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THE FINAL INSTALLMENT

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By the time I was sent north for the summer, the basement curiosities of childhood had matured into a more disciplined obsession. The nurse who once bent slightly too far forward under a bare bulb had been replaced by a fuller syllabus. Above my bed sat a lineup of Revell model cars, arranged with the care of a museum curator who had no business being that young. A ’57 Chevy. A ’65 Mustang. A Cobra I’d glued together badly but loved anyway. On my desk lay a constantly rotating stack of Car and Driver, Road & Track, and Motor Trend, their corners softened by rereading. Under the bed, hidden beneath a folded blanket and a sense of guilt that came and went, were two PLAYBOYs, carefully selected and even more carefully returned to their hiding place, pages sticking slightly where they shouldn’t.

The models and magazines explained themselves.
The rest did not.

I don’t know if time had healed any strains that had existed between my parents and my uncle, or if those tensions had mostly been imagined on my part, stitched together from overheard conversations and long pauses at the dinner table. Perhaps a truce had been called. More likely, my parents had simply decided that a growing boy, a Texas summer, and a single bathroom were a volatile combination best defused with distance. Either way, a decision was made. I was packed up, handed a bus ticket, and sent to Lincoln, Nebraska to spend the summer with Geré.

I had seen the Avanti before.

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When he’d driven back to Fort Stockton for a visit some time earlier, the car had caused a similar stir to the Thunderbird, though in a very different way. The Thunderbird had been instantly understood. The Avanti was… puzzling. Red over beige vinyl. Low. Smooth. Almost organic. It looked less like something designed and more like something discovered. I wasn’t surprised when he picked me up from the bus station in it. But I was mystified nonetheless.

By then, Studebaker had been out of business for years. The Avanti had shed its original maker and continued on as a sort of automotive orphan, reborn under its own name, defiant to the end. I couldn’t remember ever actually seeing another one in the wild, much less spending an entire summer riding around Nebraska in one. While I thoroughly missed the ’57 Thunderbird, the Avanti scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. It wasn’t flamboyant. It was cerebral. A thinking man’s sports coupe, if such a thing could exist.

Geré seemed pleased by my reaction, though he never said so outright. For his part, I got the sense this summer was his opportunity to see what family life might have been like if he’d ever gone down that particular road. He wanted to make it fun. He wanted to compress a lifetime of fatherhood into eight weeks of activities, without ever quite admitting that was what he was doing.

Paddle-boating at Holmes Lake. An attempt at eighteen holes of golf. Movies at the drive-in that continued his tradition of misplaced appropriateness for my age level, but which were nonetheless enjoyed. There were multiple trips to Kool-Crest Miniature Golf.

Having no experience in such matters, it was completely lost on him that you’re supposed to let the kid win. He approached miniature golf with the same intensity he brought to everything else. Stance adjusted. Wind considered. Club selected with purpose. The battles became epic. I lost repeatedly. He did not apologize. We both learned something in the process.

We drove constantly. To nowhere in particular. The Avanti seemed to encourage motion. Its long hood stretched out ahead of us like a runway, the fiberglass body impervious to logic or tradition. Geré pulled on fine leather driving gloves every time we got in, even when the temperature climbed into the nineties.

I asked him about it once.

“Grip,” he said.

Then, after a pause, “Habit.”

I was quickly becoming well versed in both.

He mentioned the built-in roll bar, a structural flourish disguised as design, explaining that if things ever got out of hand and the fiberglass bullet ended up rolling into a bar ditch on the way to Omaha, we’d probably be fine. This struck me as odd, especially since neither of us ever bothered with seat belts. I suppose he figured the roll bar was good enough. Or perhaps he simply trusted the car more than restraint.

I asked him, eventually, how he came to own a 1963 Avanti.

I don’t remember the specifics, which tells you everything you need to know about the story. It involved a used car lot and “wanting something different.” That was it. No drama. No destiny. I was disappointed. I’d been hoping for a tale involving Raymond Loewy collapsing in an emergency room, Geré heroically dragging him back from the brink, and Loewy, overwhelmed with gratitude, gifting him his personal Avanti as thanks.

Reality, as usual, declined to cooperate.

He didn’t speak kindly of other relatives, though he knew them far better than I did. The same was true for Republicans, for whom he had no use at all. Nixon was on his way out the door that summer, back when even the suggestion of impeachment carried weight. The idea that a president might resign in disgrace rather than fight it seemed natural then. I didn’t know enough to appreciate how temporary that instinct would turn out to be. The whole thing felt oddly aligned with the Avanti itself—a sleek, forward-looking artifact born of desperation, designed to outrun collapse.

One afternoon, he took me to a hunting store and had me pick out a long, bone-handled knife. He offered no explanation. I accepted it carefully, returned home, and packed it away in its tooled leather sheath. I never took it out again. I still have it somewhere. I suspect it was a message, possibly to my mother, delivered through me. When I got home and she saw it, she rolled her eyes. That reaction could have meant several things. I didn’t pursue clarification.

We were cleaning out the garage one afternoon. He had a couple of beers iced down in an old Hamm’s cooler. He saw me eyeing it after he’d taken one out. I thought he was going to ask if I wanted one. He looked like he was about to.

He didn’t.

Later, I came to appreciate that he had a line he wasn’t willing to cross.

As with so many things, my appreciation for the Avanti deepened long after the summer ended. The story of a handful of designers sequestered in Palm Springs, racing against time to save a century-old company with a fiberglass coupe and a prayer, grew richer with age. It felt like something Larry McMurtry could have taken and turned into a novel—or at least a miniseries. Men under pressure. Big ideas. Inevitable loss. Lonesome Dove, but with cars.

I saw Geré only once after that summer.

He passed through town briefly, on his way somewhere else. He still had the Avanti, though it hadn’t fared well. One windshield wiper was held on with a surgical clamp, a bit of medical improvisation that felt perfectly on brand. He was paunchier around the middle. I thought he’d let himself go. That was before I realized age isn’t about choices so much as it is about accepting the inevitable.

Through relatives, I heard he’d gotten his pilot’s license and was flying between rural hospitals, doing emergency room rotations wherever he was needed. He’d bought a place in South Carolina for a while.

A cousin saw him there.

“What was he driving?” I asked, expecting to hear about a DeLorean. A Corvette. A Superbird. Something worthy of the legend I’d built.

“A Dodge van,” the cousin said.

Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

Still, for a while, he had been something extraordinary. A god among men. A man whose taste in automobiles and women suggested someone who understood pairing. Someone who knew how to select a fine wine and match it with the right cut of steak. Someone who lived deliberately, even if the consequences arrived loudly.

Or so I thought.

Time, distance, and adulthood have a way of sanding down idols. What remains is rarely disappointment. More often, it’s clarity. The cars mattered. The women mattered. But not as trophies or destinations. They were expressions—snapshots of conviction taken at speed. Proof that life could be shaped, briefly and boldly, before the road reasserted itself.

First came the idea that a man could choose to be different, then the proof that being noticed carried a cost, and finally the understanding that even the most beautiful machines are just temporary vessels for lives already moving on.

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