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The Braggart
About a month ago I had the opportunity to purchase a backup/replacement vehicle for the 85 schoolbus yellow Dodge pickup with homemade plywood bedcover and Cadillac spoke hubcaps, and slipping transmission, which I have owned for little over a year. I have in that time spent a sum of money on the Dodge which exceeds the amount I would consider normal for upkeep and has nudged into that territory known as "hey, if I'm just going to throw my money away why don't I just quit my damn job, get rid of all heavy possessions and live on the street, walk around everywhere barefooted, abuse drugs, engage in illegal activities on a regular basis, tell a bunch of white lies to all the people that such behavior would offend, and etch silly nomikers like gymgahd in wet cement at the corner of 23rd and Rio Grande, Austin, TX. " The answer is obvious--decent people just don't. Plus, the highly memorable Dodge gets really crappy gas mileage--less than ten miles per gallon--and has been involved in more than one New Orleans area incident wherein the driver has acted badly and caused people who appeared at the time capable of inflicting severe bodily injury on said driver to gesture and yell just because he made maneuvers he calls his "NY moves" during peak traffic hours. The people act in ways that make him see the folly of his own occasional irrationality and therefore he proclaims it all Godsent material towards the making of him a better person.
The replacement vehicle is an 86 Toyota Corolla four door, and get this people, with air-conditioning. Forty-one years into this and I've yet to own a new car, or one with air-conditioning (until now), although that's a lie because the 72 Ford Maverick four door which sits under a shed in Bushy Fork, NC, had air-conditioning, although I honestly never used it, before I took out the condensor (?) or compressor (?) to go about my first replacing of a water pump there in Eugene, Oregon. And then after that four month trial period--where I shacked up in that guy's house across the street from the basketball courts several blocks from the university, sleeping on his fouton and in the end stealing three pair of his underwear, while he tried to figure out the meaning of his life in Bangkok, and she who was putting me up would come by during her lunch hour and laugh at my personalities, and then have sex with me--I moved in with her and her girlfriend in Springfield, while somewhere nearby the six or seven-year-old Kip Kinkel was unhappily developing into a shooter. But that's where I ended up throwing the A/C compressor for the Maverick, into that overwhelmingly dense blackberry thicket behind the house on Hunsaker, in Springfield, Oregon.
I used to keep the Corolla parked over in the driveway at Rocheblave, not using it, just happy for its backup-ability, but the crack fiends thought maybe that's being a little too uppity so back to school they took me with a sock over their hand smashing through the little rear/side triangle window, unlocking, and, apparently stealing nothing. There was a dollar's worth of change laying loose in that square blue receptacle near the parking brake. And a radio in the glove box. I had visions of joyriders (for some reason interrupted this time) and my little Corolla as the trailing throwaway, which often end up on the remote back roads surrounding English Turn--that exclusive gated community where at I sometimes work--crashed into a tree and set on fire. So I decided to pop the hood and unplug a wire into the distributor and it was then that I realized the desirable thing about the Corolla on the fated night was it's battery, now gone. I wasn't that mad although later when a guy I don't trust but still do business with came looking for an odd job, a task towards a blast, I told him I didn't have anything for him to do, but if he could find the person who stole my battery and bring to me that person's head on a stick, I would give him fifty dollars. I think he and I were both a little disappointed in the severity of my latent reaction, especially since he knows he is always a suspect, a fact both he and I regret. To atone for this I punished him several more days before giving him a job that didn't need doing, and twenty dollars.
It's a sad day when you bring something (even a little toy of a car that mostly resembles the little blue car game piece from the game of Life) to the 2600 block of Dumaine for safekeeping but that's what I did with the Corolla: took the battery from the truck and put it in the Corolla, started it, and then removed the battery and put it back in the truck. I then drove the batteryless Corolla six blocks to Dumaine and parked it behind the station wagon that belongs to Jermaine, although "belongs" might be stretching the truth. It sat for a few weeks without battery before I decided to start using it, which I do now, and adjusting my insurance coverage has made it possible to cover both vehicles with that minimum by law type of coverage that I favor, for only about twenty dollars more per year than it took to insure just the truck. So I have now what you might want to consider a fleet of vehicles at my disposal, although stop me if I brag at length.