Flash Nonfiction
Personal Essay, Memoir, or Vignette
Joanne Furio
WHAT DADDY DIDN’T KNOW
In 1983 I bought a 16-year-old Opel Kadett for $500. It was the only car I could afford. I was a college student who worked part-time and lived at home. The car looked like a refugee from East Germany, with an unassuming profile that was all function and no form. My father, a car guy, hated it. There was rot over a wheel well. To repair a dent, one of the previous owners had poured concrete into the engine’s front right corner. I liked the car because it was a stick shift. At the time I wore eyeliner and leopard kerchiefs in the style of post-war Europe and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. I named the car Fraulein.
When my childhood friend and I drove Fraulein to Rye Beach in the early 1980s, the car broke down on the New England Thruway. We were stoned out of our minds. Sunburned and still wearing a wet bathing suit under my cut offs, I watched the speedometer go down, down, down, as I pulled over. When the car came to a complete stop, we burst out laughing. The car shook as semis blew past. Because this was a busy interstate, a tow truck soon arrived. The driver was blond and buff and unaware of the effect of his muscles. My friend forced me to sit next to him in the cab and made goo-goo eyes at me. At the thruway garage, I called home collect. My dad took it from there. When he arrived, we had to wipe the smiles from our faces.
My friend and I had similar fathers: both Italian-American and children of immigrants. Both worked in the oil industry in different capacities. Her father owned a gas station in the Bronx; mine worked a white-collar job at an oil company’s Manhattan headquarters. Both believed in never-ending progress and the American way in a time when few worried about the consequences of oil consumption. Both were old-fashioned Daddy types who could fix anything. When my friend and I were in a minor fender bender, her father just happened to be driving home from work and stopped to help us. We relied on these men to rescue us.
When the call came in from the shop, I learned that my car had simply run out of gas. My friend and I laughed at the perfect stoner punchline. When I told my father, he shook his head at the needless money wasted. The danger we had put ourselves in. Even he could not save us from our own stupidity.
About the writer:
Joanne Furio is a writer of creative nonfiction whose personal essays, author interviews and book reviews have appeared in Believer, Catapult, Juked, Panoply, The Evening Street Review, Cumberland River Review, etc. Her essay “Coveting,” about Catholic school girls on a stealing bender, is being turned into a short Pixar coop film, due out this year.
Image: Hippie Girl by O:JA&L staff creative. AI-assisted digital image. Proprietary image. 2025.
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