This Modern Writer: Training to be a Writer by Digging Holes in Scranton, Pennsylvania by Salvatore Pane

From ages six through 13, I spent most summer days at my father’s garage in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He purchased the place from his family in the late 80s, and there wasn’t much to do at C. Pane Body Shop for a dorky young boy. I was too small to help my father actually work and no matter what I did, I inevitably ended up oil-coated and dirty, much to the continual annoyance of my mother. My partner in crime was my dad’s guard dog, a German Shepherd named Max who absolutely adored me. We used to play in the back lot and his chief trick was picking up a spare tire in his jaw and running back and forth across the gravel, kicking up dust clouds in his wake. In winter-time he’d repeat the trick, only with the added danger of frozen puddles and oil slicks. But my favorite thing to do with Max was run up to one of my dad’s buddies and cry out in mock pain–then Max would flip out, start barking, and chase the old geezer down. The thing about my dad’s shop was there was always people there, my dad’s buddies and especially my deceased grandfather’s pals, Scrantonian old timers who talked my ear off. These guys paid me special attention, asked me how school was going, who I liked in NASCAR—I said the rainbow warrior Jeff Gordon just to piss everybody off—and would take me with them in their beater trucks to pick up lunch for my dad and all the other C. Pane regulars. There was even an annual Christmas party where my dad cooked deer stew right there in front of the frame rack and served everybody on folding tables and chairs.

What I loved about those old guys is that they never dumbed down their conversations for me. They spoke like adults. They called people out. They cursed. They spat. They scratched themselves. And it was here I first learned to really appreciate dialogue, how people all sound unique. I never said much. I’d mess around with a floor jack and listen, soak it all in, let the music of their grizzled old voices wash over me.

Sometimes my dad gave me tasks. I never got to work on the cars—except one time when I clumsily took apart a bumper—and instead was given all the crap jobs, pulling weeds and painting walls. The worst was one summer when my dad showed me a pile of rocks, handed me a shovel, and told me to turn it into a hole. A few days later, when I finally finished, he nodded approvingly and told me to fill it back up. At the time, I wanted to chuck the shovel at him and tell him to go to hell. But now, it’s clear that this was all part of his strategy to make me hate the garage so I’d never get sucked in like he did and end up working with my hands, something my parents made it clear they were against.

When I wasn’t working—which was most times—I holed up in one of the customer’s cars and read. I tore through the entire collection of Bruce Coville books, pulpy things about island kids trying to build artificial intelligence or precocious young boys abducted by aliens to decide the fate of the human race. When that got boring, I played the revamped Donkey Kong on GameBoy. When I got older, I spent most days writing short stories or drawing comics. But for the most part, I’d wander around the garage and the lot outside, Max trotting by my side, and play out stories in my head. It was the first real time I thought I was training for something, training to spend an inordinate amount of time in my own mind with fabricated characters.

My father’s selling the garage this month. He’s moved onto a new career with Defense Services Two painting vehicles for the government, and soon I’ll be returning to Scranton to help him clear the garage out. I’m glad for the time I spent there: I got to be with my dad, read a ton, write a ton, learn the way honest working people talked. Like most only children, I hated not having somebody my own age to pal around with during those hot summer days at the garage. But now I see how vital they were in preparing me for long days spent in front of the computer with nothing but Microsoft Word and my often distracted imagination. The garage was where I first figured out that people could live inside their own minds. It was where I first began to consider what it meant to be a writer.