Of all the things I loved to do when I was a kid, the one I most wish I could do again is this: driving around with my granddad.
When I was five or six, I was obsessed with cranes—the construction machinery, not the bird—and J. Ray would drive me around to look at the various giant cranes building things around Houston. Sometimes we’d look at them from a distance, but other times he’d talk his way onto a construction site so we could look at the cranes up close. We might’ve even climbed into one a time or two.
When I was ten or eleven, my favorite food was chicken-fried steak. J. Ray would drive me all over the greater Houston area to eat and rate various chicken-fried steaks. That’s what he would have me do: rate them. We’d be at some random diner or cafe in Sealy or something, and he’d watch me enjoy my chicken-fry (while enjoying his own, too, of course). After I’d wolfed the whole thing down, he’d say, “Okay, son, what do you give it?” I’d take a sip of my Dr. Pepper before offering a verdict on a scale of 1 to 10, sometimes with decimal points for precision. J. Ray made me feel like this rating mattered very much, like he was always hoping for that perfect ten.1
Mostly, though, being a passenger in my granddad’s car didn’t mean giant cranes or chicken-fried steaks—it meant going to work with him. Many summer mornings, my brother and I would be at home with nothing to do, eating our Fruity Pebbles and watching The Price is Right, when J. Ray would show up at our house unannounced and ask if we wanted to ride along with him that day. We never hesitated.
He owned an air-conditioning company called Eagle Mechanical, a name which seemed extremely cool to me as a kid.2 Eagle Mechanical consisted of two people: J. Ray and a technician named Gene, who would meet us in the work truck wherever we went.3 We’d ride all over town, from Clear Lake to Champions Forest, entering strangers’ houses, drinking whatever they offered us, watching our rotund granddad climb into hot attics. He seemed to be good friends with all his customers, and he always spent far more time shooting the breeze than dealing with their AC. Even as a kid, I had the sense that J. Ray’s products and services weren’t always the best—my dad complained more than once about the AC his own father had sold him—but his customers rarely seemed to mind.4
He also seemed to be on joking terms with the employees at every AC supply store in town. We’d go in there to get a part and he’d introduce us—“Ralph, these are my grandsons”—and the guy behind the counter would look at us with a serious face and say something like, “I’m sorry to hear that, boys. Must be tough to have an old guy like this as your granddad.” We’d just smile and nod, only getting the joke later.
J. Ray did commercial jobs, too—a McDonald’s here, a tire shop there—and if we were lucky, he might have to stop by and see an interesting customer. One time he did work for a nightclub that always got advertised on 104 KRBE.5 We stopped by before lunch and the closed, dark nightclub had a weird vibe, but the owner gave us Shirley Temples and let us play unlimited games of pool while we waited on our granddad. How many kids could say they’d done that?
We’d always stop for good lunches, driving way out to Kemah for beer-battered shrimp or to some ancient and greasy burger joint he knew about, where we’d be sure to get milkshakes. But the real fun of those workdays wasn’t the food or the empty nightclubs. The fun was just riding alongside our granddad, this jovial figure who looked like a kinder version of Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard.
J. Ray always had stories to tell, jokes to make, observations to share, advice to give, much of it borderline inappropriate or highly embellished. He’d tell us about a guy who worked on his parents’ farm in Normangee when he was a kid who ate thirty-two biscuits in a single sitting. Or he’d say stuff like, “Boys, there’s nothing sexier than a pregnant woman.” Or he’d tell us about the many cousins of his who’d been hit by trains. Or we’d drive by a prison and he’d turn around to pat my brother’s knee and say, “We’ll be visiting you there someday, son.” We ate it all up.
As we drove around, he’d share bits of family history that we never would’ve known otherwise. He’d talk about the horse my uncle bought and cared for in high school or the rock bands my other uncle drove around when he worked as a limo driver.6 Or he’d talk about his own brother, who’d spent time in jail for writing bad checks. Or he’d fondly recall his time in the service, when he was stationed in Florida and dated two nurses at once (back before he met our grandmother, of course). Or he’d make fun of my dad for being a neat-freak as a kid, mocking him for always following the rules. Each new detail was a revelation.7
J. Ray was a great talker, but he didn’t just talk. He got us to talk too. He asked questions, solicited our opinions, gauged our interests.8 He made us feel comfortable, even when he made fun of us.9 And if our day was going a little too predictably, he’d switch things up, take us to a dollar movie or some parking-lot carnival or a visiting battleship or a random horse farm or the San Jacinto Monument. Or maybe just talk his way up to the roof of a large skyscraper downtown so we could check out the view.
When you were with J. Ray, you never knew what you might end up doing.
***
One Saturday morning when I was thirteen, my granddad picked me and my brother up without telling us where we were going. We headed in the general direction of his house, out in the deep suburbs, where the subdivisions begin to turn into farmland, but we didn’t stop there. My brother and I didn’t ask any questions. We were always happy to go anywhere J. Ray wanted to take us.
We drove down a feeder road lined with trees and then stopped next to some orange and white barricades that barred the entrance to a highway construction area. My granddad put his flashers on and looked over at me. “Get out and move those.”
I stared at him, waiting for him to say he was pulling my leg—he was always using that phrase—but he didn’t smile or say anything else. He just stared back at me, the flashers ticking away.
Wasn’t this illegal? I was a rule follower, like my dad. I wasn’t going to move those barricades. J. Ray and I never fought.10 But I stayed in my seat, hoping he’d change his mind.
“Let’s go, son,” he said. “Can’t wait here forever.”
I stepped out of the car. Looking around for police or witnesses, I hurried over to one of the barricades and dragged it over to the side. Now I was implicated in the crime. My granddad drove through the opening and then waited for me. I moved the barricade back in its place, covering our tracks, and got back in the car.
J. Ray drove like he knew where he was going, like he’d been here before. Soon we entered an unfinished highway. Or, rather, an almost-finished highway. Several lanes, smooth and pristine, stretching far and straight into the distance. This was the new State Highway 99, the Grand Parkway. No traffic signs yet, no other cars, no other people—the kind of road you’d drive on in a dream.
He parked his Maxima in the middle of this not-quite-finished highway, opened his door, and told me to get in the driver’s seat. I’d never been behind the wheel of a car before, but I did what I was told, despite my many reservations.
I listened for oncoming sirens as my granddad gave me instructions. Check your mirrors. Put your right foot on the brake and put the car in drive. Now use that same foot for the gas. Let’s go, son.
As you might expect, I drove very slowly, cautiously, nervously. I drove like I was going through a school zone lined with police officers holding both radar guns and actual guns. I drove scared.
“Stop,” my granddad said.
That’s when J. Ray scolded me. He told me this kind of driving wasn’t gonna cut it. I needed to put the pedal to the metal. I needed to let it loose. “Let’s go, son. You gotta learn to go much faster than that. You gonna drive on the damn highway one day going fifteen miles per hour?”
Reluctantly, I took my foot off the break and started to go faster. Twenty, thirty, forty. But that wasn’t fast enough for J. Ray. “Give it more gas,” he said. “Come on, now. Faster.”
Fifty. Fifty-five.
“Keep going. Fast as you can.”
My brother remained quiet in the backseat. I like to imagine his emotional state at that moment, this eleven year-old riding in the backseat of a Maxima driven by a nervous thirteen year-old who has been instructed to go as fast as he can.
Sixty. Sixty-five. Seventy.
“Stop!” J. Ray yelled.
I came to a nice and easy rolling stop, feeling proud that I hadn’t given my passengers whiplash. But J. Ray wasn’t happy with me.
“When I say stop, you gotta stop right then. I didn’t say slow down, son. I said stop. What if there was a wreck right in front of you? What if there was a little dog running across the street? You can’t drive if you don’t know how to stop. Let’s go again. When I say stop, you stop this time.”
I took it slow, waiting for him to tell me to stop. But he didn’t: he told me to speed up. So I sped up. Then he told me to speed up again. Over fifty. Over sixty. Over seventy.
“Stop!”
I didn’t slam on the brakes, but I stopped much quicker than before.
“Better,” he said. “A little better.”
We kept moving down the unmarked highway, working on those two things: going fast and stopping fast. I kept breaking my own speed barrier—Did I make it to eighty? Ninety?—until finally the highway in the distance became an unfinished bridge that jutted out into the air over a river. The end of the road. This seems like a detail I might’ve imagined, or maybe dreamed, except my brother remembers that bridge, too.
I’m not sure if J. Ray and I switched seats again at the bridge or if he let me turn the car around and drive back. But I do remember this: at some point, without even realizing it, I’d stopped listening for sirens. And I’d stopped being so scared of putting my foot on the gas.
We never got caught.
***
There’s so much more to say about riding around with J. Ray. How he kept a spring-loaded Rolodex next to his carphone and a pistol in his glove compartment. How he’d hike up his pants, roll down his window, and spit every time he got on the highway.11 How he’d show up at my high school every evening during the fall of my sophomore year, after whatever sports practice I had, and hand me the keys to the Maxima so I could practice driving home on the busy Houston highways.12 How he taught my brother to drive, too, out on the empty country roads near Needville.
How he’d drive us out to Normangee, taking us along as he cleaned up old family graves in the little cemeteries around town and pointing out the various railroad crossings where his cousins got hit by trains. How he’d take us with him to visit some distant elderly relative we didn’t even really know—Aunt Vietta or Aunt Oma or Willie Dot—and how he’d bring them a box of light bulbs (“Old people love light bulbs”) and chat on their couches like he had all the time in the world, even as we quickly got antsy. How he took us to Rice football games when we were kids and the basketball state tournament in Austin when we were teenagers, not because he was interested in sports—he wasn’t, really—but because we were.
How we took another road trip to Normangee when I was in college and he was well into his seventies, and I put on some Hank Williams Sr., assuming my granddad would enjoy the classic songs of a fellow country-boy born only a few years before him, and J. Ray made me turn it off almost right away, saying he wanted something “with a good beat.”13 No slow stuff for my granddad.
How the car rides dwindled away when he got sick, the massive heart attack he had in the hospital, getting brought back by CPR multiple times, spending many weeks in long-term care with a breathing tube, eventually getting out and living long enough to see me get married. How shocking it was to see him in a lesser state, much skinnier, more tired, speaking much more softly, never again quite as sharp as before. How long it took to stop seeing that J. Ray in my mind after he died. How much I miss him still. How much I wish he’d show up at my house unannounced.
The J. Ray I see now is the one who might make anything happen at any time. If you had the good fortune to ride around with him, you couldn’t help but feel a little more awake, a little more alive. Life always felt a little less dull, and a little more enchanted, when you were in his car. Any time he picked you up, there was always a decent chance you’d end up with a story you’d be telling for years afterwards.
We knew he wasn’t perfect—that was obvious, even when we were kids—but we also saw how he loved people, not in an abstract or hypothetical way but with the kind of love that takes genuine pleasure from their presence. Wherever we went, he usually made people laugh and smile, even if they were skeptical of him at first.14 Wherever we went, he made a connection with somebody, found some common link, took an interest in their interests. And he did the same thing with his grandkids, every time we got in his car.
J. Ray offered some questionable wisdom over the years (“If I can give you only one piece of advice, son, it would be this: marry a rich woman”), but there was also an implicit lesson behind everything he did with us. It was a lesson about choosing to make time, again and again and again, for the people you love. He made it seem easy—natural, even—but now I’m old enough to realize the extraordinary effort he put into being our granddad. That kind of effort isn’t easy at all. Yet he always seemed to get a kick out of it. Each time he picked us up, he was teaching us that love isn’t about fulfilling an obligation; love is about the joy you get from giving other people joy.
The closest we got to a perfect 10 chicken-fried steak was a place on I-10 called the Alamo Cafe. As far as I can tell, there are no more Alamo Cafes in the Houston area. If I’m remembering right, it was in the parking lot of an outlet mall, which is either the best or worst possible place to get a chicken-fried steak.
Now the name makes me laugh. It makes me think of American Empirical Pictures, the name of Wes Anderson’s production company. I remember reading somewhere that Wes and Owen Wilson came up with the name when they first arrived in Hollywood as a way to make their production company sound as adult and imposing as possible. Eagle Mechanical has the same vibe. Actually, it sounds like a front.
In my late teens, Gene was replaced by David. Each of these men seemed to have their own complicated employer-employee relationship with my grandfather.
My granddad was the kind of salesman who might view his own son as a potential source of easy money. He’d tell you he was giving you a deal, but you might not always feel that way afterwards.
I can’t remember which one. Was it the original Sam’s Boat? Maybe. I wish J. Ray was around for me to ask.
One night, apparently, my uncle drove around the members of Led Zeppelin. But I don’t think my granddad named them when he told the story. We found that part out later.
When you’re a kid, it’s strange and thrilling to hear your grandfather make fun of your father for following the rules.
When I was in my twenties, he took me to lunch with one of his distant cousins because that cousin’s son was a writer in Hollywood, and J. Ray knew I was interested in writing. The distant cousin, who seemed to slightly regret agreeing to this lunch engagement, told us that his son wrote for a show on NBC called Friends. I said I’d heard of it. He did not offer to introduce me to his son.
We’d gone quail hunting together several times, and I never shot anything—lacking both skill and inclination. Talking about this with my brother in the car one day, J. Ray said, “The only thing your brother ever killed was time.” I was sitting right there next to him. He also frequently told my brother that his elevator didn’t go all the way to the top.
Once, when I was little and feeling inexplicably moody, I kicked him very hard in the shin for no reason. I still remember his hurt and confused reaction. “Why’d you do that?”
My brother was the one who noticed this Pavlovian reaction—J. Ray never seemed to be aware he was doing it.
I can only recall putting his life in danger once, when I almost ran the passenger side of his car into a concrete barrier while trying to enter Beltway 8. He had to grab the wheel himself. That was maybe the only time I ever saw him frazzled.
I put on a Tom Petty album instead, the only other CD I had with me. J. Ray gave it a thumbs up. “See? This has a good beat.”
I’m thinking, for example, of a jukebox repairwoman we met at the Live Oak Grill. Or that he met at the Live Oak Grill, while I remained at our table. Long story.