|
|
|
adventures with Punch Buggy Rust
Saturday, May 12 2001
I woke up with a slight hangover and went to work to clean out my desk and get my affairs in order just in case Monday should be my last day. My planning was so thorough that I even wrote a goodbye email for my fellow co-workers (though of course I didn't send it). Interestingly, though, my cubicle didn't really look evacuated after I was done; it was still dominated by a massive sculpture comprised entirely of tea boxes.
Intermittently all week I've been chatting via AOL Instant Messenger with my housemate John about various things I need for my Punch Buggy Rust and he's been dutifully researching places where these things can be purchased cheaply. The place to go, he'd already decided, is the junkyards of Duarte, some distance to the northeast of Los Angeles. This morning as we prepared to drive out there we thought about taking my car, but I don't really trust it yet, so we took John's VW Golf instead.
It was a grey dreary day and the scenery looked ugly as we headed east down the 10. "California isn't really very pretty," I observed. "When it's not sunny, it's really not," John agreed. "It looks like a dump." The patchy stucco, tilt-up concrete structures, humps of brown dirt, yellow grass, and scattered palms whizzed by disagreeably.
The scenery continued to deteriorate as we approached Duarte. The endless dreary suburbs of East LA (with their crumbling middle-American homes and fenced patches of brown lawn) gradually gave way to massive excavations and earthworks, none of which appeared to be serving any obvious purpose. What were they mining? Sand? What were they impounding? Floodwaters? The real estate out in this part of the world is cheap, and this is why the junkyards and automotive recyclers locate here.
When we got off the 605 we found ourselves in a bustling community of junkyards, each specializing in various makes of cars. The place where we went specialized in Volkswagen Beetles, Rabbits, Buses, Vans and Audis. They were stacked neatly one on top of the other at high density throughout the yard, and up near the front discrete parts had been removed and sorted according to purpose, make and model. We didn't really know what we were looking for, but lucky for us there was an older guy there with his punkrock bug-restoring son, and older guy happened to be something of an expert on the part we were looking for: the engine lid that goes on the back of Bug. For whatever reason my Bug is all gangsta style and doesn't have one but I'd like to get one if only to keep leaves, sand, branches, children's fingers and shit out of the engine. I didn't really notice, but the '65 Bug's engine lid is longer and more graceful than the later model engine lids. There weren't many of the kind I needed in the yard, but there were a few, some in better shape than others.
We also picked up a replacement used windshield and windshield gasket (the windshield on my car is cracked). When we went to pay for things, the only big surprise was the engine lid, which the junk yard people wanted $135 for, but John (who had been promised a lower price for a considerably more damaged lid) talked them down to $85. This particular junkyard was pretty much a one-stop shop for bug parts, because here we could also get new parts (such as the windshield gasket) and even such classic reference materials as the Idiot's Guide. Presiding over everything unseen was whatever whiskered beast ate from the enormous bowl full of cat food out in front of the office trailer.
After we had the parts we needed, John and I wandered through the junkyard just to marvel at the cars and the intricacies of their functions, revealed by various injuries and states of disassembly for us to see. Looking at a late-model Audi stacked high upon some cheaper car, John pointed to the battery, which was situated beneath the rear seat, Bug-style. He said, "That shit shoulda ended a long time ago!"
Loaded down with our junkyard loot, we cruised into the town of Duarte for lunch. Like any small town embedded in the fringe suburbs of a major world-class city, Duarte had a sad unremarkableness about it, intensified by the bland genericness of its architecture and business franchises. Even the mountains to the east, which at least would have provided something of a backdrop, were obscured by the the yellowish smog characteristic of the atmosphere downwind of Los Angeles. The city had installed vertical-hanging flags of civic pride on the lamps running down the median strip of the main thoroughfare, and they proclaimed things such as "Duarte, the City of Health." "Someone on the city council is very proud of those I'm sure," John said. The only cool thing about Duarte is the satanic symbol on the hill up above the town.
We parked in a strip mall in front of what looked like a 98 cent store. But the eight was broken in such a way that it almost resembled a nine and we realized that it had once been a 98 cent store but now it's a 99 cent store, and the missing piece of the eight was a deliberate relabeling of the establishment. This did nothing to alter our preconceptions of the town. In the adjacent Green Pepper "Authentic Mexican Restaurant" we each got burritos and chips. We were sorting of holding out the hope that this was one of those rare gems in the rough, a truly outstanding restaurant with inauspicious pretences, like the Taco Plus in West LA. But we were sadly disappointed. Those may have been the worst burritos we've ever eaten.
Back in West LA, the fog had burned off and it was a beautiful day, so John and I immediately got to the task of installing my windshield. We had no idea how to do it and figured we could sort of puzzle it out as we went along. Lucky for us, though, an angel came out of the heavens and offered us wisdom. He came in the form of a tester-device-toting Verizon telephone man ("GTE is now Verizon") parked illegally in the red zone across Rochester. He knew all about Volkswagen Beetles and suggested that the easiest way to remove the old window was to cut the old gasket with a knife. Then he explained the complex process of installing the window, which requires someone to somehow pull the lip of the inside gasket into the car. I certainly would never have guessed this, but it involves putting a string all the way around the gasket between the inside and outside lips and, from the inside, pulling the string in and the lip of the gasket with it, all the way around "like opening a sardine can" (though that simile was not especially accurate). The Verizon man was originally from Mexico City and he chatted for awhile about this and that, including Mexico City's terrible air quality. When we told him the prices we'd paid at the junkyard in Duarte, he was impressed, so we returned the favor of his wisdom and gave him an extra business card from the place.
Things were uncharacteristically weird in our neighborhood on this Saturday afternoon. Amazingly enough, people were out on the porches or stoops enjoying the day. One guy was playing a guitar and singing loudly in Spanish. A couple of young men kitty corner across Amherst and Rochester kept shouting in unison, "Ha! Ha! Ha! [Clap!, pause]... Nice!" as if they were rehearsing this for a performance. It got to be so annoying (the pause and the "Nice!" especially) that John wanted to strangle them. Meanwhile, of course, I was covered with dirt and working on an ancient Bug. The combination of these low-rent activities imparted more of a ghetto vibe to the quiet semi-upscale feel of the landscape, and I joked on several occasions, "There goes the neighborhood!"
I needed some bolts to attach the engine cover onto my Bug, so we went on an experimental drive down to OSH Hardware and proceeded to shoplift the items needed. It's necessary for me to mention this because as John was stepping through the door into the greenhouse area, a telephone began ringing in a way that made John think a theft detection alarm was going off, an complete impossibility because there's obviously no place to hide a theft-prevention device on a naked steel washer or bolt.
Out in the parking lot I went to start the car and for karmic reasons or whatever, it just wouldn't go. Being still somewhat unfamiliar with the car, I assumed the gas gauge was broken and that I needed to add more. Lucky for me, it seemed, there was a red gasoline container right there, and it was completely full. I dumped a quart or so into the tank, enough (I figured) to get us to a gas station. But as we were zooming along nicely northward on Bundy, the engine coughed once or twice and then completely died. I had just enough warning to pull into a legal parking space, but then no matter what I did, the car refused to start. I added the rest of the gasoline from the plastic container and still it wouldn't catch. John thought I'd probably flooded the engine and we should go for a walk around the block and give it a little time to recover.
But even after a walk around the block the Bug wouldn't start. About this time John suggested that I confirm that the stuff in the red container was actually gasoline. So I went and smelled it. Sure enough, the fluid had no odor! I was horrified!
We immediately unbolted the gas container, removed the gas line from the bottom, and drained the gasoline-water emulsion from the tank directly into the gutter. Yeah, I know, I'm supposedly an environmentalist but here I was creating a Superfund site right down the side of Bundy Drive. "It'll all evaporate before it makes it into the groundwater," I rationalized.
John got the idea that we push the car up to the next street uphill, take a sidestreet down to the bottom of the hill again and fuel up with "dry gas" at the gas station at the intersection of Bundy and Olympic. In retrospect I think he hatched this plan entirely as an excuse to exert himself. It was a lot of work to push the car all that way even though it was mostly down hill, and he had to keep running out ahead to see if there were cars coming or if I could blow through stop signs. Various people who happened to be out and about watched us with amusement, some asking what year the car was and others just smiling. Our gay bleach-blond next door neighbor saw us and drove up in his shiny black car to ask if we needed any help and we said we were just fine.
At the gas station we pumped STP gasoline additive through the fuel line and swished it around the bottom of the tank. John was so beat he went into the deli and bought himself a sixteen ounce can of Old English malt liquor. I took a sip of it and it tasted like ambrosia. By now the battery of the Bug was dead and we needed the assistance of a cute Asian chick for a jumpstart.
The car ran intermittently badly all the way through the sidestreet neighborhoods along our circuitous route back home. I had to keep the engine idling fast or it would stall, especially when a drop of water would pass into the carburetor. John was astounded that the car was running at all. "You put a fucking gallon of water in the tank!" he kept exclaiming.
Now I don't know who would do something so stupid as put a gallon of water in a clearly-marked gasoline container. I talked to Julian about it and he said it wasn't him. So I'm guessing it must have been Chris Johnson. But why would anyone use a gasoline container for water? Surely water stored in a container once used for gasoline is unsuitable for drinking, yet there's no need for water in the car itself. It's a conundrum wrapped in an enigma shrouded in mystery.
John drove to the airport in the evening to pick up his old college buddy Pinkis who'd flown in from Florida. Pinkis, you just glance at him and you know he's a fun guy. He's so Jewish looking that you keep blinking your eyes thinking you see a yarmulka on his head. Amusingly though, one of John's relatives, "Jew-hating Jimmy," somehow couldn't tell and once said a bunch of anti-semetic things right in front of him and Pinkis just let him go on talking without interruption. He has a calm earthy Howard Stern-loving wryness about him; I'm trying to think whom he reminds me of but my memory is trashed by too much ecstasy abuse.
As John and Pinkis reminisced about the old college days, they kept telling one hilarious story after another. There was the time when John's idiotic roommate was getting head from a floozy sorority chick and she went to spit, grabbing John's favorite mug. John was in the upper bunk at the time (probably jacking off, he said) and he came swinging out at the last second to save the mug from its ultimate humiliation but it was too late of course.
Then there was the tale of the take-out place in Pittsburgh that had the reputation for making the absolute hottest hot wings in the city. So, being macho hot-food fanciers, John and his friends had to order them. But the wings were so fucking hot that people started gagging before they could even get them to their lips. The hot wings weren't food at all; they were novelties made purely to give the take-out place bragging rights. Now John, he can take extremely hot food, and managed to eat two wings before turning violently ill and dissolving into a puddle of projectile vomit and explosive diarrhoea. Amazingly enough, though, there was this one Indian guy in the dorm who could eat those wings one after the other, and he finished all two dozen in the course of an evening or two. "His mouth must be wired differently," I said.
Later in the year that Indian guy was very upset to discover John was banging the one cute Indian girl they all knew. She was a hairy one, that Indian girl, with a wide swath of pubic hair extending from her belly button around to the top of her ass crack in a disturbing "hair diaper."
Stacked junkyard automobiles.
A baby doll in junked car.
Modified 98 Cent sign for a 99 Cent store.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010512 feedback
previous | next |
