Paul, a shy Midwestern teenager moves to California at the height of the muscle car era and is taken under wing by class clown Mark, who concocts a scheme to have the two of them overhaul a broken-down '57 Chevy into a hot rod. Except Mark never bothers to disclose he knows nothing about rebuilding cars. The two hapless mechanics triumph in their quest, but a tragedy pulls them apart and they go their separate ways. Everything changes, though, when a flood of eerie e-mails one night from Mark 30 years later convinces Paul that Mark has also failed to disclose something else ― and it is a matter of life and death. The Groove Project pulses with the sights and sounds of an unprecedented period in American history. It tells a timeless story about the struggle to find your own path in life and the stubborn faith that marks who your friends really are.

THE GROOVE PROJECT

Two Unlikely Friends, an Unlucky Car, and a Lifetime They Never Imagined By PAUL HEAGEN

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Paul Heagen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-4373-5

Contents

PREFACE...............................IXCHAPTER ONE...........................1CHAPTER TWO...........................14CHAPTER THREE.........................27CHAPTER FOUR..........................39CHAPTER FIVE..........................53CHAPTER SIX...........................68CHAPTER SEVEN.........................81CHAPTER EIGHT.........................91CHAPTER NINE..........................107CHAPTER TEN...........................118CHAPTER ELEVEN........................128CHAPTER TWELVE........................141CHAPTER THIRTEEN......................151CHAPTER FOURTEEN......................172CHAPTER FIFTEEN.......................182CHAPTER SIXTEEN.......................188CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.....................195CHAPTER EIGHTEEN......................198EPILOGUE..............................201

Chapter One

Whump whump

I can't believe I'm working this late. Midnight flew past a while ago. At this rate I'll start wondering why I'm working this early.

Whump whump

Still, when you have your own home office, it's nice that if you have to work, at least you can do it in solitude; no phones ringing, no office gossiper trolling around your door shoveling the latest scoop, no noise to speak of except that lopsided whump whump of the ceiling fan overhead. One of these days I have to get out the stepladder and tape a quarter to one of the blades. I know I never will.

Whump whump

(blip)

The electronic tone startles me at first, until I glance down at the bottom of the computer monitor to see the bobbing icon.

(blip)

It's the alert telling me I just received an e-mail; an e-mail at 1:30 in the morning. Like it matters.

(blip)

(blip)

I stare at it as if somehow my stare alone will make it go away. The icon is that overanxious kid in grade school jumping up and down in the gymnasium class when captains are picking sides in dodge ball-"Hey, pick me! Pick me!" They never shut up or go away until you go ahead and pick them.

So I click on it.

To: paul From: mark Subject: '57 chevy hey buddy ... remember stoned valley ... yeah ... you drank the muscle car juice my man ...

Mark. Now that's interesting. I've never received an e-mail from him. Funny; what's he up to at this hour? I flip a quick reply, like a ping of friendly sonar, but no sooner do I respond than the icon bobs its head and there is a volley of even more e-mails.

To: paul From: mark Subject: '57 chevy it was awesome paul. no wonder people were so anxious to hear and see your 57. it was a huge story. To: paul From: mark Subject: '57 chevy

paul, i don't think you ever understood what you meant to the school. that car had everyone anxiously wanting to see, and it took on mythical status. sometimes two weeks went by with no news and anxiety would grow over the whole school.

Every time I click on one of the notes, another one pops up, as if this is some kind of Internet Whack-A-Mole. I push my work out of my mind and concentrate on trying to slip in responses amid the repeated blips of his notes, but I am outrun.

To: paul From: mark Subject: '57 chevy We had a good time, my friend ... the best time

Thirty-five years is a long time ago, but I am startled with how quickly the notes come to life, how text morphs into images and sounds. I close my eyes and, almost on reflex, inhale deeply. It's all still there, soaked into my senses as much as my memory-the aroma of fresh oil, the heat of the exhaust, the musty garage, the AM radio blasting. As I drift into the images in my mind, the whump of the ceiling fan falls away and is replaced by a throbbing bass guitar and drum kick, mingled with the jangle of box-end wrenches dropped on a cold, concrete garage floor ("You're the only girl I know-CLANG-really love you so-CLANG-in the midnight hour, oh yeah ...").

It has been a long time. A very long time. But as I lean back in my chair in the quiet and the darkness, the sights, the sounds, and the smells surround me again and I am lost in them.

(blip-blip ... click)

For every reply I try to squeeze in, I am peppered with more notes-but he is not answering; he is just spilling it all out. The notes are hurried, frenetic, even desperate. Some I can barely read for all the misspellings and typos. In my office at this hour, time no longer matters to me, yet the e-mails coming at me seem to be racing against a clock I cannot see. After a while, I stop trying to make it a conversation and just let the notes come. For the next half hour, the monologue rattles on. Now, though sitting in the same solitude of my office, I am no longer alone. It is me and the icon as it taps out its rhythm.

Then, as suddenly as the barrage began, it stops. I probe the silence with a "Hey, buddy, you still there?" note, but there is no reply; the icon resting compliantly. I wait a few minutes more-it is not like I am going to shut down on the first e-mails I ever got from him without some pause-but the hours are weighing in on me now. It's time to call it a night.

* * *

"What time was it when you finally came to bed?" My wife Carol slips up behind me as I brace my elbows on the kitchen counter, watching the coffee drip into the carafe. She cuffs my neck, partly in affection, partly in annoyance. "You know you're always tired the next day when you stay up so late working."

"I wasn't working," I reply, handing her the first cup of coffee. "I was reading e-mails-a bunch of them. From Mark."

"You mean as in `Mark' Mark?" Carol is puzzled. Mark is one to call at all hours with something on his mind-Carol fields as many of the calls as I do. But this was different. He never sends e-mails. Never.

Then he sends thirty in one night.

"Can I read them?" Carol's question is more than curiosity. She knows enough about Mark to spot his antics and his impulses, especially now that he is a virtual fixture in our lives, but now she senses something odd. You can hear it in her voice.

"Thirty is a lot. I need to read them."

We take our coffee back to my office and Carol sits in my chair as I stand behind her and point out the string of e-mails on the computer screen. I narrate the first few-see, it's all about the Chevy, the Ducks, here he talks about the cheerleaders, the funk band-but then my chatter is muted by Carol's waving hand as she scrolls through the notes. She reads each one, clicking through the list that trails out of sight at the bottom of the screen.

"After all these years, he dumps all this in one night." I rest back against the office wall and slurp some coffee. "What a character, huh?"

Carol leans in more, studying the notes.

"So what do you think?" I ask. "Pretty cool, huh?"

Carol is silent, scrolling back up through the notes, her eyes retracing the lines of text. I see her shoulders tighten as she speaks for the first time.

"No," she says quietly, never looking away from the screen. "Something's wrong. Something's really wrong."

* * *

To: paul From: mark Subject: '57 chevy The Beast was awesome ... man ... the best ... nothing like it "Far-out car, man!"

I glanced nervously to my left and am confronted by wiry knuckles rapping on the steel-blue sheet metal of the doorframe and a grinning face peering through the open driver's side window. It was a thin, long face with a sharp nose and darting eyes, blonde hair combed straight back on the sides but crowned with a rooster-style flip on top, all policed into place with cream. The head bobbed around like a bobble-head doll to a beat only he could hear.

I had first seen him amid a horde of students just minutes before as I made my way to the parking lot near the gym after my last class. The swarm had gathered near the blue/gray Chevy, cupping their hands over their eyes and peering inside. He was leading the pack, conducting an unauthorized but thoroughly authoritative inspection tour of the car, pointing out features and flaws like a Kelley Blue Book assessor. When he saw me approach, he called out, as much as anything to announce to his followers, "Hey, Mr. St. Louis! You bought Rocky's crate! Far-out car, man!"

I sheepishly wormed my way through the students, barely suppressing a smile of pride, and climbed into the front seat. That's when he strutted around from the front of the car to frame himself in the open driver's side window.

"My name's Mark. Most people just call me `Mark.'" He cackled at his own joke but still thrust his hand into the open window to shake my hand. "Let me know if you need help." It never occurred to me I would need help, at least not this early. It wasn't supposed to be this way. I had dreamed of having my own car for nearly three years, and now here in just a few hours it was all seeming a little overwhelming.

* * *

My dad had a '66 Mustang.

I was fourteen years old when he got it. It had those classic spinner hubcaps, a three-speed manual transmission, and a 289-cubic-inch engine with four-barrel carburetor. When you are only a year or so away from getting your driver's permit, you pay attention to those details. It was yellow; Phoenician Yellow is what Ford called it. No doubt a name that some marketing guy pulled out of his dumb hat when you realize that the ancient Phoenicians were known for the deep purple colors of their fabrics, not yellow.

My father was not a car guy by any measure, so it was a bold stroke for him to buy that Mustang. It was a stroke that afflicted a lot of people in 1965 and '66; the car just seemed to speak to every guy's inner devil that there was still a place in their middle-class, suburban lives for sport, independence, and even occasional spasms of abandon. The latter revealed itself one Saturday morning when my dad and I were scheduled to meet his regular golfing buddy at the course about twenty miles away from our St. Louis suburban home, except we got up late that morning. It would horrify my mother to this day to know this, but we hauled down the interstate at something close to ninety-five mph to catch our tee time.

We didn't make it in time, but it was a great try. Who cares, anyway, about golf when you can be a fourteen-year-old in a '66 Mustang at dawn streaking down an empty freeway at nearly ninety-five mph, sticking your arm outside the open passenger side window, sluicing and carving your hand through the cold air as if it were an F-4 Phantom jet fighter.

That Mustang sat in our garage taunting me for another year and a half before I convinced my dad to let me drive it by myself to the edge of the curb, then in reverse back to the garage. Just to the curb-not one inch further. As I learned to stop that car within an inch of the curb, I was almost soaked with anticipation of what it would be like someday to actually take it out on the road. So on a Sunday afternoon, you would see this yellow Mustang pacing back-and-forth, back-and-forth on our driveway, to the curb back to the garage and back to the curb, for hours, like a tiger trapped in a cage.

I had to get my license.

I enrolled in the mandatory driver's education class, and given my time-tested agility at shifting from first gear to reverse and back from my driveway warm-ups, I passed the class easily. Cruelly, Missouri required a "cooling off" period between graduating from Driver's Ed and actually getting your license. That made no sense to me at all; I think it is far safer to slip right behind the black, knurled steering wheel of that Mustang within minutes of your last driver's ed class before the flush of responsibility and training wears off. Plus, as anyone knows, you don't tell a teenage boy to cool off.

It was already late spring. Teenage guys were starting to ditch class early on Fridays to drive down to the local hamburger stand where they could preen and troll the parking lots in their father's cars, or in the case of my filthy rich neighbor's kid, a GTO that his father bought for him. Convertible. Dual exhaust. Hurst shifter. I still hate him.

I hit the bottom rung of the teenage social ladder when I asked a beguiling blond girl on the next street over if she would be my date for a concert by the Turtles at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. When I met her at her front door and walked her to the driveway, her eyes widened when she spotted the yellow Mustang. Her eyes then pinched to a pained, scornful glare when, instead of inviting her into the passenger seat, I hustled us both into the back seat and my mother turned around to look at us from the driver's position.

"Well, don't you two look so cute!" My mother beamed as she reached back to shake the girl's hand. "I'm Paul's mother."

The girl slumped sullenly in the seat and stayed in that stony posture through the entire Turtles concert, even when everyone else was holding hands and wrapping arms around waists during the finale, "Happy Together" ("Imagine me and you, I do ...").

I had to get my license.

Just a few days after my Driver's Ed graduation, I was at the kitchen table plotting my first solo flight in the Mustang when my parents nervously announced at breakfast that they were moving the family to California the next month-a job change for my father. I sulked off to my room and pulled the covers over my head, only to hear the muffled rumble of Jay's brand-new '67 GTO cruising past my house. Lucky jerk.

A few weeks later, I arrived at our new home in Northern California to discover that the Missouri-issued driver's education certificate I had labored so hard to earn was somehow inadmissible in California. I would have to take the driver's ed class all over again, and the next session didn't open up for six weeks.

School was starting in five. The three-mile route from our new house to my new high school was a serpentine, two-lane stretch of road without any sidewalks. As well, the asphalt was crumbling at the edges, so riding a bike meant either a teeth-chattering, spoke-bending adventure in steering or the more perilous game of chicken from competing for the smooth roadway with oncoming cars.

I was left with the Faustian choice of riding my bike to school or having my mom drop me off in her car. For those first few days, my mother may not have known exactly where my high school was located because I always had her drop me off at a park about a block away.

"Are you sure you want to walk the rest of the way, dear?" she asked.

"Yep, Mom. I'm fine. You're the greatest."

There is a certain curiosity associated with being a junior-year transfer from out of state, but not much. By the time you hit high school, you had to be on your toes, pick your spots and blend in, or stand out in a good way. Without a driver's license months after my sixteenth birthday, I did none of that. Like right after the last class one day during the first week when a group was hanging around in the hallway, rendezvousing for a motorcade to a local hamburger stand.

"Oh, you don't have your license yet? Really?" Then, again, they would walk away.

I finished the California version of Driver's Ed, and within days I checked off all the right boxes, made all the right three-point turns, and demonstrated my prowess at parallel parking to the examiner and got my license. I needed just one more thing.

A car.

My dad had sold his Mustang-why he sold one of the coolest cars around just when he moved to California where I could enjoy it I don't understand-and replaced it with this ugly, moss-green Pontiac LeMans. His car just screamed family car. I wasn't going to get caught dead in it. I was already dead on arrival socially. Mothers being mothers, my mom wanted my dad to buy me a safe, reliable, practical car. My dad was more direct: I could get whatever I wanted, as long as I got it myself. It was the YOYO Plan-You're On Your Own. (It wasn't like I was unprepared-I had stashed two hundred dollars from mowing lawns over the last few months. Not hard to do when you haven't had any dates.)

Scouring the classified ads, I was bewildered about which cars were which and, being new to the area, how far I would have to hitchhike or walk to see them. I circled several that sounded close-a '59 Rambler, a '61 Impala that didn't run, and a '59 Ford Galaxy that ran sometimes-but slunk away from the prospects when I called and found each one was well beyond my two-hundred-dollar limit.

During a recess one afternoon at school, a burly senior with pinched eyes and a tight jaw walked up to me near my hallway locker.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE GROOVE PROJECTby PAUL HEAGEN Copyright © 2010 by Paul Heagen. Excerpted by permission.
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