The ballad of Little Mama...

So I had this minivan, right? I bought it when I was 25. And right about now, you’re asking yourself something like, “Why in God’s name would a young red-blooded American male, still full of piss and vinegar and the stuff that makes red-blooded American males act the way they do, buy a minivan by choice?” Well, if you’ve read my previous blogs, you know that at one time I had an Acura Integra. I bought it with well over 140,000 miles, but its usefulness, nor its ability to wreak havoc at the hands of a well-trained (or stupid—sometimes it’s disturbing how fine the line can be) pilot were not quite exhausted. I got the tired old thing up to over 100 miles per hour before I was tagged by a state trooper. I’m still paying for that one, in that, to cover the fine, I had to work for UPS during the Christmas season, and the knees were just never the same. (Hey, you try jumping down from a rolling UPS truck carrying a computer [still in the shipping crate, natch] repeatedly for thirteen hours a day for two months and then tell me how you feel, and we’ll talk.)

Anyway, in order to reduce the chances that anything like that would happen again (I am my father’s son, after all, and driving like a maniac is in my genes), I wanted something slow. A Volvo wagon? A VW microbus? I found this lovely GMC Safari in Schaumburg. It was owned for its entire 130,000-mile life by the same family. They had all the maintenance records. Hell, they still had the original window sticker. Not a spot of rust on it. The interior was perfect, the A/C ice cold, brand new tires. Also, it was very, very slow. Plus, as a musician, I relished the thought of any vehicle that could haul any and every piece of musical gear I own, all at once. I took it home.

I am of the opinion, however misguided, that complex inanimate objects, like computers, or motorcycles, or bass guitars, or, in particular, cars, have a sentience of their own, and that, if they like you, they’ll do nice things for you, like get you home even when the needle has read below the ‘E’ for the past 50 miles and you have 25 cents in your pocket. Or, you forget to change the oil for, oh, say, 15,000 miles and they just keep right on truckin’. I’ve had cars like that. The minivan—whose name was, as mentioned in a previous post, Little Mama—was not like that. I think it was pissed at me for removing it from its loving household and introducing it to the world of a piss-poor grad student who was moonlighting as a bassist. Let me tell you how I arrived at this conclusion.

On a vehicle with over 100,000 miles, you expect stuff to break. Fine. So when the exhaust system—complete and entire from the headers back—decided to fall off after two months of ownership, I just shrugged and handed over my credit card. Same with the alternator the next month. Same with the water pump the next month. Oh, and when I hit that rock and slashed the sidewall of one of my still-fairly new front tires. Ah, but this time, when I took it to the shop and requested that they order an identical replacement, was I surprised when they told me that that particular tire was no longer available? Yes, I was. Oh well—so it’s got three ballsy raised-white-letter tires and one whitewall. These things happen.

All righty, but after two years, three alternators, two water pumps, two power steering pumps, an A/C compressor, an exhaust system, and so on and so forth, things started to get old. And this is nothing, when compared to the weird shit that would break on the thing. For example---

I pull up at my friend Ed’s house. He’s on the driveway, sweeping or something, and as I get out, he says, “Hey, do you know that you’re leaking antifreeze?” I look between Little Mama’s front wheels, and sure enough, there’s a bright green puddle forming there. “Well, dammit,” I say, and open the hood. Not only is it leaking from the water pump that was at that time two months old, but the power steering pump is sitting at a crazy angle. I wait long enough for the engine to cool down so I can add coolant, then I drive my bad self back to DeKalb and make a detour for the shop that was thankfully within walking distance to my apartment.

I get a call the next day. It’s John, the mechanic. We’re well on first-name terms by this time. He asks an ominous question—“How much do you like this van?” Well, by this time, I fucking hate it, but do I have enough jack to by another car? Not even close. I do, however, have the ever-useful credit card, which by this time is dangerously close to the limit.

What has happened is that the power steering pump bracket has broken. Don’t ask me how something like this happens—I have no idea either. What’s even cooler, according to John, is that, instead of one bracket for each underhood accessory—alternator, compressor, power steering pump, what have you--GM decided to use one big horseshoe-shaped bracket on the front of the engine to which all accessories are attached. The bottom line: to replace this bracket, all the accessories have to come off, including the A/C compressor, which will have to be recharged with freon (very expensive, all by itself.)

Well, with no other option, and with my credit card whimpering softly to itself in the tight confines of my wallet, I tell John to go ahead. The van runs great for about another two months, when a mysterious short pops up that causes the taillight and instrument panel light fuses to blow as soon as I turn on the headlights. This problem takes a little longer to sort out. It turns out to be a short in one of the front turn signals. The boys at the shop are mystified—they’ve never seen this before.

Now things get weird. I have owned this thing for a little over a year at this point. By this time I have graduated and have gainful employ. I get home from work, and I am still living with my folks. I pull into my parents’ driveway, where my dad is standing and having a smoke. I get out, briefcase in hand. My dad gestures with his cigarette.

“D’you know that your car is smoking?” I turn around, and, sure enough, steam is wafting out through the grille and from under the hood. I open the hood and find that the entire engine compartment is covered in a fine spray of antifreeze. The radiator—this is the second one—is blown. I curse and slam the hood.

This time I take it to a mechanic my father has recommended. I get the van back on a Thursday. On Saturday, my dad and I drive Little Mama to Home Depot. It’s running fine, so I’m all smiley. When we get to the parking lot, I attempt to shut the engine off, and the fucking key won’t turn. I physically cannot shut off the ignition. My father tries as well. With no other option, we leave the engine running. I wait in the car while my dad gets what he needs from Home Depot. He gets back in and says, “Well, let’s just drive on back home. We’ll open the hood and figure out a way to shut the engine off from there.”

I swear I am not making this up: When I get back to my folks’ house, I pull the hood release lever. It comes off in my hand—the whole hood release cable just pulls out of the dashboard. The engine is, of course, still running, and now there is no way to open the hood. My father and I stand on the driveway smoking cigarettes and scratching our heads until the van runs out of gas two hours later.

Well, of course I take it back to the shop and go postal. I can’t conceive of how they could have screwed up the ignition while replacing the radiator. Neither can they, but they graciously replace the ignition cylinder and fix the hood release free of charge.

Oh, and did I mention that, when I bought the thing, it had not a single speck of rust on it? I believe I did. After about a year, the rocker panels (the parts of the body underneath the doors) had rusted out completely, leaving interestingly jagged remnants of bodywork sticking out. Numerous friends cut their legs on these. A girl I am taking out tears a vicious run in her pantyhose on one, and refuses to go out with me again.

Okay, so, now it’s March of 2001. In April, I will have owned Little Mama for two years, and officially I hate it. I have called it every conceivable name; I have spat on it, kicked it, and, if you look at the three remaining tires with their oh-so-ballsy raised white letters, you will see that the outermost half of each letter, the half closest to the tread part of the tire, is worn completely off. This is from me, in my impotent rage, throwing the van into corners so viciously that the tires just fold under and the van is literally running on the sidewalls. I am super-pissed, and my credit card had long since been maxed out. But, the thing is rear-wheel-drive, and there’s still snow on the ground, so there’s still some tail-out fun to be had. Now, before you condemn me for beating on the thing, and say to yourself, “Well, Jesus, Jay, that’s why the thing broke all the time—you beat the shit out of it.” Keep in mind that a) it’s a minivan, and you just can’t do the things in it that would have gotten me in trouble in the Acura—e.g., the steering is alarmingly loose at speed, so I keep it under 75 mph on the expressway; b) it gets really shitty gas mileage, so I can’t afford to drive it like a nut; and c) I use it pretty much to commute to work in rush hour traffic, so there’s little opportunity to get up to shenanigans. Besides, anyone who’s ever driven in snow will tell you that you don’t have to be stupid to lose control; it just happens. The fun part is doing deliberately.

So here I am in a snow-encrusted parking lot, turning hot laps with the ass end somewhere in the next county (which I have to admit, you don’t often see done in a minivan. I wonder what that looks like from the outside). Anyway, halfway through a beautiful left-hand sweeper, the power steering pump quits. Now, with no power assist, and with the van still well-sideways at well over forty miles per hour, I go careening gaily off course and into a large snowdrift. It takes a large tow truck to extricate Little Mama thence.

I think to myself, Well, shit—every time I fix something, something else breaks, so I’ll just drive it like this, with no power steering. Have you ever tried to drive a car that normally has power-assisted steering without it? It’s not easy. Not impossible, but it certainly makes driving a chore, and what used to be three-point turns become 25-point turns. I make it for two months before my father catches me driving the thing in this state, and offers me this alternative: he will pay to get the van fixed if I will agree to sell it. My forearms aching in acknowledgement, I nod wearily.

So now it’s May, and the sky is blue and the grass is growing nicely and birds are singing and little furry bunnies are hopping around and I have listed Little Mama for sale in the paper. I list all the options it has, and some of the newer bits that have been installed. I omit from the description the fact that the fucking thing has a curse. About a week after I place the ad, a nice little Hispanic family shows up. Young guy, about my age, mid-20’s, with a pretty young wife, and a six-month-old baby in the back seat of a beat-up Nissan Sentra—red in color, with funny white fender flares. This will be important later.

The guy—his name is Juan—takes it for a spin. He offers me $1300 on a van I paid almost $4000 just over two years before. I agree.

I run into the house, saying, “He’ll take it.”

My father’s eyes narrow into slits. “Did you print up a bill of sale?”

I pshaw with dismissal. “Naw—they seem nice. What do I need a bill of sale for?”

“Just do it,” says my dad, the sly old fox. “You never know; they might be drug dealers.”

“They’re not drug dealers, Dad, for Christ’s sake,” I say, but I acquiesce to his wishes. I print up two copies. I sign both, and Juan signs both. We each get a copy, and Juan drives off in Little Mama, his wife and child following in their red Sentra. I am sure that is the last I will ever see of Little Mama, and I dance a little jig on the driveway in celebration.

July, 2001, and I am tooling along in my Honda Accord station wagon—Magoo—on the return side of a trip to visit a buddy at Southern Illinois University, when my cell phone goes off.

“Jay Olaszek.”

“Yes, Mister Olaszek, this it Detective Brian McHugh with the Illinois State Police, narcotics division.” My testicles shrink noticeably.

“Y-Y-Yes...er, how can I help you, Detective?”

“Are you the owner of a red 1988 GMC Safari?”

I swallow. Hard. Something in my throat goes click.

“Well, I was, but I sold it. Two months ago.”

“Well,” says Detective McHugh, “The serial number comes back as belonging to you.”

“Really? Well, like I said, I sold it.”

“Uh-huh. Can you prove that?”

“Well,” I say, with an inward sigh of relief, “yeah. I mean, I have a bill of sale, and, like, stuff.” Thanks, Dad.

“That’s good,” says the detective, “because if you can’t prove that you no longer own this vehicle, you have some explaining to do.”

“Why, whatever is the problem, officer?”

Detective McHugh clears his throat. “This past weekend, we recovered your van with over 66 million dollars of cocaine in the back.”

I pull over. I talk with Detective McHugh a while longer, and agree to come down to the station the next day with my bill of sale. When I walk in the door, my parents are sitting at the kitchen table. My father looks calm as a cucumber; my mother less so. She looks up at me as I walk in; has she been crying? It’s hard to say, but I’m gonna bet yes.

“Did you know the State Police are looking for you?”

I explain the situation as best I can. My mother goes to bed; my father and I have a beer and discuss some things. We agree that it’s best to wait until we see what happens at the police station the next day before we start talking with the lawyer.

I get up bright and early and head on down the State Police headquarters, Division 5, in Joliet, right next to the Illinois State Penitentiary. I have my bill of sale cradled gently but firmly in both hands. Detective McHugh greets me cordially, and I show him my bill of sale. It turns out that the gentleman who bought the van, Juan something-or-other, has been wanted along with his twin brother for almost ten years for his involvement with drug trafficking. He has not used an alias to sign the bill of sale. I identify him in a mug shot. It turns out that the street value of the cocaine recovered from my van is to date the largest recorded in Will County history. Remember, Joliet is in Will County. The police caught him and his brother loading bags of cocaine from the trunk of a red Nissan Sentra (with funny white fender flares) into my van. There was another five or so million in the trunk of the Nissan.

You can read about this in the papers, if you have some time to kill. Just go to any library that has copies of Will County newspapers on microfiche and hunt around in July of 2001. It was on the front page of one or two of them, if memory serves.

As an epilogue, Detective McHugh asks me to accompany him out to the impound yard to positively identify the van. There it is, in all its rusted, three raised-white-letter-tires-and-one-whitewall glory. It still has the Christian fish bumper emblem, and the “Saint Francis Spartans” sticker is still in the back window.

Cursed? You tell me.

On having a shitty day...

Today was shitty. We've all had them, I guess, and in my case they're few [knock wood]--at least, when they're due to things that don't occur only inside my head. But, rare as they are, today was a truly shitty day.

At work, there's been no rain for going on a month. No rain, and the grass doesn't grow. No grow, no mow, so things have been slow. We've been picking up work here and there landscaping, and today we began a project that looks to be truly monumental, even more so now that a) the 10-day forecast shows an outlook of temperatures climbing into the giddy 90's without a hint of rain in sight and b) we're inexplicably down a man.

Tonight, I had a dinner engagement with a colleague at St. Francis, the purpose of which was to read the anonymous reviews we asked our students to complete for us at the very end of the year. I simply passed out little slips of white paper to my students and had them drop them into a slot in a well-duct-taped box on my desk. My colleague--Mary Feltes--did the same. I read hers to her and she read mine to me. To be blunt, mine were brutal. I deserved them, I guess--everything my students said about me rang pretty true. If you're one of my students and you're reading this, thank you for your candor, and I will try to do better in the future.

To cap things off, I got home at around 11:00 p.m. and decided to walk up to the local Tuffy Auto Service Center to collect the Dragon. You all know the Dragon by now if you've read my previous ramblings. She's still in pretty good shape--not great--but lately it had developed this heavy vibration at speeds over 30 mph. Tuffy said it was universal joints. I could have done it myself, I guess, and thank Tuffy for the diagnosis, but we all know my success rate with things mechanical of late, so the job, I felt, is better left to professionals.

After a good long walk on a beautiful early summer evening, during which I had a lot of time to think about the whole teaching thing, I got to the parking lot at Tuffy and I saw this:



Cool, huh? Well, I ain't walking home, so nothing left to do but change the fucker.

Have you ever used the tire-changing gear on a car of early vintage? More likely than not, the answer is no, and the reason is probably that no one does it that way anymore because it's freaking insanely dangerous. Here's what the jack looks like:



Keep in mind that the Dragon weighs almost 5,000 pounds. I gotta use this thing? What's particularly cool is that, when the car's whole ass is off the ground, and you're pulling on the wheel to take it off (or pushing on the spare to put it on) the whole thing wobbles alarmingly. Could you imagine using this on a gravel shoulder in the rain? No doubt our parents or grandparents had to do this at least once, and I appreciate their sacrifices all the more now.

Once the Dragon's large green ass is safely back on terra firma, I notice that the spare is not quite inflated to the proper operating pressure, so it's off to the gas station to top it off. After this is done, I take the thing out on the expressway. Thank God, at least the boys at Tuffy did something right--the old beast is back to her old ways of long, low and smooth, eating up the asphalt and sucking down a gallon of gas every 10 miles or so.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

On junkyards...

This is another oldie that I decided to take out of the closet. I hope it will serve in good stead of a truly original post; in any event, it kinda works as a prolouge to the story of Little Mama, my 1988 GMC Safari that was by far the most cursed thing I ever had the displeasure to know. This tale was written during Little Mama's short but all-too-long tenure with me.

Junkyards

The problem was the stereo. I know old GM minivans aren’t supposed to come factory-equipped with bumpin’ systems that piss off the neighbors, but one expects at least the basics. I like to have the fader set so that most of the sound is emanating from the back speakers. It balances things nicely, and anyway, the driver sits really close to the front speakers in my car, so unless they’re turned down quite a bit, one really doesn’t hear the back speakers at all. Little Mama (for the unwashed, Little Mama is my gas-guzzlin’ oil-burnin’ 1988 GMC Safari, replete with rusty rocker panels, a wheezy 4.3 litre non-Vortec V-6, and a bastion of mid-80’s GM idiosyncrasies such as a shitty stereo, among many others) was equipped with a stock GM stereo that, whenever a sizable bump was hit, would completely shut off the back speakers, thereby routing the entire signal to the front. Sometimes, just to be endearing, it would do this of its own accord, bump or no bump, as a result scaring the shit out of the unfortunate pilot, which, 99.3% of the time, happened to be me. After a year and a half’s worth of tepid ownership, I still had not gotten used to it. Also, I was becoming more than a little irate.

I woke up one morning this past September with a newfound resolve to ameliorate the issue. I ate a quick breakfast and drove to Best Buy with no intention of leaving until a suitable replacement had been selected. However, once having gained the threshold of said establishment’s not-insubstantial “Kar Audio” section, I quickly came to the realization that there was no fucking way I was gonna walk out of there with a decent sound-generating device under my arm on a teacher’s salary.

I drove back to my house and got some tools. It was time to head to the junkyard.

“Now, wait just one fuckin’ minute,” you, O Honored Reader, are no doubt saying to yourself. “Who goes to the junkyard to get a car stereo? Are you out of your freakin’ skull?” Well, if you’re broke, like me, and you just barely know the difference between a flathead and a Phillips screwdriver, like me, you pays yer ticket and you takes yer chances.

And, if you think about it, it makes some sense for someone on a budget, especially when one owns a vehicle manufractured by the General. From 1983 to 1994, most GM cars used the exact same head unit for their stereos. Considering that there are six makes to choose from—Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, and GMC—that makes the chances of finding a replacement all the easier. One would think, anyway. And so off I went, optimistic of my chances.

Going to the junkyard is, for me, always a happy, enjoyable experience. I stand a good chance of fixing a problem that is annoying enough to warrant me doing something about it, and usually on the cheap. Also, since the weather must needs be decent for such a sojourn, lest the prospector find him- or herself, not to mention the countless carcasses from which he or she hopes to extract momentary salvation, mired in three feet of viscous brown mud. Thus trips to the boneyard are always sunny, lighthearted affairs, when the weather is nice. Stephen King said that summer means different things to everyone. For me, summer conjures up images of rotting metal carcasses gleaming rustily in a heartless midday Midwestern sun, with me picking my way slowly and dreamily among the ruins.

I arrived at “Hub Auto Wreckers” at about 11:00 that day. Pulling into the parking lot at this particular boneyard, one is met with a setting that is probably similar to any Midwestern auto salvage facility. There’s always three or four cars already there, regardless of the hour. I never thought of boneyards as having peak hours. Nor they do, from what I have observed, because there’s always the same number of cars—badly beaten, misshapen wrecks for the most part, upon which Bondo has been liberally spread. They’re usually old American iron, from the 70’s and 80’s, though often you see a clapped out Nissan Sentra or Toyota Tercel, its muffler shot, CV joints rattly, and body pock-marked with calderas of rust. It’s usually one of these latter that I see abandoned at the back corner of the lot, too nice to scrap, but just worthless enough to preclude the owner investing any more time or knuckle-skin on the thing.

Entering this boneyard requires one to divert through a sagging box trailer converted to an office. Raised on blocks, one must climb a flight of six rickety wooden steps, open the door and cross eight feet to the other side, and climb back down another flight. On one’s trip through the trailer’s bowels, one is unfailingly accosted by the proprietor of the establishment, a fine Southern gentleman whom I once pissed off greatly by rendering effectively worthless a theretofore perfectly serviceable rear end to a 1976 Dodge B100 Tradesman—but I digress, and anyway, that’s a story all by itself. He dealt with me in the same laconic manner he had used since that day when I was but a wee shaver of 25 waving a 7/16 offset box wrench.

I told him what it was that I sought. I did not bring in the offending unit from my own vehicle. GMs are, as I have said, nearly ubiquitous in boneyards, and their radios accordingly as populous. He knew right away what I was talking about.

“Shit, boy, findyaself any GM car and start pokin’ away at her,” he replied. He turned and gestured to an aerial photograph of the establishment tacked to the bowed and peeling Formica paneling on the wall. “Pontiac’s here (front-drive’s here and rear’s here); Olds right about here, Chevy’s here, here, here, and here; Buick’s here, GMC’s over there, and Caddy’s somewhere over in that corner.”

I deigned to take my tools with me. I thought I’d prospect for about 15 or so minutes; then, when I found a suitable donor, I’d assess the situation, then go back and obtain the necessary tools. What I thought would be a 15-minute search, however, turned out to take quite a bit longer, because it seems that the first thing to get removed from a donor as soon as it comes in on the wrecker is the stereo. It took me a good hour to find the first suitable transplant candidate.

I started, of course, in the Cadillac section. The logic was that Caddies are GM too, but their stereos surely must be better than the standard fare on lesser General issue. (I have since learned that, for the most part, this is not the case.) I made my way slowly to the Cadillac section, passing through Ford front-drive (Escorts, Tauri, Sables, etc.) and Buick on the way.

Cadillacs are a strange brew. Even in a boneyard, there’s something different about them. They don’t even seem to rust in the same way as lesser marques. I wouldn’t say they have a regal quality about them, but there’s a sophistication, a sleekness, a worldliness that is more Las Vegas than continental, but imposing all the same. Here’s a white ’82 Biarritz. White leather interior, burgundy trim. Oil-caked crater where the engine used to be. I can see this car idling out in front of the Sands Resort out in Vegas, trunklid open as the valet puts in the suitcases. Here comes the owner, now, bulling her way across the lobby like a ship with every scrap of canvas to the wind. She is a stately woman, even in her leisure suit, a shade of green that contrasts nicely with the white of her hair. She flashes a smile whose brilliance is more likely due to Polident than to Crest, and hands the valet a fin as she walks around to the driver’s side. The door, while taking some effort to get in motion, closes with a reassuring thunk. She drops the transmission into DRIVE, hits the gas and is gone, the engine, a big 350, barely breaking a sweat as the Caddy hits 65 on the outbound side of the expressway.

No radio in this one, though. It’s still in good shape, otherwise. Probably what happened is the owner upgraded to a newer model a few years after she (or he; what does my imagination know?) got this one; it got swapped to owners who cared about it less and less as it got older. Maybe the engine finally gave up, and instead of fixing it, the owner just gave up too. The license plate is still affixed to the rear bumper. The sticker shows a year of ’96. Yeah, I’ll bet that was it. It sat for awhile, the owner probably intending the whole time to throw another motor in it, until…well, you know how it is; I guess we just need that space for other things. Boneyard’ll give me fifty bucks for it and tow it for free.

Here’s a black ’76 Fleetwood. Big bash in the driver’s-side rear door. Pretty rusty, and the paint is starting to crack. Still, this car can talk, and what it says is back the fuck off. I could be plenty mean if I wanted to, you bet. It’s too old to have the radio I want, though, and anyway, the entire interior has been gutted. Brightly colored wires spill out from firewall and under the dash. No seats, and the floor is peppered with small flecks of glass, all that remains of the windshield.

There are a lot of Cadillacs here. Here’s a pale-yellow ’87 Seville that was probably used for the sole purpose of going to and from church on Sundays, was sold after the original owner passed, and then brought here after the wreck. There’s a caved-in mess made of the front end, with general contours that would probably fit well around a telephone pole. The hood is crumpled over a snarl of hoses, wiring and cast-iron bits that would be more trouble to get at than would be worth to sell. Here’s a ’91 Eldorado, a burgundy beauty from the A-pillar back. The front end is a blackened, rusty ruin. There is, in my opinion, no better, more efficient, or more effective way to destroy a car than to burn one. There’s Caddies ad nauseum, and here and there an Oldsmobile Toronado or Buick Riviera, which to the uninitiated look similar enough to Cadillacs as to be easily confused. No radios in any of them.

An hour blown, I make my way over towards the Pontiac section. Straight off the bat I find two potential donors—an ’86 Sunbird convertible (red, of course) and a white ’90 Grand Am. I head for the Sunbird first, thinking that a ragtop must needs have a respectable sound system. I am not disappointed. It’s the standard quirky-sized GM faceplate, occupying the same amount of space as a 5  7 index card, but there’s a bonus I’ve never seen in a GM car before. This one has a five-band graphic equalizer, sandwiched between the volume knob and the clock. It probably is just a gimmick, and does little to improve the sound, but it sure looks cool. I head back to Little Mama for my tools.

The route I take back to the parking lot takes me past the minivan section. Out of habit I look for anything resembling the Astro/Safari twins. What I have found to be the case with the GM S-10-based minivans is that there are damn few in the boneyards, and those that are there are mere skeletons, having been thoroughly picked-over by faster scavengers than myself. Here are two, right next to each other. They’re easy to spot from a distance once you get used to it. There’s little left of either, and one has been turned on its side. Its general state of repair says that it was involved in a rollover accident. There’s not a straight body panel on it, and its roof is caved in over the left rear corner. I know that neither carcass will have a stereo, but I look in the overturned one just for the heluvit. It’s pretty bare in there, too. All the seats are gone except the rearmost. The fine brown clay that is the pavement of this place presses up through the holes that used to be windows, and lying on the C-pillar between the rearmost and middle side windows as though it were placed there is a child’s shoe. It is pink where it is not filthy. Sure, it could have simply been tossed there; it doesn’t necessarily belong with the remains of this vehicle. My overactive imagination, however, always so eager to project backwards to what the previous owners were like, and to what happened to them, sails into action. I jump on it with both feet before it gets very far. Stephen King is right. Sometimes having a great imagination is a neat thing, because you can envision whatever you want, whenever you want, in total privacy. But sometimes it turns around and bites the shit out of you with these big sharp teeth, and the wounds bleed for a while.

I reach my own van, and for a little while my imagination pulls against the ropes as I see a running, upright version of the wreck I have just left. Was the little girl sitting at this window just before it happened? Shaddap, you, I think, but not before my brain treats me to one or two especially choice images. Dammit.

I grab my toolbox and head back. I make sure I avert my eyes as I pass the minivan section. On my left is the Ford full-size section, replete with Crown Vics, LTDs, Mercury Grand Marquis and the occasional police interceptor. The police cars are cool to look at, but they’re rarely worth anything by the time I find them because they have popular bits like big engines, big carburetors, big tires, and big alternators that would just about light up your house. The scavengers usually head for these first.

At the Sunbird I decide that I will need only two tools; a 3/8” socket wrench with a 3-inch extension, and the Torx-head driver that fits about 98% of the interior fasteners in any 80’s GM vehicle. If you own a GM vehicle and you plan to work on it yourself, you gotta have one of these. In my car, Torx-head screws of identical size hold on the dashboard, headlight surrounds, taillight bezels, plastic rub-strips on the footwells by the doors, and so on. Six of them keep the dashboard faceplate in place on this specimen. Off they come, and there is the radio, held in by two 3/8” stainless nuts. 30 seconds later and it is mine.

I head on back to the office with my prize. I bring my toolbox in with me; of course the Southern gentleman will want to inspect its innards for any contraband. First, however, must come the money. I set my find on the counter.

“Hmm,” he says, industriously gnawing on the end of a paint-pen. “D’ja get this’un out of a Pontiac?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Lookie here like ya found yaself a l’il added bonus,” he says, jabbing at the equalizer with one horny thumb.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Well, these normally go for forty, but this’ll probably knock the price up a buck or two,” he says, looking at me as if for approval. I think forty is already insane for a radio that came out of a scrapper anyway; the windows in over half those wrecks are gone and this unit has seen untold rainstorms, snow, what have you. Forty’s lunacy; an extra five dollars is a spit in the ocean.

“What if it doesn’t work?” I ask, thinking that if I’m gonna get raped, it’s at least gonna be fair.

“Waal, shit, ya jest come on back in here and we’ll findya anuther’n,” he says, nice and easy-like.

I nod and hand over the wad. He takes it with one hand and writes some arcane hieroglyphs on the unit with the other. Hey, if they mean something to him, great. I place the stereo on the floor and hold up my toolbox for him to inspect. He does so thoroughly, then gives me a nod and a wink. “Ya got too much shit in thar t’fit in anything else,”

“Yeah,” I say, and head for the door.

It’s lunacy to pay forty bucks for a scrapyard radio, let alone forty-five, but it’s even dumber to leave before verifying that it works. I am prepared, and have the dashboard of Little Mama dismantled in no time. The offending unit is removed and the new one installed in five minutes. I turn the key to “ACC” and hit the power button, once again thrilled with the anticipation of fixing something with parts I got from something someone else threw away. It’s a great feeling, but it’s tough to describe. I once fixed the sunroof in my dad’s old ’83 Toyota Supra with a part I got from the junkyard. I paid five bucks for that part, a simple switch for which the dealer wanted eighty. That felt great; I felt like I was getting something back on The Man. That feeling feeds on itself. With these tools and these hands and this brain I can fix anything, and for cheap, too, I thought. The dealers want me to shell out major coin to fix my car for me, or, if I want to fix it myself, to pay exorbitant prices for parts. If it gets too expensive to fix, why, it’s time to buy a new car. But I can keep this old heap running as long as I want, if I don’t mind getting dirty and turning a few wrenches.

Is this some fucked-up metaphor for life? I don’t think so. But it seems that whenever a trip to the junkyard turns out to be successful, I walk out of there feeling like more of a person than when I went in. I feel like I’m in charge, for once. I did it my way, I think. No one can ever screw me again. I don’t have to be submissive, I don’t have to be weak, I don’t have to pander to anyone’s philosophies but my own. But it’s more than that, somehow. I don’t know…it’s like—it’s like--fuck.

Okay. I got it. You know what it’s like? It’s like, okay, here’s this rusted out/smashed up/burned to a crisp wreck. It’s worth nothing to anyone. But here…you see this grease-obscured part? This—what is it—this PCV valve? The dealer wants a hundred and a half for it. I got a hundred and a half like a got a rubber dick. But I can get it off this old heap for fifteen, and fifteen I got. Now I can take my kids to the zoo like I promised.

You see? Almost a square mile of seeming worthlessness. But somewhere in that rough waste there is a part that I could ill afford otherwise, but that allows me to propagate something that means a lot to me. “It’s just a van, Jay; fuckin’ relax.” Well, yeah, it’s just a van, but like all my cars have been, it has been a bed, a home, a hangout, an umbrella, and transportation from Point A to Point B. Point B is usually where the people I love are, and when it isn’t, my car takes me away again, to the next Point B. If I have to get greasy to keep that privilege—fuck that; necessity--—then so be it. It’s just a piece of shit, but it’s my piece of shit. And it’s just a radio today, but tomorrow it will be something else.

Feeling ten feet tall, feeling like a man again, I hit the power button and sit back.

Of course it doesn’t work. Why would I ever have expected it to work? Maybe I don’t have the key turned all the way to ACC (I do). Maybe the power plug isn’t all the way in on the back of the stereo (it is). Everything’s hooked up correctly, but I get nothing except a buzz through the speakers that sounds like a short somewhere. The fuckin’ clock doesn’t even light up.

Thoroughly pissed off, I pull the connectors brutally out of the stereo. I slam the door and head back to the office.

“Whudya mean she don’t work?”

“I mean it doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything,” I reply.

“D’ja plug ever-thang in right?” I am struck by his ability to completely and clearly eliminate any traces of the y in everything.

“Yeah.”

“You sure?” This comes out y’shoor.

“Yeah.”

“Walp,” says the proprietor, turning around and throwing the erstwhile solution to my sound-generation difficulties on a steadily-growing rubbish heap in the corner, “go on back out there and digyaself out anuther’n. Good thing ye checked afore ye left.” Item: It’s been a while since I’ve heard the word one reduced to a mere contraction tacked onto the back of another word. Item: I have often seen the word ye written in books and stories, as in Hear ye, hear ye! I don’t believe I’ve ever actually heard it spoken until now. I ruminate on these things as I slouch my way out the door.

I aim myself toward the Pontiac section, meaning to make a donor out of that white ’90 Grand Am I had spotted earlier. My travels take me through the Oldsmobile section, however, and I find myself forced to stop. What catches my eye is not some horribly mangled wreck that still has blood on the upholstery, but a perfectly ordinary 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. What’s strange about this one is that it is, apparently, in fine shape. There are no dents, no busted glass, no evidence of fire. I walk over and open the hood. The engine is there, complete. Nothing is missing, save the battery, that I can spot. Sure, it could have thrown a rod, I guess, but this engine is GM’s corporate 3.8 litre pushrod V6. If there’s anything The General knows how to build, it’s transmissions and 3.8 litre V6’s. I’ve never heard of anyone having to replace one. I’m sure it happens, but to my knowledge it is rare.

I open the driver’s door. The interior is clean and intact. Like the exterior, the interior is a rich burgundy. There’s one of those green piney-smelling trees hanging from the lighter. I look at the odometer. It reads 45,873. GM’s didn’t use six-digit odometers until ’91, so this one could have rolled over once, but I doubt it. This vehicle’s in way to good a shape to be here.

I notice on the lower passenger-side corner of the windshield a parking permit for Sandalwood Apartments in Wheaton, Illinois. Sandalwood is a retirement community. I suspect, looking at the condition of the car, and the fact that the seat is pulled up really close to the steering wheel, that the last owner of this car was somebody’s grandmother.

Despite my efforts to stop it, my imagination jumps into action again, and I flash through a number of scenarios until I come up with one that seems at all likely. The short version—after a long illness, under which the grandmother’s family is placed under great strain, the old lady mercifully dies. In order to put paid to the woman and shut that door of everyone’s lives as quickly as possible, her things are given away. The car is put up for sale. After two weeks, there are no takers, so…well, just need that space for other things. Boneyard’ll give us fifty bucks for it and tow it for free. Again, I am most likely wrong, but sometimes an overactive imagination just will not be suppressed, and I get out of the car, overcome with a wave of sadness every bit as wretched as that experienced at the rolled-over minivan.

I walk away, thinking that the car’s too nice to start taking it apart. But one must know that it really is a matter of time before it gets what’s coming, and it does have a tape player that ought to fit in Little Mama. I go back and start hacking away. When I am done, I leave, but not before making sure the door is closed, a consideration few, including me, bestow upon junkyard relics.

Back in the van, having cleared the exchange with the owner, I plug in the radio. Upon hitting the power button I am blessed with a clear signal from 97.9 FM, and the song that’s on the radio is “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain. It’s just what I need to break my funk, and besides, the fucker works. My spirits brighten considerably, and I am beginning to put everything back together when I remember that I have not tried the tape player. I slide in Robert Palmer’s “Addictions: Volume I,” and hear just a snippet of “Simply Irresistible” when there emanates from the deck a muted twannngg! and the tape stops. I blink, then eject and reinsert the tape. Nothing. Eject and reinsert. Nothing. Eject and reinsert, this time with a hearty smack to get it in the right humor. Nothing.

Evidently what has happened is that the old lady who owned the car from which this stereo emanated used the tape player rarely if ever. The drive belt became dry-rotted from years of disuse until I came along and ZANG. Thoroughly frustrated, I rip the unit out and stomp off to the office. Therein, I place the offending item on the counter and just stare at the guy.

“This’n don’t work neither?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Walp, third time’s the charm, as I’ve heard it said. Wanna try one more time?”

Well, I’m here, and I still have my tools, so I’m game for one more shot.

This time I go straight for the Pontiac section. I don’t stop or look around as I walk. I find the Grand Am and go straight for it. I rip the door open and fall into the driver’s seat.

God, what was GM thinking in the early 90’s? This thing is painfully ugly, with a dashboard whose instruments look as though they were placed by throwing darts. Half the gauges are digital, and half are analog, and all are hideous—a mishmash of angles and shapes and lines that lack any and all harmony with one another. The car on a whole is in poor shape, besides being ugly, so I attack the fascia holding the radio captive with a vengeance. I get it halfway out when I find that its egress is blocked by the console-mounted shifter. It’s an automatic, and the situation would be easily rectified by sliding it back into DRIVE, but that requires the ignition key, which of course is nowhere to be found. I’ve been in this fucking boneyard for four hours and I’m no further along than when I started. I’m tired and I’m pissed. I struggle with the shifter by hand to no avail, then finally resort to sitting on the floor and kicking it with the heel of my boot. Five minutes of this and the shifter finally relents, giving way with a crack that sounds like breaking bone. I’ve also got a killer headache, so when my imagination tries to jump on that little tidbit of mental imagery, I grab it in a hammerlock and go back to manhandling the stereo out of its womb in the dashboard. The process requires a little more breakage here and there, but I’m beyond caring now. It looks as though this car was cared for little anyway before it came here, so I feel little remorse for abusing it thus. Yet finally I have my prize, and with a sigh of relief I head back toward the office, wherein I verify the exchange with Bubba and head out towards the van.

As I am walking it hits me. Is that how it starts? Is that how people forget to care? Do you just get tired and pissed off enough that shit just doesn’t matter anymore? I guess now I can see how that happens. That Grand Am is a perfect example. It’s a rolling embodiment of apathy. A Grand Am is a fine vehicle, don’t get me wrong. But no one’s gonna buy one and take it home and spend a Saturday afternoon washing and waxing it. It’s basic transportation with a pretense of sportiness; that’s the way GM builds them and that’s what they’re used for. A car that’s bought for such reasons usually gets the short end of the stick. Think about it: how many mint-condition late-eighties GM vehicles have you seen recently that weren’t Corvettes or Cadillacs?

Cars that are built and bought that way usually live a hard life. It’s hard to get a ten-year old GM vehicle past 100,000 miles without spending a lot of money (g’wan; ask me how I know). Well, this one’s getting too expensive to have fixed all the time, so it’s time for a new one. We can probably get a grand for it though. And that’s the way it goes—I’ve bought cars on that rung of the ladder, five or six rungs down from the top, and sold them there too. And after awhile, it just stops mattering. You’re too tired and pissed off to care, so let’s have some fun while it still runs. Here, this oughta be good—watch me put my cigarette out on the steering wheel. Hey, check this out—you ever do a neutral-drop in a front-drive car? Sit back and watch the smoke. Hey, watch this…hey, you ever try…man, you won’t believe what I did with this thing…to this thing…I hate this thing…I can’t wait to get rid of this thing…I wish it would just hurry up and die so I can get rid of it.

I’m getting closer to the van now, and I’m about halfway across the parking lot when I hear a god-awful noise over my shoulder. It sounds like a bulldozer driving through a china shop. Sickening crunching noises peppered with the sound of breaking glass…like every chump that ever slowed down on the expressway to gape at an accident, I am powerless to stop myself from looking.

It’s the boneyard’s car-crusher, a device that takes cars from which simply no more use can be garnered and smashes them into little cubes about three-by-three-by-three. What happens is they use an enormous forklift, about two stories tall, to spear cars on the forks and them deposit them in the smashing chamber. They’re stacked about two or three high before they go in on the belt, and they come out in bastardized Hyundai-Ford-Isuzu-Saab-flavored boullion cubes. The crusher is powered by an enormous Caterpillar diesel, and it’s remotely controlled by the guy driving the lift.

As I watch, the driver trundles over to the crusher with an old Chevette skewered on one fork. He’s got it through the two rear doors; it dangles thence like a possum on a stick. It looks pretty intact, from where I stand; apparently Chevettes aren’t worth that much, even to boneyard scavenge rats like me. The driver places the Chevette on top of an old Mercury something or other, then goes around behind a pile of wrecks and out of sight for a moment. When he comes back into view he’s got a Mazda B2200 pickup truck upside down on the forks. He’s going pretty fast; he hits a bump and the truck goes flying. It hits the ground with a hollow popping sound that is totally unlike what I expect to hear when two or three thousand pounds of anything hits the ground from more than ten feet up. When the truck comes to rest there’s little recognizable left. The driver deftly retrieves it and pokes it in the crusher on top of the Chevette. He hits the START button and the diesel belches black smoke; the crusher starts and when it’s done there’s nothing to show that this cube ever contained a car that once gleamed on the showroom floor; was given as a graduation present to an ecstatic, tearfully thankful teenager; was ever taken to the drive-in; was used to pick up an old friend at the airport; was cursed on a heartless, crystal-blue Midwestern winter morning for failing to start; was ever cherished, hated, or acknowledged at all.

With an effort, I am finally able to wrench my eyes away, but they catch on an old transmission leaning against the fence. The torque converter is still attached; it has leaked pink transmission fluid that, against the dirt parking lot, assumes a coppery-reddish hue that looks like…

Fuckin’ imagination. I don’t want to think about that. I just want to put in this fuckin’ radio and get the fuck out of here.

This one works in both capacities. I have already decided that this is the last attempt; after this I start mugging old ladies, and Best Buy will yet have my business. But my reserve is short-lived; the signal is strong (though the track that is playing this time, “Shooting Star” by Bad Company, is just a little too poignant to be enjoyed) and the tape player works, although some remnants of a previously-eaten cassette tape must be scraped off the drive apparatus before it will play cleanly. I poke at it with a screwdriver for a little while before I realize that is going on 4:30, and it will be getting dark soon. For the first time in my life, I have spent an entire day at the junkyard. The realization leaves me feeling weird, and altogether greasier than that under my fingernails would attest.

The van’s dashboard bolts back together easily enough; it’s almost second nature by now. I throw my tools haphazardly in the toolbox and fire up the engine. The radio’s signal is crisp and clear, and before leaving the parking lot I adjust the fader and aim the van straight for a few choice potholes. The van’s body shakes alarmingly, and my tools rattle accordingly in the steel-sided toolbox, but not once does the signal come pounding up through the front speakers only. I am satisfied.

Back out on the expressway, cruising at a perfectly legal 65, Jimi Hendrix is easing through “Little Wing.” I recline the seat back a few degrees. It’s starting to get dark, so I turn on the lights. As the sun sets deeper, I come to realize that something is not right. As I pass under a viaduct and into shadow, I see what it is for the first time. The dashboard lights in my GMC glow not with the mystic green that is traditional for American automobiles, but with a milky white that began to come into vogue in the mid-eighties. The stereo I have just transplanted, however, glows not white, but red—a color chosen by Pontiac just as GMC, Chevy, Olds, Buick and Cadillac shifted to white.

I consider turning around, but just for a moment. Today has been an emotional roller coaster, and with the help of my hyperactive imagination I have seen more of the back door of the Great American Highway than I ever wanted. Sure, the radio’s red; but the sky’s blue and water’s wet and I am listening to the music as I head for home. In the light of the dying day, and in light of where I have been and what I have seen, that’s just fine with me.

On motorcycles that also have names that begin with M (are you tired of this yet?)...

Well, in all this talk of music and mowers, MGBs and mayhem in the classroom, I have failed to mention one other thing that is of vast importance in my life. I have at the moment no significant other, and am at the moment in a state of almost constant brokeness (I do the little dealie where there’ll be a 50 in my wallet one day and the next, it’s gone), so I have to limit my free time and the ways in which I spend it to things that don’t regularly require a monster influx of cash. This rules out a) heavy drug use; b) a serious gambling disorder; c) eating binges; d) uncontrollable weekly shopping sprees; e) an inability to say no to telemarketers and door-to-door salesmen. Yes, they do still exist.

This leaves a guy like me, non-skilled in the ways of fashion or chasing down the opposite sex; without a suitable posh ride for sliding up to the Bamboo Room and palming the valet a fin as I swagger to the door in my reet pleats; without prepaid season tickets to the White Sox; with little to do at night (at least until another band gig comes along) or in the daytime on the rare day off. With the exception, of course, of the bike.

Yeah, I guess I may have failed to mention this thing. It ain’t nothin’ fancy, mind you—I’m not bragging about it; I don’t tout it as the fastest thing in three counties or the best looking. It isn’t any of these things, truly. And it isn’t even anything mega-sexual like a Harley or one of those oh-so-trendy Orange County Choppers or a ballet-dancing crotch-rocket that spends most of its time with one wheel in the air. But I’ll be happy to show you pictures, and if you steal a glance at my face while I’m showing you, I’m sure the look you see there will remind you of the look on new fathers’ faces as they show you pictures of their first-born. Yes, I am a sad, hopeless, twisted freak, but I knew this already.

It’s a 1983 Honda Magna v65. I’ve had the thing for 10 years now, and after those 10 years I can look over my shoulder at it while walking away and I still get the old thrill. My dad says that when this goes, it’s time to sell. I don’t ever foresee that happening.

Again, though, nothing fancy. Go into any bike shop and start talking bikes, and when they ask what you’re spreading your ass-cheeks on, tell ‘em you’re tank-slapping a Vincent Black Shadow and they’ll sit up and take notice. Norton 850 Commando? BSA 650 Lightning? Triumph Bonneville? Honda 305 Dream? 1948 Harley-Davidson Panhead? These will elicit nods of knowing approval. Even the new stuff, like a Triumph Rocket 2300 (I’ve ridden absolutely nothing even remotely as fast as that thing) or a new Goldwing will bring forth an "Ah," from the listener. A v65 Magna? Might as well tell them you’re riding a Schwinn. But there are a few of us out there who appreciate them, much as there are those who swear by their Magic: The Gathering ‘swamp-death’ deck or their train collection or their DeWalt 18V cordless jigsaw. It’s all relative.









Well, the Magna (see? Also begins with ‘M’, as do its other two appellations of affection, ‘Medusa’ and, more colloquially, ‘The Moose’) is nothing special, but I’ve been across the country on it, rebuilt it twice, dumped it at over 60 mph during the last hour of a 60-hour round trip, had it in my house, my parents’ house, my classroom, and had a piece of it in my pocket during every job interview I’ve had since I've owned it, and during my thesis defense. Again, I know I’m a sad piece of shit with no life, but all I can do is shake my head along with you. I dunno—it’s like the teddy bear or the blanky you had as a kid that you still to this day are loath to remove altogether from your life. I had a bear—his name was Brownie—and a blanky too, but they both got sold at garage sales before I was in high school. (Yeah, I cried. What are you lookin’ at?) So I have the Moose, and she is a part of me now. I don’t think I’ll ever sell it—I’ll just move it into my living room in place of the loveseat and kick back and watch movies on it when it finally decides to throw a rod through the block or something.

Well, anyway, this summer I have been extremely late in the instigation of my vernal ritual of digging the Moose out from the back of the garage and getting it ready for a summer of no-particular-place-to-go. I finally got it out last night. It’s old, I know (twenty-two friggin’ years), and it has a lot of miles on it, but there’s fight left in it yet. I changed all the fluids and charged the battery. It lit up on the seventeenth try, the old valvetrain clicking and rattling like a bag of nickels thrown into the dryer. Also, after five minutes, it overheated and puked antifreeze all over my shoe. Kinda like waking my grand-papa (I know you’re looking down on me, grandpa, and I’m only funnin’) up from his afternoon nappy-nap.

Tonight was better. Took the ol’ girl up to the Blockbuster to rent Shallow Hal, and all along the way I reveled in the raucous bark of the exhaust, so different, so naaaasty after I replaced the stock system with a MAC four-into-one. It’s still pretty fast; though it will no longer lift it in second with a little judicious clutch abuse, it’ll still stand up pretty easily in first. I enjoyed walking out to it from the Blockbuster and getting on just as a nice little family pulled into the space next to me in their Toyota Highlander. Two kids, about six and nine, in the back seat. Wait until they open the door and get out, then hit the starter and Ra-GAAA! Instantly they’re screaming their asses off and I’m scooting my bad self back to the hills. Oops! (Insert big innocent smile right about here.) I keep forgetting how loud it is! Silly me. Ah, summer nights.

Well, it’s missing a turn signal and still pukes about a quart of oil onto my left boot every two hours or so, but it’s good to have the ol’ piece o’ shit pounding the pavement one more year. Maybe next year I’ll finally have to move that loveseat out of the way, but we’ll just take it one day at a time.

P.S. I mentioned my old MGB a few blogs back, and I alluded to the electrical problems that plagued it as a result of its British heritage. Tonight, coming back from the video store, I got behind one coming up to the light. When he stepped on the brakes, the turn signals went on instead. I thought I was going to cry from the nostalgia.

I rolled up next to him. He was turning right (ah, but I didn’t know that yet, see, ‘cause the turn signals were otherwise occupied, dig it?) and I was going straight, but there’s room for a motorcycle and a dinky little shitbox in one lane.

"Nice car, man," I said, throwing the guy a shitty little salute.

"Hey, thanks," he replied. "Nice bike. Hey, is that a Magna v65?"

Sigh. It’s nice to meet someone who knows. "Yeah. She’s old, but she’s still pretty fast."

"Yeah, my cousin got killed on one," the guy said. "He was doing a hundred and thirty-five when he hit the tree, the cops said. Also, his BAC was over point two."

"Wow," I said, as the light turned green. "That sucks."

"Not really," said the guy. "He was an asshole. Had a nice bike, though." He stepped on the gas and took off in a cloud of blue oil smoke. I sat there breathing it in and experiencing almost total recall to age sixteen when someone behind me honked.

I snapped instantly back to 2005 and made my way slowly home, blipping the throttle at every opportunity and scaring as many small children as possible.

On trashing friends' backyards...

With apologies, this is a shameless repost of a short story I wrote about five years ago. The contents herein are all true, of course-they took place at Jeff's house on New Year's Eve of 1999. Not that I didn't have other ideas for my weekly blog; I just felt like blowing the dust off this one.

It’s 1:00 in the morning on New Year’s Day and Jeff is jumping. An appropriately titled tune by Van Halen is blasting out of the speakers on the wonderful old console stereo, and from time to time Jeff launches himself free of the world for a split-second or two. Only once does the CD skip when he lands. Culley and Carey are over in the corner trying party hats on various and sundry of each other’s respective anatomies. Dani is unsuccessfully trying to engage Jeff and Kurtis in conversation over Eddie’s screaming guitar, and I am fuzzily trying to decipher The Book of Lists. No one knows where Pat is.

There’s something running through my mind like a three-legged gerbil. It’s lopsided and grotesque, but intriguing in an elusive sort of way, all the same. It’s got to do with past New Year’s Eve parties—a videotape—wild laughter—damn. It squirrels its way through my mental grasp once again.

I am standing now, and I mean to walk into the living room and exchange The Book of Lists for We Interrupt this Broadcast when I notice that the music has changed. It’s not Van Halen anymore, not even close. It’s really familiar, but I just can’t place it. Fuck, am I that drunk? I know this tune…ah yes. It’s Roger Waters and his pros and cons.

"…and Cadillac limousines and the company of has-beens…"

…Cadillacs…

…a V-8 screaming in harmony with someone’s wild cackling laughter…

…a house flashing past on the TV screen in a lit-window blur…

Click.

I find my way over to Culley and Carey.

"Hey, Mike."

"Whutchoo want?"

"Didn’t you tell me something about Jeff going out in his backyard and doing donuts on New Year’s Eve a few years back?

"Yeah, we watched the videotape."

"Do you…er, d’you think he might be up for it again?"

"Fuck if I know. Why don’t you ask him?"

I decide, in a fit of drunken half-logic, to do just that. As the words pour out of my mouth, while I listen impotently to myself, I notice Culley weave his way over, his eyes, still at half-mast, lighting up with a yellowish, booze-induced glow. I guess I must look just like that.

Jeff, as gracious a host as ever got spanked by the doctor, agrees with an air of nonchalance. "Sure," he says. "Just be careful."

Oh, but we will, won’t we? Course we will.

I fumble my keys out of my pocket, and realize they are not the keys to my rice-grinding pansy-mobile Acura affectionately known as the Blue Banana, but to my mother’s brand-new Jeep Cherokee complete with a 4-liter straight-six that would just about pull a house, shift-on-the-fly full-time four-wheel-drive, and a perfectly acceptable 6-speaker stereo with six-disc CD changer.

Dr. Jekyll, sitting astride the left hemisphere of my cerebral cortex, lets out a wail of dismay and pounds his fists ineffectually into the convoluted surface.

Mr. Hyde only grins a grin filled with picket-fence teeth.

Culley and I are staggering toward our respective mounts when Pat (ah, there he is) crashes out through the screen door behind us. He begs us to tell him what we are doing. We do. He ejaculates verbally, and starts running. We figure he wishes to join us, but—well, Culley has a truck. I have—for the time being, anyway-this embodiment of road-rage on wheels. Pat is running toward…oh, dear God. A 1998 Mercury Tracer rent-a-wreck.

It’s front-wheel-drive.

It’s a four-cylinder.

It’s a four-door.

It’s pink, for Christ’s sake.

Oh well. Culley sprints lopsidedly for his Toyota and I fold myself laboriously into the cramped (for me, anyway) cockpit of the Jeep. It fires up with a smooth yet torquey-sounding purr. I load a Susan Tedeschi disc into the changer and pull the transfer-case lever back towards me. A small light appears on the dashboard, indicating that the full-time four-wheel-drive is herewith engaged.

It is January, yet so far there has been no snow. We have agreed to stay cool and off the gas until we get to the track portion of Jeff’s backyard, but Culley goes careening around the corner of Jeff’s house with the back end of his truck somewhere in the next zip code, rear wheels effectively skinning the lawn down to the frozen top-soil. I, of course, immediately follow suit, but my attempt to boot the rear end out with a poke of the throttle only tosses me back in my seat as the Jeep lurches forward. Of course you can’t hang it out in four-wheel-drive, you dolt, I think. I slide the lever forward, and the little light goes out. Ah, now this is much better. I skate around the house to the back yard with the peppery echo of turf bouncing off the fenderwells in accompaniment.

Culley threads his way through the trees onto the track, now obscured by pasty-yellow prairie grass that, in life, stayed admirably out of the way of highballing dirt bikes and Honda Odysseys. Now, in death, it exacts it revenge by completely obliterating the track surface. No matter. Culley pounds all 160 horsepower right through the floorboards, and his truck pirouettes beautifully across the track’s infield, the front and rear wheels—the ones I can see, anyway—pogoing frantically up and down over the tussocks.

I find that the experience is all the more rewarding if I simply leave the transfer case in two-wheel-drive. Things are much more exciting this way; I traipse gaily over the dead foliage, the Jeep rarely pointing in the direction it is traveling. The heater is blasting and Susan Tedeschi is bellowing and the world is just fine as paint. A track on the CD finishes, and, just before the next begins, I hear a sound over the sonorous grunt of the engine that is sufficiently strange to make me punch the ‘stop’ button.

Yes, there it is again. A high-pitched buzz that rises and falls, rises and falls. It’s behind me, so in booze-induced paranoia I stomp on the gas again and shoot off across the field. I pause after awhile; the sound is still there, only now it is accompanied by bright lights that wash across my rearview mirrors periodically, leaving my vision swathed in fuschia.

I finally get up the balls to stop, get out and look. It’s a pink bubble, floating in a bouncy sort of way across the grass. Like the Jeep and Culley’s truck, its trajectory rarely matches the direction in which its headlights point. It lacks a certain grace, though, somehow; its rear end comes out, snaps back into line, comes out, snaps back into line. I figure there’s some serious handbrake-yankin’ going on in there. The engine is constantly screaming, and every once in a while it does a complete one-eighty, throwing up grass in large divots from its madly-spinning front wheels.

It’s Pat. He sees me and stops, frantically rolls down the window. Across his moon face is plastered what seems to me to be the largest grin I have ever seen.

"Man, what the fuck?" I ask him, laughing. "What are you doing to this poor thing?"

"It’s a rental," he replies. That’s all he needs to know, and all I need to hear. I sprint back towards the idling Jeep as Pat throws the Mercury into another series of wild handbrake-induced loops.

I’m back in the Jeep, now. Susan is belting out "Friar’s Point" as I make my way all the way down to the very rearmost of Jeff’s enormous yard. A brisk stab of the go-pedal and the Jeep is pointing back towards the house. I steer into it, the rear end hooks up and away I go. The ride is rough, but not too bad, and I see the speedometer briefly touch thirty. All of a sudden the ride becomes smooth as butter, and I look down to see both the tach and speedometer needles go streaking towards the redline. Like Jeff, I have managed to leave the earth behind for just a little while. I circle around and do it again, and again, and again…and, like Jeff, only once does the CD skip when I land.

Crashing back to earth for the fourth time—or is it the fortieth?—I see a bright flash of light from the large picture window at the back of Jeff’s house. Instead of tossing the Jeep into another sprint-car-inspired left-hander, I continue on into the backyard proper. It is Kurtis, who is taking pictures. Immediately my brain screams "PHOTO OP!" How cool that must be—I’ll go flying up toward the house, and I’ll yank the parking brake and go slewing wildly toward the window. Kurtis will have some awesome footage.

Here I go—I accelerate toward the house. The Jeep vaults over the lip separating the track from—God help me—the lawn. I see the volleyball net flash by on the left. I cannot make out the individual squares in the net, so I must really be hauling. Here’s the tree; I aim the Jeep at a point three inches to the right of the tree and pull up on the handbrake. The Jeep swings into a lurid slide towards the house. I think it’s pretty close to full-on broadside, but then I think I could do better. The camera flashes into my peripheral vision as I release the parking brake with a snap and let some more ponies out of the corral. The brake-induced slide turns into power oversteer, and I go back out underneath the tree and past the net into the track’s infield, where Culley is doing a long, slow donut while simultaneously leaning his head out the window to watch himself.

I get out and swagger over, timing the truck’s oscillations and stepping inside the loop. Third Eye Blind is pounding out of the cab. Culley sees me and stops, turns the music down.

"Man, Kurtis is takin’ snappy-snaps," I crow.

"Of what?" Culley demands.

I proceed to demonstrate. As I come around and head back towards the track, I see Culley’s red Toyota come hurtling toward the house. And…yes, here is that bulbous little pink thing, its engine a cacophonous wail. Culley pelts toward the house, but pulls the handbrake a little too late, and does not follow it up with a liberal application of throttle. He obliterates the fire pit. Pat spins the front wheels splendidly; the front end of the car washes out and goes skimming towards the patio. He cuts the power just in time to avoid plastering the barbecue.

Now this is a party. We loop madly around the lawn, throwing in variations occasionally. I come heading straight for the house if full attack mode, intending to step on the brakes at the last minute in a spectacular show of…well, I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be cool. I forget the Jeep has no ABS, however, and I slide grandly toward the window, all four wheels hopelessly locked. The Jeep comes to a stop a foot or two from the house. Kurtis snaps furiously away from behind the window. Jeff is next to him, and from the look on his face, he is either shocked, laughing hysterically, or super-pissed.

The flashing red-and-blues from across the way give us pause. We all converge in the center of the lawn and erupt from our respective vehicles. I am laughing, Culley is laughing. Pat looks worried.

"I think those cops over there are for us," he says, jerking a nervous thumb towards the back of the yard at the cop parked next to the house behind Jeff’s. The officer is out of his car and looking at us; as Pat says this last, he leaps into the idling cruiser. Even above the tortuous racket Pat’s car is now making, we can hear roar of the police car’s engine, and we know the officer tarries not along the way.

"Okay, we better cool it," I say sagely. "Let’s get these things back out in front of Jeff’s house before the cops get here. That way they’ll never know which cars were back here."

We pile in and go back around the front. I am behind Culley; he snaps the headlights off and flings himself from his truck as I pull up behind him. I am getting out of the Jeep just as Pat’s abused Mercury limps out from behind the house, its engine sounding like an electric mixer—and just as two police cars converge on Jeff’s house. One of them courses in from across the street to block the driveway, as though to prevent our escape; its nose dips violently toward the pavement in the officer’s haste to bring us to bear.

Pat parks his car where it is and kills the motor. He walks up as the cops are beginning the Riot Act.

"Are you guys driving around in this guy’s backyard?" one asks, his tone incredulous.

I look at Culley. He looks at me. We both look at Pat.

"Well," Culley says, "we were just moving some cars around to save some space."

The officer is nonplussed. "So you—all three of you—decide to do some donuts while you’re ‘moving cars.’ How long were you out there?"

We exchange glances. None of us answer.

The other officer speaks up. He asks the question that, had we been any less twisted, would have known our actions would have forced him to ask. "How much have you guys had to drink tonight?"

The lie springs to my lips and is spoken before I can catch it. It is of course a blatant lie, and the officers both know it, and I know they know it, but I cannot help it.

"Er…nothing?" My voice rises on the last syllable, as if I were asking a question. I have just signed our death warrants.

At precisely that instant Jeff comes hurtling out his front door and down the driveway. Before he has even gotten off the porch he is shouting at the cops. "This is my house! Mine! I told them they could! Private property! They’re fine!"

He continues on in a similar fashion until he reaches the group. He and the officers engage in conversation, most of which I cannot hear as I have my head buried in my hands. But Jeff is as savvy as he is courteous and generous, and finally the cops head toward their cars, after admonishing us and telling us to sleep here tonight. Most of us do…except me, who leaves in search of an all-night Do-It-Yourself car wash open on New Year’s Eve wherein I can wash Jeff’s lawn off my mother’s car.

On getting this blogging thing figured out...

You'll notice, I guess, a drastic difference in the appearance of my little sanctum sanctorum here, simply for the fact that the type on the original setup was way too small to read. If I gave you a headache, I am deeply sorry. I hope the old look didn't deter you, and if it did, I hope the new look will not deter you.

On cars with names that begin with M...

Well, here be my inaugural blog. I apologize for the delay if I have implied that there would be something up here sooner; I’m bad that way. Problem is, after a day of good solid manual labor, I plop my big ol’ butt down here to check my email and whatnot, and before I can get up a good head of steam on the old blogger train, I’m asleep or way too drunk to make any sense. Not that I make sense awake or sober, but at least the chances that I’ll be cogent are a little greater.

In any event, I am a motorhead of the rawest variety. I get this from my father, who also was a motorhead despite the best ministrations of my grandfather, who just didn’t get it. My dad was and is one of those types where you ask him his blood type and he says "Penzoil." My father has two sons. It was a safe bet that one of them would follow in his footsteps, and that person is me, though unlike him I have never raced professionally nor earned my living by my mechanical skills, meager though they may be.

So I’m a motorhead too. Where I differ from my father (among other things) is that I name all my cars. Yeah, I’m that type of motorhead. Don’t ask me why; you either get it or you don’t. I’ve always anthropomorphized the hell out of any vehicle I own, to the extent that I talk to them, give them oil changes or baths as gifts, try to be easy with the wrenches so I’m not hurting them (unless I’m pissed, and then I’m deliberately rough so I cause them as much physical discomfort as possible. To quote a quote from Kevin, y’all wouldn’t last 10 minutes in my head), and applaud them when they perform well or feel bad when I’ve done something less than nice to them. I felt guilty, for instance, when I totaled my Acura Integra, not because it was a nice little car (it was) but because I felt it deserved better. My father, who is unlike me also in that he experiences none of this emotional baggage, responded with "Son, you are fucked up."

Anyway, I name all my cars. They’re all female and for some reason, they’ve all had names that begin with the letter M. I don’t know why this is, for it certainly wasn’t contrived; it just worked out that way. Here, then, is a list of all the cars I have owned, and their names.



My first car was a 1978 MGB. It was, as the picture implies, a little convertible of British heritage. It belonged to my brother, who has none of the guilt ascribed by me to things done or not done to cars, and so he beat the absolute shit out of this thing at every opportunity. And, you must understand, by this I mean more than the average high-school burnouts in the parking lot. My brother had a mastery for torturing vehicles, and I have to say that the B held up well, even after an entire year during which, on the return trip from dropping our car-pooler off at his house, our route home took us down Summit Hill, renowned for the fact that there was major air to be had for anyone psycho enough to hit the crest at greater than forty miles an hour. My brother never once took this hill at less than seventy, and if you asked me to bet if a person could have stood at the crest of that hill and my brother’s car would have cleared that person, I’d have bet yes.

I inherited it after my folks got my brother a well-used but still serviceable Honda Accord for graduation. They had the B repainted and let me tool around in it. I had it for two weeks, then parked it on a hill and forgot to leave it in gear (the parking brake didn’t work). It rolled down the hill and hit the only tree within 50 yards.

Oh well; it was never that reliable in the first place. MGBs are British, and like all British cars of 70’s vintage, had Lucas electronics. You’ve heard all the Lucas jokes, right? Why do Brits drink their beer warm? ’Cause Lucas makes their refrigerators. Heard of the Lucas three-position headlight switch? Yeah—off, dim, and flicker. Hey, I just had a Lucas pacemaker installed in my chest, and I feel gr—

Anyway, the MGB had a badge on the trunk that said MG. It looked like this:
If you were really drunk, and squinted a bit, you might think that said "Midge," so that’s what we called it.



This is what we replaced the B with. It was a 1983 Chevrolet Cavalier station wagon. It looks good in the pictures, but it really was a piece of shit. It was such a bare-bones stripper that it didn’t even have a cigarette lighter. But the seats folded down, and that was cool. I never lost my virginity in this, but I watched two friends (on two separate occasions) lose theirs. Yes, I’m a shameless voyeur, but I don’t go around peeping in windows; I was just the designated driver.

My friends called it the Cadaver; I called it Maggie. Its one redeeming feature was that it was a manual. Of all my circle of friends, I was the only one who knew how to drive stick, so I taught all my friends in this. I only had to replace the clutch twice. It got T-boned in the parking lot of the Toys-R-Us where I worked.



Then I got this. This was a 1987 Mazda B2200 pickup truck, and she was a sweetie. I called her Myrtle—a fitting moniker, I felt, for a slow little rice-grinding pickup truck whose color exactly matched that of poo. What you see in the photo is what I did with it a lot—practiced my drifting technique in snow-covered parking lots. For this you need a rear-drive vehicle with a hand-operated parking brake (not required, but helpful) and preferably a manual transmission. Myrtle had all of these, and she excelled at power oversteer. I would go out on winter nights after a big snowstorm before the plows came out and just hang my ass out around every corner. I once lost it when well sideways at way over 60 miles an hour around a long right-hand sweeper and ended up in some poor guy’s front yard with the high beams blazing in through his front window into the room where he was watching TV. He got up and waved. I waved back. I managed to get out of there before the cops came. I still can’t figure out how he didn’t get my plates.



I sold Myrtle at over 200,000 miles when the top of the engine started making some funny noises. She was puking oil out of the rear of the engine and needed a clutch, and was really rusty to boot, so I let her go for $500 and got this. This was Matilda, a 1988 Acura Integra. A nice little car and reasonably fast. I got sideswiped by a truck about a year after I got it and the whole driver’s side was pretty well fucked. Both doors on that side still worked, though, so when the insurance company wrote it off as a total loss, I collected the money and kept driving the thing, though from then on it was known as the Blue Banana, because a) it was blue and b) it was bent. My friends hated to ride in the back, because the rear fender was pushed in over the wheel on that side and the tire would rub when I hit bigger bumps. "I always feel like such a fatass when I ride in your car," was my friend Bob’s way of putting it.

One night, at about 3:00 in the morning, I was heading back to DeKalb on the tollway. It was a crisp November night and the highway was deserted. I had been thinking about all my friends who wold brag about how fast they got from here to there because they got their car up to 120 or 130. I’d always wanted to try that, and so I put my foot to the floor and held it there. "Just so that I can say that I tried it," I told myself as the speedometer climbed. By this time, Matilda had well over 200,000 miles and was running on borrowed time. I got her up to 101 mph. That’s what the cop said when he pulled me over. That ticket cost me a shitload of money and my insurance went through the roof. My dad told me he was proud of me.



Matilda was pretty well shot, but I wanted no further temptation, so I got this. This was Little Mama (it kinda begins with M), a 1988 GMC Safari. I owned this fucking thing for two years and I was never happier to get rid of a vehicle than when I sold it. I never believed in curses until I met Little Mama, and she was truly a cursed thing, to the extent that she was even in the papers, and people are in jail. I firmly believe that they would be walking around free today (which would definitely NOT be good, as they were true criminals) if not for this incarnate of Satan on wheels. I could write for days and still not paint the true picture, but I won’t do so now. Hey, if you really want all the gory details, ask and I’ll be happy to throw down, but for now we'll let the thing sleep.



With rapture I got rid of Little Mama (giving the thing a good solid kick in the ass as she went) and got this, a 1991 Honda Accord wagon, to this day the best car I ever owned. Not the coolest, but definitely the best. She was gunmetal gray (a color cops notice a lot less than red or yellow) and was a 5-speed. How cool was that? When I got it, it ran fine but would only idle on 3 cylinders, making a neat little putt-putt sound that my mother said sounded just like a car in a Mr. Magoo cartoon. The name stuck, and I kept Magoo for a while until a lot of expensive things broke at around the same time. I fixed them all at great expense, and then noticed a clunking sound coming from the transmission. I sold her with full disclosure to a guy on eBay.

At this point, you may have noticed that all my cars have been used. Many of them were well-used when they came into my life, and really, on average they last about two years, with the exception of Myrtle, who gave me five great ass-hanging years. When Magoo left, I made a deal with my dad, who was riding an old 1977 Yamaha and had to push it home one out of every three rides. My folks had been pretty vocal up to this point that my cars were always pieces of shit and they were getting pretty sick of picking me up every time one broke down. I told my dad that I would get a new car if he got a new bike. We shook on the deal, and he came home the next day on a new Honda Nighthawk. I went out and got this.



This was Mariah, a 2001 PT Cruiser. Now, I am a guy, and PT’s have always been nancy-mobiles in my opinion. But after Magoo, I liked the idea of a hatchback with four doors, that was also a four-cylinder and a 5-speed, a combination that lends itself well to decent gas mileage. I told my folks that I would buy something new, by which I meant no more than two years old. Mariah had 29,000 miles and was loaded to the gills with stuff I’d never had before in a car and never expected to have on a teacher’s salary—-CD player, leather interior, alloy wheels, a freaking sunroof! But, on top of what I made as a teacher, I was working pretty steadily with a pretty good band, and they were paying me union rate for every gig, so I was pretty confident I could make the monthlies.

Right around this time I scraped up an extra $300 and got another pickup truck. They’re handy to have around, and for $300, my God! You’d pay that just renting one once from Menards or U-Haul. And don’t kid yourselves—everyone has need of a pickup from time to time. I have noticed that I have a lot more friends when I own a pickup than when I don’t, and I was feeling lonely, so I got Mimi—a 1984 Ford F-150. Quite possibly, this thing was the biggest piece of shit I will ever own—the body was two different colors and the taillights were held in with duct-tape. For all that, however, she was a sweetheart and was damn near indestructible, save for a penchant for eating starters. I had her for two years and put six starters in her. But, she was also a manual, so if a starter crapped out on me, I could get away with push-starting for a little while.



Having a big ol’ beater around that you can haul stuff with is a blessing beyond the capability of words to describe, so after Mimi failed three emissions tests in a row and my license was being threatened with suspension, I sold her for $300 and bought this thing, a 1973 Ford Gran Torino station wagon. Now, she is not the best car I have ever owned, but she is definitely the coolest. She’s big and ugly and green, and so her name is Maud. Around these parts, however, she’s known as the Dragon, because she’s big and green and ugly and smokes. Also, she sucks gas down like a bastard, so she sleeps a lot. Also, she has red eyes in the front, though in the picture they’re still orange.



Eventually the band money dried up and making the payments on Mariah became a struggle. I sold the PT (I was glad to see her go, really, because I felt like a failure after bouncing check after check) and was wondering what to do next when I was blessed with a gift from a good friend. That gift came in the form of a 1993 Chevrolet Lumina. She was left out behind a house in Big Rock and hadn’t run in around two years. My friend Kevin said it was mine for the taking. I rented a trailer from U-Haul and went out to Big Rock and dragged the Lumina home with my dad’s Jeep. I threw a new fuel pump in her and off she went. She was big, pretty fast and really comfortable. Also, she was free. Thanks, Kevin. Kevin told me that he had named her either Margaret or Meredith. I liked Margaret.



I drove Margaret around for almost a year before gas prices went through the roof this spring. Margaret was a V-6 with an automatic and got about 20 miles to the gallon, so I sold her and used the money, along with some from my savings account, to buy this thing, a 1992 Honda Civic with the uncanny ability to squeeze almost 50 miles out of a gallon of gas. She’s small and wimpy and is constantly in danger of getting flattened by Hummers and Lincoln Navigators, so I named this one Mouse.