April 28, 2006

• A Shiny New Exhaust System for my Rusty Old Car

  Parts —— $165.00
  Labor —– One extra large size carrot cake with non-dairy whipped topping.
  Entertainment value —– PRICELESS

  Up until earlier this week, I didn’t realize I needed to go to town at
  all this month.  I was thinking that I could leave my studded snow
  tires on until the end of May.  I have only lived in Alaska for
  thirty-three years, how am I supposed to remember that the mandatory
  deadline for getting studs off the road is the end of April?

  Greyfox clued me that I had to get the tires changed over this
  week.  As of last night, I hadn’t decided whether I would go today
  (it’s still Thursday, but could be Friday before I post this),
  tomorrow, or Saturday.  This morning, I was dreading the trip so
  badly that I decided to go ahead and get it over with.

  I was not in tip-top physical shape.  Stumbling and fumbling,
  spilling my morning coffee, I prepared to hit the road.  On my
  first trip back into the house for something I’d forgotten, as I went
  past the disabled truck in the driveway, I caught the jagged corner of
  its open back hatch in the tender shell of my right ear.  On the
  outward leg of my second return trip, as I bent to get into the car, I
  banged my head on the door frame.  Then, sitting there in the
  driver’s seat, I realized that my sno-jogs would be unnecessary down
  there in town, so I came back in the house and put on my sneakers.

  The drive into town was uneventful except for the time I had to pull
  over and stop to deal with some severe pain that hit me out of
  nowhere.  Nothing unusual in that.  All it takes is a moment
  of focused attention to switch it off, but a moment of such focus is
  impractical while doing 65mph on a narrow winding road.

  First stop on the edge of town was the tire place, where I asked Mike
  to look at my exhaust system while he had the car jacked up because it
  had never been that noisy before.  When he called me in to back
  the car out of the repair bay, in addition to the four winter tires in
  the hatch, there was my rusty old rotted-out muffler.  He said it
  hadn’t been doing any good hanging there, so he took it off before it
  became road debris.  He was right about its not having been doing
  any good.  Just not having it under there resonating made the car
  run quieter.

  I stopped alongside the highway at Greyfox’s roadside stand at Felony
  Flats to do some public hugging with my beloved Old Fart, and he gave
  me a shopworn kerambit knife he was getting tired of showing and not
  selling.  I’d admired it when he first got it and was pleased to
  add it to my collection, even if it is showing a little wear.

  I was kinda hesitant to tell him I needed a new muffler, because the
  summer selling season really hasn’t gotten started yet and we are still
  in the winter living-off-the-credit-cards mode.  I tried and
  failed to come up with some pleasant “good news” to balance the spendy
  “bad news.”  We talked about my options, and decided I would go
  see if our friend the mechanic — I’ll call him “Dick” — was busy
  today.  If he couldn’t install my new muffler, I could go on over
  to Midas and see how busy they were.

  “Dick” isn’t an old friend, not one of the stoners we used to get
  loaded with.  He’s one of our newer, closer friends, that we stay unloaded
  with.  His repair bay was full and there was a truck up on the
  lift and some welding going on.  He was evidently as happy to see
  me as I always am to see him.  We resonate, being near the same
  age and having been stoned and stupid for about the same number of
  decades.

  When I had answered his query about what brought me there today and
  said I guessed I’d head on over to Midas, he reached out and grabbed my
  arm and said, “NO!  Not Midas.  ‘John’ [another anonymous dope fiend friend of ours] has the shop next door, and there’s nothing up on his lift today.”

  He checked the door next door, found it locked, went into his office
  and made a phone call.  He waited through a few rings then said,
  “John… c’mon, answer your phone.”  He looked up and said to me,
  “He picked up, I can hear his motorcycle…”  Then he went back to
  talking into the unresponsive phone.

  Just as he was giving me a quizzical look and repeating that he could
  hear the bike, I realized I was hearing the bike, too.  It was
  pulling into the driveway and up to the garage next door.  “Dick”
  put down the phone, and we went out to intercept “John”.  For a
  while there, he didn’t have any attention to spare for me beyond a
  hurried, “Hi!”  He was shucking out of his coveralls as he
  unlocked his office door and ran inside to open up the garage door.

  Then he pushed the motorcycle inside, closed the garage door, yanked
  off the dark watch cap he was wearing and grabbed a bright-colored
  gimme cap.   He was turned half away from the street,
  watching out of the corner of his eyes as a city police car cruised
  slowly by.  He told us he had been doing a standup wheelie as he
  passed the police car.

  That was all the explanation he offered right then.  Before going
  back to work, Dick told John his phone was on, and John pulled the cell
  out of his pocket and turned it off.  Since I was still standing
  there looking expectantly at him, he asked me what was going on with me
  and I told him I needed a new muffler.  He was under my car
  looking at the remains of my old exhaust system when a motorcycle cop
  went by and then the same cop car came back and cruised through the lot
  full of cars and trucks fronting the big garage building.

  The cop pulled back out onto the street and we could hear the police
  motorcycle riding out of the neighborhood.  As a shaky,
  shifty-eyed “John” crawled out from under my car, stood up and brushed
  himself off, I said, “Looks like you dodged the bullet this time.”

  I got the full story as he was driving his truck, first to my credit
  union for cash and then to the parts house for the muffler and
  pipes.  He has been practicing stand-up wheelies, running up
  through the gears on one wheel.  He had been shifting from second
  to third on one of the main streets in that part of town when he
  noticed that a car he’d just passed going the other direction was a
  police car.  The cop made a quick U-turn, John put his front wheel
  down, twisted the throttle up, made a couple of quick turns and went to
  ground.

  For the rest of the drive, we talked about addiction, recovery, and the
  sort of stuff we habitually talk about when we get together.  He
  said that today was his one-year anniversary, a year of clean time, an
  NA “birthday.”  I asked him if he would be at the meeting tonight
  and he said he would, and he was thinking about bringing a cake. 
  Some groups have a member whose job it is to keep track of “birthdays”
  and supply the cakes.  In our group, we bring our own birthday
  cakes.

  John said since the parts were so spendy, he wasn’t going to charge me
  for any labor, so I asked him if I could buy him a cake.  That was
  how I (the one in our group who keeps reminding everyone that sugar and
  caffeine are drugs and we’re all a bunch of hypocrites for saying that
  it’s a program of complete abstinence from all drugs) came to be
  carrying a big sheet cake into the meeting.  I really hadn’t
  consciously planned to eat any of it, but since John had said he didn’t
  have a favorite flavor, I HAD gotten my own (and Greyfox’s) favorite, carrot cake. 

  Greyfox groaned when he saw what I’d brought, and said to me, “If
  you’ll break your diet, I’ll break mine.”  It was good cake. 
  It didn’t kill me. It didn’t trigger a carb binge.  So, I guess I
  sorta dodged a bullet of my own, tonight.  Tomorrow is another day.

  G’nite.
  
  

  • 3:47 am
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