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My first car was a Datsun pickup that my dad bought me six months before I was legal to drive it. It was white with a fiberglass camper shell. It had blue pin stripes on the sides. Mag wheels. An eight track tape player. Someday, I will see that truck again in heaven.

My dad could be an angry and anxious man. This had a lot to do with drinking. But when he taught me how to drive, he completely chilled out. We were both of us big guys, but he managed to be unassuming in the cab of a Datsun pickup, which is a good trick. When I did something wrong, he spoke calmly. He never once yelled at me inside that car.

There’s a concept in dramatic writing which I dearly love: it’s called “a negotiation over an object” It’s how you describe actors relating to each other through the stuff of the world. A lover who expresses her ambivalence by refusing to walk through an opened door. A grieving mother who refuses to surrender a beloved child’s toy. A father who gives his son a beautiful truck and then teaches him how to drive it.

My dad never really got me. I read books and watched way too much TV. I never met a sport that didn’t scare me. I reminded him of my mother, and not often in the good ways. Giving me my own truck was a complicated gesture – he wanted me to become a builder like he was. That Datsun pickup might have been the first chance he saw to reach me. He was right: the place where I felt closest to him was inside the cab of his 1972 Chevy truck. Ninety percent of our relationship took place at one of his jobs – coming and going was when we talked.

There are a few things to know about “a negotiation over an object.” It’s never about the object itself, although it helps to find an object that calls forward strong emotions in everyone involved. Money, for example, is often a good object to negotiate over, although it’s better if the money looks like something else. A diamond necklace, maybe. A Maltese Falcon. Wherever you find drama, you’ll find objects that are negotiated over. Human beings rarely say what they mean, and they rarely admit what they want. They’re always looking for some kind of prop with which to express their feelings.

There’s no more vivid call to action than an inexperienced driver grinding the gears on a manual transmission. It still blows my mind how calm Dad was. Within the context of his patience, I became a great driver. My ability to manipulate a clutch is one of the things I’m most proud of in my life. Pull me out of my wheelchair when I’m 107, strap my arthritic hand to the stickshift, strap my gnarled feet to the pedals, and I’ll still find that sweet spot. Skills like that don’t go away. The truck was Dad’s way of talking to me. Becoming a good driver was my way of talking to him.

But here’s the downside of that particular negotiation: how poorly I took care of that Datsun after I went away to college. It was a time of being pissed off at Dad. He didn’t make such a good show in his divorce from my mom. In a bit of grandstanding meant to hurt her, he refused to give me money for college. Yet another negotiation over an object: me. I took it out on the truck. Sometimes – about once a year – I would check the oil and there wouldn’t be any. One morning, after a bad night with a girl, I kicked in all four sidepanels with my bare feet.

The truck kept running, though. That’s just one of the miracles of this story. Datsun made one incredible truck. It took me everywhere I wanted to go for eight years. When my father bankrolled a trip to Europe after I graduated (guilt, I’m sure, over not helping with college), I left the Datsun in his garage. When I returned from Europe, he’d removed all the dents and repainted the entire truck. Reupholstered the bench seat, too.

My Dad died in 1984, and I stepped out of my own truck and into his Chevy, by then on its third engine. A few months later, I woke up one morning to the sound of a local cop pounding on my door. He pointed toward the street where a ball of crumpled metal was sitting in the same place my Datsun had occupied. “Is that yours?” he asked. Sometime while I slept a Porsche had slammed into my little car. I focused my eyes and didn’t for a second imagine that a whole chunk of my life was gone.

The reason that I didn’t hear the crash was because I was hung over. In other words, I heard the crash but decided to ignore it. Later that year, I quit drinking.

Since then I have never felt right about abusing machinery. Machinery has a soul, too, and sins against automobiles cut into your Karma. I hope someday to ask for that Datsun’s forgiveness. I’ve made some amends by taking good care of every car I’ve owned since.

In action movies, there’s another version of “a negotiation over an object.” Alfred Hitchcock is credited with the term “MacGuffin” which he and his writers used to describe an object that has no real importance, except for the fact that everyone in the movie wants it. Uranium in Hitchcock’s Notorious. Microfilm in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. The letters of Transit in Casablanca. The videotape in Road Trip.

I’ve spent years of my life doing nothing but thinking about MacGuffins. It’s a tremendously useful term. Magical, even. Human desire is so powerful that it can make almost anything valuable. Diamonds, they tell me, are much more common than De Beers and company would like us to know. Money is made of, well, paper. In an action movie – and I believe mostly life is just an action movie – it doesn’t matter what the MacGuffin is so long as people are willing to risk everything to get it. The MacGuffin has life because people give it life.

Hitchcock said that the term came from an old joke, which I will tell you right now:

There are two men on a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”

And the other one answers, “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”

The first one asks, “What’s a MacGuffin?”

“Well,” the other man says, “it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”

“But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” the first man says. So the other one answers, “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!”

I don’t know what it is about fathers and sons, but it sometimes seems like we’re put on earth to hurt each other. We are the men on the train but we are also the Macguffins. What’s great about Hitchcock’s term is that he doesn’t pretend that the object has any meaning, and neither did my truck. My truck had meaning because it was how we talked to each other. It had meaning because I imagined it was how I would get freedom from my family. I never really got freedom from my family, and my father and I never really talked to each other until the last moments of his life. By then, real talking was over because they’d put a fat plastic tube down his throat which we knew wouldn’t come out until he was dead. In the hours before that happened, I screamed at him, trying to keep him conscious. The last thing that he did before he spaced out for the last time was reach up and grab the back of my head. He pulled me down – his arms were very strong – and he gave me a kiss. I stopped shouting after that.

We only pretended it was about the truck. What it was really about was having something to share. I wonder sometimes how much another person has to do before you recognize them as one of your angels, one of your personal saints. And who gets to decide, after all, whether your father was good to you or not? Let’s forget about how angry my dad was. Let’s forget about how he let me down. In the grand scheme of things, how much does that really matter when compared to the fact that for six months he was cosmically patient with me and I will remember how to drive a stickshift until the day I die? When I see that Datsun pickup in heaven, you know who will be sitting in the passenger seat. And you’d better believe there are lions in the Scottish Highlands.