2 Matilda Is Born

This was written on December 19, 2009.




Play this song, why don’t you? Do it now. Get yourself in a sort of mood for the true story that follows.



You may need coffee, or a beer, or something to puff on. It’s up to you, and no one here will ever judge you.

No, this song isn’t the Stones. It’s Spoon.

You see, I am writing this whole Fuckno CA in reverse. Call up Fat Jerry's Hearse for a ride. He didn't end up so well. But you will, good bud, when this four part story ends, in the weekends that follow.


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Fuckno, CA., 1980’s: Cars. Part I

Have you ever rebuilt a car engine? By yourself? Without any help at all, except for a Chilton’s guide? Without any formal training in auto shop at the high school? And, when you were fifteen?

I should have afforded myself the luxury of auto shop. That would have been a blast. I may have not mashed my knuckle to the pink bone and got all dizzy if I'd been taught to pull on the socket wrench instead of push. Lotta blood there, chummy. I saw bone.

You should have seen my room. Chronological order of parts removed, each labeled, clockwise around my bedroom in Fuckno, in section 8 housing, north of the reservoir just below Shields Avenue. Chestnut Street. A duplex in a housing project.

That was where I’d met the young man who’d made fun of my brown (dark orange) squared-toed boots with the zipper up the half rise, with big heels.

That first day of school would later happen in a couple months from when this true story begins.

I had saved up cash money by working at a biker bar, (mopping up spilled beer, broken teefs and glass, vomit, blood, rings and watches, cumshot, and wet money in that shithole, The Silver Horse Saloon) and bought a ten speed, and then saved up for my first metal bitch. My first love, (automobile-wise, that is).

Here is how my first experience of owning and then rebuilding a car went down. (Mind you, I blew the newly-bored engine trying to impress a big-tittied-bitch, and ended up in her driveway with butter on my dipstick, just when her boyfriend showed up. He was a biker.)

BTW, butter on your dipstick means that you have blown a head gasket and water has been churned with the oil to make emulsion. But I quite like the sexual innuendo. I just didn’t, that night, with the jilted biker dude, tapping on my car window with a tire iron and all. But more on that later.

First part of this story: My mom showed me a car that her lover’s daughter’s boyfriend wanted to get rid of. This piece of shit was a 1972 Toyota Celica, 2.2 Liter 4 banger Special Ed, and when he started it up, it smoked like a bar-lit hooker. It drank too: a quart of oil every day. I swear she blew blue smoke rings from her tailpipe.

When I look back, from an Air Quality viewpoint, that hurts.

Anyway, for $500, that dog-fucking rip-off artist towed it to the front parking space of my duplex. It couldn't even pass inspection.

Who sells a kid a piece of shit like that? OK, he made $480 more than he’d have gotten at a junkyard. Kudos to him, the bastard.

But when I started to clean her out, I began to own her. You see, the ideals and dreams of the young will always ignore the deep scratches and fabric tears of the current situation, and this is a sort of magic. Or illusion. But you imagine what could be, and then you try to make that happen.

You see, she didn’t have any dents or rust at all, just oxidized paint. This was California, after all. Shit gets oxidized from the sun. Not much else happens to a vehicle, other than car crashes. More on that later.

Oxidized paint? Yes, you guessed it. It took many coats of Turtle Wax and 2.733 shitloads (metric) of elbow grease to rub that oxidation off, and one day, she gleamed like the smile your grampa got on his teef when grandma took her own teef out.

My bitch was very cute. I named her Matilda. Now you may ask yourself, "Why would a young man name his vehicle such an old woman's name?"

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You would be right to ask yourself such a question. That goes back to a comic book that had scared the shit out of me and gave me nightmares when I was nine. It had a story named, "Matilda And The Red Shoes." This chick stole shoes off her sister's corpse after the funeral because she liked 'em.

Then the corpse came riding down the hill in her casket in the middle of a freaky hurricane, and smashed in her sister's door, at the bottom of the hill from the cemetery.

How cool is that? I stayed up for weeks, because I actually lived below a cemetery, on the Maine coast, for a number of years when I was nine. After that, I read "The Shining." Now you see why I am the way I am.

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So I asked around and found out that it was possible to make a car stop smoking and drinking if you took her to AA.

OK, if you bought a Chilton’s guide to automotive repair. Every step is outlined with what they call exploded diagrams, which means that all the parts are separated, in order, according to removal and then recombining.

God bless those Chilton dudes. Truly. They do it for each automobile. And they show you, step by step.

Which works when you are tearing something apart, but wait until you try to put your shit back together.

God Help You.

I found out that there are machine shops that will bore out your block, and sell you the correct-sized piston heads, rings, arms, everything, at a pretty decent price. They even spun my crankshaft. That was nice of them.

You see, if you were a poor but also motor-hungry teen like I was, it was up to you to put it all back together again.

I used a soup can with giant plumbing clamps to squeeze the rings and a rubber mallet to get those piston heads back into the block. That is something you should never do. I was lucky. No scrapes.

I was fifteen. Chilton now recommends using "Piston Ringy Thingy Squeezer/Compressor Shit Or What Have You Apparatuses." PRTSCSOWHYA, for you uninitiated.

I wanted to have a good car to drive after I’d get my license in eight months. I wanted to make this piece of shit that good car I pictured in my head. I was going to get my permit and then license at each turn in the road, you betcha.

There is nothing like owning a machine that offers you the opportunity to drive off in any direction you like, for as long as you like, whenever you want. This is the taste of Freedom. I think this something that only we Americans can experience. You see, the European Union is not like these United States. We can drive from coast to coast, through each sovereign state without a passport at each border. We are quite a helluva country, you know.

I blew my newly restored 1978 Celica racing a big-tittied chick in, get this, her 1982 Celica. She had plastic. On the car, but those boobies were the real deal.

She protected her car,I didn't. I red-lined. Guess it was being proudful of having built the thing. When you are legal to drive your restored automobile, you feel empowered. Or maybe it is being sixteen, ten feet tall and invincible.

Yes, I was a punk. I would always be a punk, from then on. Still am. But that sucked that evening and night.

Wish I'd had the balls to match my bore, that night, fleeing from a dude and his Harley, chasing after me and my blown, steaming rice burner.

A bit o’ the Irish, a song for ya. You see, I am half Irish, half Indian. I am of two tribes. Lotta voices I'd like to quiet, don'tcha know laddie?





To Be Continued Next Weekend, if ya like.

Next Weekend: Racing, Blowing an Engine, Getting Blowed, meeting a Pissed Off Biker, and How To Drive Away With A Blown Engine Being Chased By An Angry Biker.

God Help You. God Bless Us, Everyone. Merry Christmas to you and yours. Or whatever you believe in and/or sacrifice animals to.


---willies out.