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Punch Buggy Rust mission to Venice
Sunday, June 3 2001
I spent most of the morning tweaking, perfecting, and expanding my various Vodkatea rating systems. This kept me indoors in front of my big nineteen inch screen and out of the pleasant, unchallenging Southern California weather.
Unlike myself, my housemate John had been out in the sun, engaged in a paintball battle with some friends of Fernando's. They were mostly big, out-of-shape, not-especially-bright regular fellas and hadn't really stood much of a chance against John's "hot" (overly-powerful) paintball gun and (for them) puzzling sense of humor. Evidently Fernando had failed to mention to John that the paintball battle was actually part of a larger bachelor party.
When John came home, he convinced me to get out of the house and into the sunshine by taking the Punch Buggy Rust out for a drive. We drove to Venice, stopping along the way for coffee at John's favorite coffee place, the DK Donuts on Santa Monica. Somewhere near the Promenade, John made the observation that somewhere out there in America there's probably at least one guy who will never be able to exceed his one big youthful achievement: nailing President Clinton's daughter in the ass. "Her Daddy even knew about it and I didn't even get in trouble!" he slurs over his beer to a disbelieving drinking buddy.
Until shooed away by the owner, we sat for a good hour or so on some ridiculously-overpriced antique chairs across from where California Avenue Ts into Abbott Kinney. This is a busy, bustling, sunny place, with lots of chairs and benches out on the sidewalk and more people sitting around socializing than eating products purchased from the restaurants. For our part, we were mostly watching people and making witty observations about them and their dogs. Every time a woman would cross the street in front of us, John would observe, just quietly enough that she couldn't hear, "Chu got deh finest ass I've ever seen!" in a staccato Mexican accent. Most of these women actually did have fairly fine asses, but not so the saggy post-prime fake-breasted woman in front of the coffee shop. She was all tricked out for a Sunday afternoon in a black fishnet shawl and extremely tight black vinyl shorts. Her legs were taut like the skins of sausages and suntanned a few exits past healthy, and the smaller imperfections in their contours were plainly visible from across the street. She may not have been our cup of tea, but she'd managed to attract the ardent attention of two gaunt older men on bicycles, one of whom tailed after her when she finally wrapped up her socializing and rode her bicycle down the street.
"Why do I feel so short in this city?" John had asked me earlier. And he's right, anywhere one goes in this town, one is surrounded by tall people, both men and women. Short anglos don't move to Los Angeles. They stay in places like Bethesda and Lexington, Duluth and Akron. So when John finally saw a short guy walking towards us on the sidewalk, he stood up to bask in the glory of his brief moment of relative tallness as the guy passed by unaware.
We went up and down Abbott Kinney a few blocks, more or less doing the Bathtubgirl thing, but with considerably less seriousness and no intent of purchasing anything. One antique store specialized in antique fixtures from dismantled Minnesota mansions. Up until today I hadn't been aware that one could buy an old set of doorknobs for three hundred dollars, but now I know one can if one is so inclined.
The car was running well, though the suspension felt a little like going on a hayride. Sometimes when I'd turn really sharply I'd provoke a pitiful moaning from the front end. My plan with the car is to become increasingly familiar with its idiosyncrasies until I'm confident enough to take it on drives of arbitrary length. This method of car acclimation seemed to work well with the other junky cars I've owned in the past. For example, the Punch Buggy Green made probably a half dozen trips to and from Oberlin, Ohio circa '92-'95. John admits that he finds my style of car acclimation curious and intriguing. Instead of forcing the car to accommodate me, I'm allowing myself to change my habits and neuroses to accommodate the car. It's certainly not a very American way to go about doing things. When, for example, there was a need for a writing utensil that could write in a weightless environment, NASA spent a million dollars developing a zero gravity pen. The Russians, on the other hand, settled for writing with pencils. (I kind of figured that was an urban legend.)
We stopped at an auto parts place near the corner of Pico and 26th and picked up a number of things, including a fuel filter to replace the one I'd ruined with that gallon of water I'd accidentally poured into the gas tank.
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