Who doesn’t get tired of getting up in the dark? And in Owen’s case, he had to get up earlier than most; because of his scholarship job, as a faculty waiter, he had to arrive in the dining-hall kitchen at least one hour before breakfast—on those mornings he waited on tables. The waiters had to set the tables—and eat their own breakfasts, in the kitchen—before the other students and the faculty arrived; then they had to clear the tables between the official end of breakfast and the beginning of morning meeting—as the new headmaster had so successfully called what used to be our morning chapel.
That Saturday morning in February, the tomato-red pickup was dead and he’d had to jump-start the Meany Granite Company trailer-truck and get it rolling down Maiden Hill before it would
start—it was so cold. He did not like to have dining-hall duty, as it was called, on the weekend; and there was the added problem of him being a day boy and having to drive himself that extra distance to school. I guess he was cross when he got there; and there was another car parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, where he always parked. The trailer-truck was so big that the presence of only one other car in the circular driveway would force him to park the truck out on Front Street—and in the winter months, there was a ban regarding parking on Front Street, a snow-removal restriction that the town imposed, and Owen was hopping mad about that, too. The car that kept Owen from parking his truck in the circular driveway adjacent to the Main Academy Building was Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen Beetle.
In keeping with the lovable and exasperating tidiness of his countrymen, Dr. Dolder was exact and predictable about his little VW. His bachelor apartment was in Quincy Hall—a dormitory on the far side of the Gravesend campus; it seemed to be “the far side” from everywhere, but it was as far from the Main Academy Building as you could get and still be on the Gravesend campus. Dr. Dolder parked his VW by the Main Academy Building only when he’d been drinking.
He was a frequent dinner guest of Randy and Sam White’s; he parked by the Main Academy Building when he ate with the Whites—and when he drank too much, he left his car there and walked home. The campus was not so large that he couldn’t (or shouldn’t) have walked both ways—to dinner and back—but Dr. Dolder was one of those Europeans who had fallen in love with a most American peculiarity: how Americans will walk nowhere if they can drive there. In Zürich, I’m sure, Dr. Dolder walked everywhere; but he drove his little VW across the Gravesend campus, as if he were touring the New England states.
Whenever Dr. Dolder’s VW was parked in the circular driveway by the Main Academy Building, everyone knew that the doctor was simply exercising his especially Swiss prudence; he was not a drunk, and the few small roads he might have traveled on to drive himself from dinner at the Whites’ to Quincy Hall would not have given him much opportunity to maim many of the sober and innocent residents of Gravesend. There’s a good chance he would never have encountered anyone; but Dr. Dolder loved his Beetle, and he was a cautious man.
Once—in the fresh snow upon his Volkswagen’s windshield—a first-year German student had written with his finger: Herr Doktor Dolder hat zu viel betrunken! I could usually tell—when I saw Owen, either at breakfast or at morning meeting—if Dr. Dolder had had too much to drink the night before; if it was winter, and if Owen was surly-looking, I knew he’d faced an early-morning parking problem. I knew when the pickup had failed to start—and there was no room for him to park the trailer-truck—just by looking at him.
“What’s up?” I would ask him.
“THAT TIGHT-ASS TIPSY SWISS DINK!” Owen Meany would say.
“I see,” I would say.
And this particular February morning, I can imagine how the Swiss psychiatrist’s Beetle would have affected him.
I guess Owen must have been sitting in the frigid cab of the truck—you could drive that big hauler for an hour before you’d even notice that the heater was on—and I’ll bet he was smoking, and probably talking to himself, too, when he looked into the path of his headlights and saw about three quarters of the basketball team walking his way. In the cold air, their breathing must have made him think that they were smoking, too—although he knew all of them, and knew they didn’t smoke; he entertained them at least two or three times a week by his devotion to practicing the shot.
He told me later that there were about eight or ten basketball players—not quite the whole team. All of them lived in the same dorm—it was one of the traditional jock dorms on the campus; and because the basketball team was playing at some faraway school, they were on their way to the dining hall for an early breakfast with the waiters who had dining-hall duty. They were big, happy guys with goofy strides, and they didn’t mind being out of bed before it was light—they were going to miss their Saturday morning classes, and they saw the whole day as an adventure. Owen Meany was not quite in such a cheerful mood; he rolled down the window of the big truck’s frosty cab and called them over.
They were friendly, and—as always—extremely glad to see him, and they jumped onto the flatbed of the trailer and roughhoused with each other, pushing each other off the flatbed, and so forth.
“YOU GUYS LOOK VERY STRONG TODAY,” said Owen Meany, and they hooted in agreement. In the path of the truck’s headlights, the innocent shape of Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen Beetle stood encased in ice and dusted very lightly with last night’s snow. “I’LL BET YOU GUYS AREN’T STRONG ENOUGH TO PICK UP THAT VOLKSWAGEN,” said Owen Meany. But, of course, they were strong enough; they were not only strong enough to lift Dr. Dolder’s Beetle—they were strong enough to carry it out of town.
The captain of the basketball team was an agreeable giant; when Owen practiced the shot with this guy, the captain lifted Owen with one hand.
“No problem,” the captain said to Owen. “Where do you want it?”
Owen swore to me that it wasn’t until that moment that he got THE IDEA.
It’s clear to me that Owen never overcame his irritation with Randy White for moving morning chapel from Hurd’s Church to the Main Academy Building and calling it morning meeting, that he still thought of that as the headmaster’s GRANDSTANDING. The sets for Dan’s winter-term play had already been dismantled; the stage of The Great Hall, as it was called, was bare. And that broad, sweeping, marble stairway that led up to The Great Hall’s triumphant double doors … all of that, Owen was sure, was big enough to permit the easy entrance of Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen. And wouldn’t that be something: to have that perky little automobile parked on center stage—a kind of cheerful, harmless message to greet the headmaster and the entire student body; a little something to make them smile, as the dog days of March bore down upon us and the long-awaited break for spring vacation could not come soon enough to save us all.
“CARRY IT INTO THE MAIN ACADEMY BUILDING,” Owen Meany told the captain of the basketball team. “TAKE IT UPSTAIRS TO THE GREAT HALL AND CARRY IT UP ON THE STAGE,” said The Voice. “PUT IT RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STAGE, FACING FORWARD—RIGHT NEXT TO THE HEADMASTER’S PODIUM. BUT BE CAREFUL YOU DON’T SCRATCH IT—AND FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T DROP IT! DON’T PUT A MARK ON ANYTHING,” he cautioned the basketball players. “DON’T DO THE SLIGHTEST DAMAGE—NOT TO THE CAR AND NOT TO THE STAIRS, NOT TO THE DOORS OF THE GREAT HALL, NOT TO THE STAGE,” he said. “MAKE IT LOOK LIKE IT FLEW UP THERE,” he told them. “MAKE IT LOOK LIKE AN ANGEL DROVE IT ONSTAGE!” said Owen Meany.
When the basketball players carried off Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen, Owen thought very carefully about using the available parking space; he decided it was wiser to drive all the way over to Waterhouse Hall and park next to Dan’s car, instead. Not even Dan saw him park the truck there; and if anyone had seen him running across the campus, as it was growing light, that would not have seemed strange—he was just a faculty waiter with dining-hall duty, hurrying so he wouldn’t be late.
He ate his breakfast in the dining-hall kitchen with the other waiters and with an extraordinarily hungry and jolly bunch of basketball players. Owen was setting the head faculty table when the captain of the basketball team said good-bye to him.
“There wasn’t the slightest damage—not to anything,” the captain assured him.
“HAVE A GOOD GAME!” said Owen Meany.
It was one of the janitors in the Main Academy Building who discovered the Beetle onstage—when he was raising the blinds on the high windows that welcomed so much morning light into The Great Hall. Naturally, the janitor called the headmaster. From the kitchen window of his obtrusive house, directly across from the Main Academy Building, Headmaster White could see the small rectangle of bare ground where Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen had spent the night.
According to Dan Needham, the headmaster called him while he was getting out of the shower; most of the faculty made breakfast for themselves at home, or they skipped breakfast rather than eat in the school dining hall. The headmaster told Dan that he was rounding up all able-bodied faculty for the purpose of removing Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen from the stage of The Great Hall—before morning meeting. The students, the headmaster told Dan, were not going to have “the last laugh.” Dan said he didn’t feel particularly able-bodied himself, but he’d certainly try to help out. When he hung up the phone, he was laughing to himself—until he looked out the window of Waterhouse Hall and saw the Meany Granite Company trailer-truck parked next to his own car. Dan suddenly thought that THE IDEA of putting Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen on the stage of The Great Hall had Owen Meany’s name written all over it.
That was exactly what the headmaster said, when he and about a dozen, not-very-able-bodied faculty members, along with a few hefty faculty wives, were struggling with Dr. Dolder’s Beetle.
“This has Owen Meany’s name written all over it!” the headmaster said.
“I don’t think Owen could lift a Volkswagen,” Dan Needham ventured cautiously.
“I mean, the idea!” the headmaster said.