It’s either the thunder or the rock music that rouses me. I awake to the sound of clouds cracking open and Mötley Crüe blaring from the speakers in Uncle Punk’s garage across the alleyway. As I slowly surface from sleep, the rumbling dies down. I hear Punky rummaging around his tool chest, calloused fingers shuffling through steel drawers. He cranks the volume on his boombox and lowers himself onto the creeper cart. As he rolls under his Mustang, the wheels screech against the concrete floor. His voice rises above the dissonance. He belts the lyrics to “Dr. Feelgood.” If you like the gritty, raw-throated style of metal singing, he’s not half bad. In his twenties, Uncle Punk fronted a band called Woodpile. He’s lived on this block his entire life. According to him, ever since he got his first drum kit at age ten, the neighbors have been complaining about the noisy kid down the street – “The Punk on Pearson Avenue.”
There’s no use trying to fall back asleep, so I crawl out of bed and get dressed. From my second-floor window, I watch Punky work. I see his Wrangler-clad legs fluttering beneath the front bumper of his red GT. His hips gyrate as he fiddles with something under the chassis. Though he’s buried waist-deep, I know what he looks like above. Grease-stained collar. Acne-scarred cheeks. The same feathery mullet he’s sported for as long as I can remember. His physical appearance hasn’t changed a lick since I was in kindergarten. It’s his interior world that’s altered. As I approach high school graduation and he nears fifty, the connection we’ve always had is unraveling. Something happened during Grandpa’s illness. Instead of talking about old concert footage he found on YouTube, like AC/DC’s Countdown performance from 1979, he’s been into something he calls “Obama Bomb Drops.” First, he claimed that Barack Obama was going to be arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay, and recently, he’s been saying that the ex-president is getting subpoenaed for something called “Russia Gate.” A few days ago, he showed me a digital image of Bill Clinton in handcuffs. “I told you so,” Punky said, handing me his phone. A man in a black ski mask was leading a downcast Bill Clinton toward a cop car where a grinning Donald Trump waited behind the wheel. The strangest thing to me wasn’t that he’d been duped by a fake AI photo, but that, somewhere in his hazy mind, he’d conjured a conversation we’d never had. Told me what?
I have to sneak out of the house before Mom sees me. It’s easy to avoid her. She’s in the kitchen reading the newspaper like always. If Punky’s traditional weekend spot is the garage floor, the kitchen table is Mom’s domain. Much like the cobwebs and paint splatters that mark Punky’s territory, the coffee rings and sun-faded furniture are the residue of Mom’s rituals. They both grew up in this same house, and there are remnants of their sibling rivalry all over the place – dented appliances, scuffed floors from mom’s softball cleats, a spackled hole in the wall where Punky slashed his elbow through it. I can imagine them, two bullish personalities, battling to see whose presence would be the most prominent or longest lasting. If she knew I was heading out to see Punky, she’d try to stop me. The back door through the laundry room is the best escape route. It’s the exit farthest from the kitchen and the one least used in general. As though I’d placed a special request for my getaway, the dryer is running. The tumbling racket helps cover my footsteps. This isn’t the first time I’ve broken out of the house without Mom knowing. Usually, I can latch the door behind me without a single sound, but this time it slips through my grasp and clangs against the frame. I wait for a few seconds, but nobody comes.
The alley between our house and Punky’s is only about the width of a pickup truck. Aside from a few dumpsters and some shoe-draped telephone wires, it’s pretty empty. Nobody ever goes out there except to throw away their trash. I can get from our back porch to his makeshift auto shop in about fifteen seconds. During his band years, Mom and Punky still both lived at home. Grandpa was working at the Goodyear Tire factory, Uncle Punk was delivering pizzas, and Mom was studying to be a social worker at Kent State University. It was when Punk turned thirty and started working a second job as a mechanic over at Pearson Service Center that he was able to afford a place of his own. That place ended up being the rattier side of a small duplex fifty paces from his childhood residence. About two years later, I was born, and about one year after that, my dad ditched all of us for a lady named Crystal and a MIG welding job in Cleveland.
The streets are dry, but the earthy scent of rain is in the air. Up close, the garage is so loud I can feel the bass pulsing behind my right eye socket. For a second, I wonder if that is what’s gone wrong with Uncle Punk, some kind of hearing damage combined with rattled brain syndrome. He’s still singing and jimmying around under the hood when I walk up and give his boot a kick.
He lets out a yelp and wheels his way into full view. “What the fuck?”
Lying flat on his back, smeared with soot and wreathed in grimy hair, he looks more like a sasquatch than a guy you’d like fixing your carburetor, but whatever. It’s Punky. That’s just who he is.
“Zach Attack!” he says, rising to a seated position on his whirly cart and stretching his arms out toward me. “I’d give you a hug, but I look like shit.”
“You definitely do,” I say. Even his lips are caked in what looks like tar. His whole body’s been rolled through a charcoal pit.
“I’m glad that you’re here,” he says. “Can you hand me that combo wrench and the flex funnel?”
I know exactly what he’s talking about. I see both instruments lying on his workbench. It took a while, but over the years, between lessons from him and Grandpa Fred, I’ve become fluent in shop language. When I come back to the front of the car, Punky is draped half above and half beneath the engine block. He hooks his arm around the bumper and reaches for the wrench first. As he slides back under the bay, I see the open hood and all the parts inside. It’s a 2015 model, but he only purchased it a couple of years ago, right after Grandpa passed and left him some inheritance money. I’ve never seen the compartment look so dirty before. It’s honestly pretty shocking. A mass of leaves and twigs is so densely packed around the casings that it looks like a gang of condors has used the space as their own private nesting grounds.
“You listen to Bongino this morning, like I told you to?” His voice is muffled by the undercarriage, but mostly by the music. I can barely make out a word he’s saying. It sounds like he asked if I played the banjo this morning, but that can’t be right.
“Can we turn the radio down?” I ask.
“You know where it is,” he says, grunting as he cranks a bolt loose under the oil pan.
When I reach the boombox, an ad is playing for the station. It blasts from the speakers. “97.5 WONE, Akron’s home for Rock & Roll.” I turn the knob to the left, and the volume lowers. Along with the noise level comes the ferocity of everything else in the room. It’s like one big dimmer switch for aggression. I can still hear the ringing in my ears. The next song starts, a muted guitar riff in the distance. Punky drops his wrench, jangling me back to reality. He finishes unscrewing the fastener with his fingers.
He glides out onto the creeper and holds out his hand for the funnel. I give it to him, and he trundles back under the car. “Bongino,” he repeats.
“Oh, right,” I say. “The Bongino Show. I remember. No, I haven’t listened yet,” I lie.
A few weeks ago, following some gentle suggestions, Punk really amped up his intensity. He’s been insisting that I tune into the right-wing podcasts that are driving his new outlook on America. For some reason, they all start with Bs. Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Bannon, Breitbart… I listened to a few clips, but after one too many stories about UFOs, clandestine overlords, and inside jobs, I couldn’t take it any longer. More than anything, it just made me sad. It made me miss the old Uncle Punk, the guy who left politics to the pundits and spent most of his time listening to old Glam albums and raving about car models with hefty cylinder banks, like the V16 Bugatti Chiron Super Sport. We can’t even talk about baseball anymore because we disagree about what name to use for our local team.
“You’re going to be sorry,” Punky says. He wiggles further underneath the car and uncaps the oil plug. “If you don’t stay informed, you won’t know what to do when the shit really hits the fan. This isn’t something to play with, Zach,” he says. “We’re talking demonic forces. Real demons. Spiritual possession. I mean,” he goes on, skidding an empty plastic container beneath the drain, “You’ve at least seen, Pramila Jayapal, right?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe.”
“All you have to do is look at her. May as well have devil horns. The possession is there. She’s evil. It’s in her eyes. Same thing with Jasmine Crocket, Ilhan Omar…” he trails off.
I have no idea how to respond. That’s the worst part. Before, when he spoke about cars, music, or sports, I had something to offer. I could relate to the conversation. How do you contribute to a discussion about satanic ghosts? The only thing I can think to say is that all the people he mentioned seem to have a few telling things in common, but I know that’s not what he wants me to focus on. He wants me to expand the scope of his bizarre universe, not shrink it.
For some reason, he has the jacks adjusted lower than normal. His body is pressed so tightly to the reservoir that the base of it creases his nose. When I step back and peer down, I notice another container beside him, separate from the one catching the oil. It looks like a vat of bathwater with bubbles, only thicker, more gelatinous. It’s sort of sparkly. He scrapes it closer with his free hand. It doesn’t slosh much, just jiggles.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he says, but before I can reply, he adds, “Calamine carbonate. Pure liquid zinc.”
“What’s it for?”
“Crow’s feet,” he says. His vessel is almost full. The flow slows to a trickle.
“Huh?”
“Just kidding,” Punky laughs. “I’m replacing the oil with it.”
“Like, completely?” I ask.
“One hundred percent.”
“Nothing but straight zinc? Since when?”
“Since right now.”
“But don’t you have to use hydrogen? Zinc doesn’t have hydrogen, right? I got a C in chemistry last year.”
“Hydrogen is essentially just air, and air is dirty. It’s unclean. That’s what gives oil that black color. It’s like leaving an avocado out overnight on the kitchen table. Black is no good.”
“So…” I’m trying to make sense of what he’s saying, but I can’t. For the last decade, Punk’s been teaching me about stuff like viscosity and synthetic polymers. He never once mentioned anything about zinc. “Isn’t that going to run hot? What cools it down? What’s the foaming agent?”
“Zinc is its own cooling component. It’s like a self-cleaning oven, only the oven is the engine.”
“But what about the racing oils, the Helix Ultra?” For years, Punky’s been raving about Denny Hamlin and the premium oil he uses in his Toyota XSE. It’s a big part of what makes him the best in the world, he says.
“Forget about that,” Punky says.
“Forget about Denny Hamlin?”
“No,” Punk says. “Just, you know, do some research.”
Unfortunately, I do know. I know that “doing research” has been Uncle Punk’s answer to everything for the last two years. He’s done research about how to get rich off cryptocurrency. How to use coffee enemas to lose weight fast. Which Hollywood celebrities use online retail markets to traffic young girls. Where the underground Lizard tunnels are located in Boston.
“Listen,” he continues, “all I know is that when I was riding with the Pennzoil Platinum, I was getting a weird aroma. Something between burning hair and overcooked bacon.”
Stepping closer, I look down into the engine bay again. It’s like a pine tree exploded inside. There are so many needles and twigs that I can reach down and scoop up dozens without even trying.
“What are you doing?” Punky asks. He can hear me probing around above him.
“Have you thought about what all of this debris in the engine compartment could be causing?” I ask.
Punky laughs so hard he snorts. “Ha! That’s child’s play, brother.”
“You’re gonna start a fire,” I tell him. “And the tires,” I say, kicking the treads on the left front wheel. “They’re bald, man. They’ve got dry rot. Look at this,” I say, toeing a few shreds of rubber straight from the sidewalls. “It’s flaking right off.”
Punky freezes completely. The sudden absence of motion is jolting. I hold my breath. “Let’s don’t get started on tires, okay?” He waits for my answer before moving again.
“Right,” I say remorsefully. “Sorry about that.”
Shit. I wasn’t thinking. If I’d been thinking, I wouldn’t have mentioned anything about tires. They’ve been such a sensitive subject over the last two years that someone would have to be an idiot to bring them up again. Tires were what killed Grandpa. Well, at least part of the way.
“Zinc,” he repeats, his voice fading with each word. “We’re all about zinc today. Zincing… it… up…” He grabs the cloth tucked in his waistband and uses it to dry his hands.
Grandpa Fred worked at the Goodyear Tire Factory for thirty-five years. In 2022, after he fainted during a hiking trip in Fairfield County, Punky rushed him to the hospital. That was when we discovered that he had something called mesothelioma, an aggressive, rare form of cancer caused almost exclusively by inhaling asbestos fibers. As it turned out, the Goodyear corporation was aware of the hazard for a long time but never disclosed the concern or took any action to prevent it. I guess it was in the equipment they used, machines called “curing presses” and “heat shields.” These were words Mom read to me from the report published in The Beacon Journal. She didn’t know what they were exactly, and neither did I, but we came to understand that these were objects of contamination and that her father, my grandfather, had touched them and breathed in their fumes without ever knowing about their secret toxins.
The sun is trying to peek through, but the sky is still dark and grumbly. The opening percussion from Faith No More’s “Epic” erupts from the radio, and because everything is so quiet at the moment, it’s louder than the other songs. Punky starts in, crooning along.
“Did you know,” he says, breaking from his singing, “that FNM’s lead singer, Mike Patton, released a live crab on stage during one of their concerts?”
“He did?” I ask. “Why?”
“No fucking reason,” Punky laughs. “He’s a maniac. I love it!”
I’m reminded again about how upsetting it is that I can’t believe him anymore. I want to go back to when he was my biggest confidant. In junior high, if I had trouble asking a girl out or if I wasn’t sure what to do when Mom was pissed off, I went to Uncle Punk. He always knew what to say. And this whole thing with Grandpa… I had nowhere to turn. One way to put it is that before Grandpa died, Punky would have been the first person I talked to about Grandpa dying. It was right after the pandemic, which complicated things. He’d already decided that the whole debacle was a hoax perpetrated by global elites in order to “thin the herd,” something he called “Social Darwinism.” It was a theory that clicked with Grandpa’s and Punky’s already narrow philosophy about survival. Because he and Fred had always maintained they were the fittest among any crowd, they didn’t have to worry about some “cockamamie disease.” As always, they found allies in their idols – Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, Richard Petty, even Richard Kramer, guys who just want to live free, drive fast, and drink Budweiser. I used to be the same, a believer in the Bible of Bravado. After Grandpa’s death, though, I came to the opposite conclusion. If the coronavirus could kill a rugged guy like Grandpa Fred, who went bowhunting for black bear up in Ottawa National Park, I needed to reassess my perspective. Punky was simply more stubborn than I.
Punky’s energy comes back online. His vocals soar.
“This song is pretty dope,” I say, lying again. This is how we communicate now, a series of deceptions. If I’m being honest, I don’t really get Faith No More. The whole idea of them is cringe to me. Why were there so many bands in the late 80s and early 90s that got lost in some warped limbo between rap and slop-rock? Nobody else thought it was odd to see a bunch of roided-up white guys chest-puffing and growling into the microphone while wearing jean shorts and soul patches?
After six months of chemotherapy, Grandpa Fred started feeling a little better. He got some color back in his cheeks, and he was able to walk to the mailbox without feeling like he’d pass out. Then, a week later, he came down with COVID. This equation, mesothelioma plus COVID, is what ultimately equaled several sums for Fred, including his own death, the fatal rift between his two kids, and whatever scrapheap of a relationship Punky and I have left. The final blowup came on the day of the funeral when Punky told Mom that in the next election, he was voting for Robert F. Kennedy. Punk said he liked his stance on vaccine avoidance, and Mom stormed out the door. She slammed it so hard that one of our family pictures fell off the wall and shattered. The reason it was such a hyper explosion was that it was compounded by their previous conversation, which happened about three weeks prior. That time, Punky claimed the real reason Goodyear didn’t report the safety violations was that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro wanted to keep sending all his violent criminals to work at the plant, and he threatened to murder all the executives if they didn’t keep their mouths shut. My mom — and this is when she completely lost it — told him he was a “total shithead.” The reason nobody stopped the misconduct, she assured him, was simply because the CEO, Richard Kramer, didn’t give a “flying fuck” about anyone or anything other than his vile bank account, and also why, she wanted to know, WHY was Punky, for the love of GOD, always so deeply interested in irrational bullshit and so unconcerned about all the rational, crucial issues in the MOTHER FUCKING world?! That’s when Punk started laughing, and I thought for sure Mom was going to flip the kitchen table upside down. He stared her dead in the eyes and said, “That’s why I’m a lion, and you’re a sheep.” The look on Mom’s face, those laser beam eyes, could have fried eggs, and that was the moment some vital link between them snapped.
The song’s percussive lyrics, along with Punk’s fierce vocals, remind me to ask him something. “Hey, Punk,” I say, cutting in as the piano solo starts. “You’re coming to the game next weekend, right?”
Punky sets his tools down, leaving a pocket of silence in the wake. “Next weekend,” he says, clearing his throat. “Right. That’s right. I forgot.”
“I thought you might,” I say.
“Next weekend is the Rumble in Rhodes Arena,” Punk says.
His body is rigid and still beneath the car. The song ends, and in the hush that follows, neither of us moves. I can hear him breathing. “But it’s the state semi-finals, Punk.”
He tugs the rag out from his waistband and begins wiping his hands. A new song comes on the radio. This time it’s the Spin Doctors I’ll have to pretend to like. “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” pours from the speakers. Uncle Punk hums along. It’s automatic with him.
“Yeah, I know,” Punk says, “but it’s not The Rumble. This is the first-ever UFC event in the history of Akron. It’s a huge deal. You should come.”
“I can’t come,” I say, feeling my voice rise involuntarily. “What are you talking about? I have the big game.”
Punky sighs. “I know, but…” he pauses, considers saying something more, then sighs again. “I don’t expect you to understand, but this is bigger than baseball. This is the kind of occasion that could blow everything sky high. It’ll put us on the map. People come from all over the country, shit, all over the world to see spectacles like this!”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Aside from Mom, Punky’s been my biggest fan since second grade. Baseball was maybe the most significant thing we ever shared. We both played first base. For a few years, during Little League, he was my coach. He taught me how to use a first baseman’s glove and how to do the special heel stretch on the bag when the throws were wild. The only person I knew who was more into baseball was Mom. Over the years, she tried warning me about his lackadaisical attitude toward sports. According to her, he was a decent fielder in his day, but it was his bat that really got him a lot of attention. He had one of those barbaric swings like Jim Thome’s, which makes sense because he was one of Punky’s and my all-time favorite major leaguers. If he made contact with the ball, Mom said, it went about five hundred feet over the fence, but most of the time he twirled so hard he missed the ball altogether. It was like watching one of those old cartoons where the Tasmanian Devil spins so fast and so recklessly that he screws himself straight down into the earth. All or nothing. That was Punky. And the craziest thing was that he didn’t seem to care. Win or lose, he still pranced around like the king of fucking Ohio. It was insufferable, Mom said. And she would know. Mom still has her picture hanging up at Ellet High. She has the most hits in our school’s history. As the star outfielder for the softball team, she was called the female Tony Gwynn. It didn’t hurt that her name, Tricia Glenn, practically rhymed with his. But the biggest reason was her hitting stroke. She didn’t smack many homers, but she wore the scorecard out with singles and doubles. I don’t think my batting style fits neatly into either camp, but I know something else that’s more important. I know enough to feel regret and humility about my limitations.
“I don’t need the world, Punk,” I tell him. “I just need you.”
As soon as it comes out, I regret it. I’m not sure what I thought I’d say, but I didn’t expect that. Something shifts inside of me. What came from a place of sadness is already transforming into anger. Why did he make me say that? He did this to me. I can feel the resentment simmering in my gut.
“Don’t say that,” Punky says.
“Why?” I ask, already sensing the answer.
“It’s just…” he puts the wrench down and slides the bucket aside. He scoots out from under the car and sits up. It’s as if he’s just cleaned an entire chimney with his bare body. “That’s your mom talking.”
Instinctively, my fingers curl into fists. I hide them behind my back.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I want him to say it directly, spell it out.
“Baseball is soft,” Punky says. “This world is hard. You need to be able to defend yourself. Playing baseball isn’t combat. UFC is war. That’s the next frontier. If you’re not ready for war, you aren’t ready for anything,” Punky says. He stands and runs his hands down his jeans, trying to scrub the grime off, but it’s no use. His hands are smeared in black goo.
“That’s what you want the world to be, not what it is.”
“Why would I want that?”
“I don’t know!” I yell. There’s no controlling it now. “Why do you want that?!” My teeth gnash together. Spit dribbles from my lips and down my chin.
He quits trying to mop his hands and steps toward me. The Spin Doctors’ song ends. The thunder has given up its battle. He sees me backing away with my hands behind my waist. A strip of sunlight appears just beyond the open door.
“Don’t do that,” he says, shuffling toward me. He keeps reaching for my arms, but I keep dodging out of the way. Then, all at once, he lunges for me. I’m ready for him. It was Punky who taught me that if you’re going to fight, do it right. Strike first and strike hard. Don’t stop. We spent weeks sparring right here in this very garage. I still have a gash on my right hand where I accidentally caught a knuckle on the side of his bench grinder. I know what to do. I cock my elbow and bring my fist forward as hard as I can. If Punky hadn’t jumped out of the way, I would have clocked him right in the face. Instead, I land a vicious hook to his sternum. I hear the oof of breath leaving his lungs as he slumps to one knee.
“Zachary!” It’s my mom’s voice. She’s suddenly appeared in the alleyway, standing there in her white fluffy bathrobe and her silly pink slippers, the ones with the baby pig faces.
“Mom!” I shout, and before I can stop myself, I’m rushing toward her.
Behind me, there’s the sound of skittering feet, like a moose trying to run on ice. When I turn around, I see Punky grab the front of the Mustang and hoist himself up. A plume of dust hovers in the air. He’s still winded but pretending not to be. When he tries to straighten up, he winces and sways back against the hood. Mom opens her arms. She smells of grapefruit and coconut shampoo. Nothing can hold me back. I know what Punky’s thinking, and I don’t care. Nobody should ever turn down an authentic opportunity for genuine comfort.
