somehow unable to jump in his truck and drive off. When we reached the course, I popped the hood of his truck and pulled all of the wires from the spark plugs and the distributor. I knew from building the GTO that each plug wire aligns with a specific plug on the cap to ensure the engine fires in succession. Once the order is lost it would take him an hour to get the plugs synchronized—when he was sober, that is. I closed the hood, and we walked inside to retrieve my dad.

  He insisted, of course, that he was fine as he stumbled out of the club toward the truck. Instead of fighting him, I motioned to my mom to let him get in and turn the key.

  The truck sat there silently as he turned the ignition. He figured out what I’d done and shot me a look with a raised eyebrow and faint smile before he got angry. I suspect he appreciated the cleverness for a moment; he had no choice but to surrender to the backseat of my mom’s car.

  The fifteen-minute ride was painful.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” my mom lectured. “Is that want you want? To have your son see you like this?”

  My father sat there in silence, his head bobbing up and down a
bit with the bumps in the road, not saying a word or reacting in any way. It was as if she didn’t exist.

  I just shook my head, still trying to process what I was now bearing witness to.

  When we arrived home, I went upstairs to my room and immediately put on my headphones. I knew that an argument would start when my dad sobered up enough to process everything, and I didn’t want to hear it. A few minutes went by and suddenly my mom opened my bedroom door.

  “He snuck out, Grant. I think he’s on your mountain bike.”

  “What! Jesus . . .”

  “I hid all the keys thinking he would try to take a car or a dirt bike. So I guess he took your bicycle.”

  I rolled out of the driveway and turned left down the pothole-riddled dirt road that was the route back to his truck. I figured he would go there and try to fix it. I had driven about three miles when I saw some movement in a ditch about 100 yards ahead of me. I slowed down and was pulling up when I realized it was him. There was Dad, crawling out of the ditch, covered in mud, carrying the bike in one hand.

  I got out of the car and walked up to him. “What the hell are you doing, Dad? You stole my fucking bike? Really?”

  “I think I hurt my shoulder,” he said without expression. He dropped the bike, and his right hand reached across to his left shoulder. He started to lift his shirt up but couldn’t move his left arm.

  I walked him over in front of the car so we could use the headlights to look more closely.

  When he lifted his hand away from the area I saw a protrusion lifting his shirt like a tent pole.

  We wrestled his shirt halfway off to find his collarbone fighting to break through his skin. “We have to get you to the hospital.”

  “No, Grant. I’m fine.”

  “Fine? You have a goddamn bone sticking out of your shoulder!”

  “I’ll go tomorrow.”

  For all of my childhood right through my teen years, in part because of my mother’s tenacious protection of me and her ability to shield and conceal my father’s growing debauchery and drinking, I was able to pretend that everything was fine. He was my dad, and an amazing one much of the time.