Greg Shemkovitz. Sunnyoutside Press, $16 paperback (272p) ISBN: 978-1-934513-49-1
There are few places
worse than a waiting room. Whether
you’re waiting to see a doctor or just waiting to get your car fixed, it’s a
terrible process. Best case scenario,
you spend a bunch of money and return to homeostasis. Worst case scenario, whatever you’re trying
to fix is beyond repair. Either way, you
remain in a state of anxious indeterminacy until someone more knowledgeable
than you (and you hope, as trustworthy) gives you the news.
This sense of anxiety and
the desire for something better infuse Lot
Boy by Greg Shemkovitz. Set in the
bleak winter landscape of Buffalo, Eddie Lanning, son of “Big Pat” Lanning,
spends his days at his father’s Ford dealership as the resident lot boy. Emptying the oil drums, sweeping the floor,
detailing the cars, going on parts runs—all of these are the menial tasks that
occupy the narrator’s day. He stomps
around, full of rebellion and a bad attitude, wanting nothing more than
escape—to get away from his crass and ill-tempered father, to get away from the
drudgery of the dealership, to get away from the endless snowy fields and strip
malls of Buffalo.
Each night, he only makes
it as far as a joy rides around town in one of his father’s cars, occasionally
getting picked up by the police. The
opportunity for a more permanent escape presents itself in one of Spanky’s
schemes, a mechanic whose catch phrase is “Shit’s fucked up, dude, you know?” They will order extra parts and sell them to
one of Spanky’s associates, a terse man with linebacker goons. From the outset, it is obvious what a
terrible idea this is.
Spanky
asked me to meet him a gravel parking lot off Tifft Street, near the nature
preserve. To get here, you have to go
through a shitty part of South Buffalo to get to an even shittier section,
until you cross a bridge into the wetlands and fields and eventually hit the
rundown industrial lakeshore. Seeing all
this decay and frozen debris pass by my windows, I realize that the only reason
anyone would ever come here is to sell stolen auto parts to somebody who would
only come here to buy them.
Of course, escape is not
so simple. While miring himself deeper
and deeper in Spanky’s plot, Eddie also must deal with the resurgence of
feelings for an ex-girlfriend, a woman whose past is evident in her limp and
the fact that she’s living in a house full of women. Eddie also must deal with his father’s
illness, a reality that worsens the more Eddie tries to ignore it.
Predictably, Spanky’s
scheme goes awry, and Eddie is left to deal with the aftermath of his
decisions. This plot winds up in a
satisfying way, and it helps highlight what Eddie is trying to leave behind—his
family at Lanning Ford: OJ, Deluca, Selznick, Jack, Andrew, Lester, and Edith,
who Eddie once thought, at a young age, was his mother.
Imagine
growing up surrounded by mechanics… Greasy, dirty-mouthed perverts, all of
them…Imagine what that means for a child.
It means developing an aptitude for mechanical vocabulary and simple
mathematics at an early age. But it also
means handing in homework assignments dotted with greasy fingerprints. It means knowing how to hold your own in the
locker room when all the boys are talking trash. But when it comes to girls, you have no
clue…You gain an imbalanced form of etiquette.
You become a smart-ass, calloused by dozens of older brothers and their
constant jabs.
Though
you can leave a place, home, that tenacious and inchoate feeling, is not so
easily abandoned. It seeps into your
skin like oil, leaving you forever altered.
In the end, whether or not Eddie finally escapes, it takes the entire
novel for him to finally understand what it is that he’s leaving. (July 2015)
Purchase Lot
Boy HERE.
Reviewer bio: Melissa Reddish is the author of The Distance Between Us (Red Bird
Chapbooks, 2013) and My
Father is an Angry Storm Cloud: Collected Stories (Tailwinds Press, 2015).
Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in print and online
journals. She teaches and directs the Honors Program at Wor-Wic Community
College on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When not writing or teaching,
she likes to do stereotypical Eastern Shore things, like eat crabs smothered in
Old Bay and take her Black Lab for long walks by the river.
*The title is a quote by the late Tom Magliozzi of NPR’s Car
Talk
