Captainkirk's Duster project
Chapter 18
Sophomore year had come and gone; summer was upon us once again. I managed to snag my first real job, if you could call it that. My sister Jill's boyfriend David worked at a pet cemetery (no, not a Pet Sematary, as in Steven King, where dead things come back to life horribly, well, wrong , like Hanratty's bull or Church the cat, or even worse yet,
Gage...
this was a real, honest-to-gosh pet cemetery). David's brother Jack ran the place. David worked as a groundskeeper, and got me a job as an additional groundskeeper, as well as other things. I wasn't too keen on the idea at first, but, hell, I needed a job if I wanted to support my motorcycle and soon-to-be car habit. It started out OK; I began in the spring just working Saturdays, making vaults. Now to make vaults, you have this steel form, consisting of an inner and outer form. We would lift the outer form off with a chain hoist (this thing weighed a freakin' ton!), then get a 5 gallon pail of grease and a brush, and coat the outside of the inner form, and the inside of the outer form with a layer of grease. Then we would lower the outer form back down onto the inner form and secure it. We would shovel in appropriate amounts of sand, gravel, cement and water into the cement mixer and fire it up. After mixing, we'd shovel the cement into the form, then walk around the perimeter pounding on the sides with rubber mallets to remove all the bubbles. After drying, we'd pop the outer form off with the chain hoist, then lift the cured vault off the inner form and stack it off to the side for further curing. Likewise, there was a form for lids, which we cast the same way. The finished product was like 2X4X2 feet tall. Once we got a stack of them ready and cured, we painted them with a tar pitch to make them waterproof, then stacked them outside to dry. It was dirty, smelly, hard work, it tore up your hands, your clothes and your shoes, but it paid fairly well at the time. So what were these cement vaults for? Guess
. It was a pet cemetery (duh!). That's right, Fidos Final Flea Emporium. State law prevented you from dumping Ol' Roy into a four-foot gopher hole (not that this stopped most people);
there might be an underwater spring nearby or something (now there's a comforting thought!) Now, with that in mind, a show of hands please
..how many of you have ever buried a pet in the back yard? Mmmm, I thought so. Let me put my hand down and continued typing.
Anyway, once the weather broke, spring had sprung, and things greened up a bit, I was shown how to use The Mower. Now this was more like it; driving a tractor pulling a gang mower! It was machinery (how cool was that?), it made noise, and I was driving (sort of). Now, this was nothing new as I'd been operating farm machinery at Uncle Andy's farm since I was about 13, going up for a month each summer to help bale hay. By the time I was fourteen, I was driving one of the tractors, sometimes the 520, and more often the 3010 (both John Deeres), for days on end. The actual baling took about a week in the field, then another week to get everything stacked in the haymow. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled program
. So driving the tractor/mower was nothing new, but I loved it. Ahhh, the sweet smell of freshly mown grass! I had my transistor radio in my shirt pocket, single earpiece stuck in one ear, sleeveless shirt on, working on a major tan and groovin' to whatever it was we grooved to back in the mid-seventies. Some days I'd lose the shirt altogether. The cool thing was, in June and most of July, the mowing was constant, most every day. Especially when it rained. Things didn't slow down until the dog days of August when the blistering sun nearly scorched the life out of every living thing in sight and the grass quit growing
. And then we reluctantly got back to making vaults. I was stashing quite a few bucks in my bank account; not for that Elsinore, as you might think
. Oh no, I had my sights set on bigger game!
***
So, I had planned my work, and was set to work my plan. I'd requested an August vacation. The car had been carefully prepped for prime and paint; the paint and primer bought. I'd borrowed Dad's compressor and bought a paint gun. I'd hung the plastic in the garage. This should be child's play for an old pro like myself.
It was all set. The fenders had been primer, undercoated and reinstalled, then carefully shimmed and aligned with the hood for near picture-perfect alignment; better, in fact than they were before I'd started. I had bought a gallon of sandable primer/sealer premix, for speed and ease of application. All was ready. But as they say, sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men
...
It started off great. The primer seemed a bit thick
.(strange?) But I imagined that was due to the sandable qualities, and shrugged it off. I started with the roof and worked my way forward, laying a smooth, consistent (yet strangely heavy) coat; across the hood, front left fender and worked my way down the left side. So far, so good! I'd used probably ¾ of the gallon by the time I'd shot the right rear quarter. As I filled the cup for the last quart, it seemed, well, thin. There's a reason for that: it was. My mistake; it being a gallon can, I should have poured the whole thing into a large container and evenly mixed it with a paint stirrer. Instead, I'd shaken it upside down, for what I considered to be an adequate period of time. It wasn't. The lighter filler material had risen to the top, or something to that effect. Anyway, what I ended up with was primer that was too thick in the beginning and too thin at the end. The right front fender came out almost see-through. This was tough. I had absolutely no money left and the primer was like $25.00 a gallon. Crap. Now what?
I'll tell you, "now what!" Now it was time to discover that why you should not have attached garages! My wife, in the house, had been breathing the second-hand fumes for hours now, and got very lightheaded, dizzy, and almost passed out. Concerned, I dunked the gun in the bucket of cleaner, left it, and drove her to the emergency room. Ever have to wait in an emergency room? By the time we got home, she had a blinding headache (but was OK) and it was late. The next day, with only a couple days of vacation left, I viewed the thin primer disaster and realized that the car would have to be sanded and another gallon shot (this time mixed better!) Seems the last quart of thin stuff had burned through the sanded paint on the right front fender and wrinkled it. Plus, I didn't have the money for the primer, and wouldn't have it for a couple weeks, 'til payday.
I can't recall the exact sequence of disastrous events that followed, but they involved overtime at work, miserable, rainy weather followed by a major cold front, unexpected financial difficulties, and the like. What matters, is that the beautiful Carmine Red metal flake enamel never got shot that fall before Old Man Winter moved in. Let's just say that marriage, folks, is quite different than single life, and when you have a wife and a baby and financial obligations, sometimes you tend to overestimate your ability to perform certain tasks within a particular time frame. And all you married-with-kids guys need no further clarification on this, right? Been there, done that? Well, the end result was that the car sat all winter, cold, forlorn, and lonely, with a tarp over it, all the bumpers and trim removed, waiting for the Robins Of Spring
..
***
Now, the money I was saving was for, as I mentioned, bigger game; that being the Javelin. I'd pick it up for a song, then tear into it. Imagine my surprise, then, the day I came home from work and saw this green GMC half-ton pickup in the driveway...
now who could be visiting, I wondered?
Imagine my horror when I found out that it wasn't anyone visiting at all; Dad had bought the Jimmy and used the Javelin as a trade in. I was, of course, properly horrified. Now what?
Well, I'd had my driver's license for a bit now, had driven the Javelin, and found the handling qualities and acceleration were not quite all that. So I guess I wasn't too disappointed, after all. By this time, sister Jill had a car of her own;
a '69 SS Nova, deep metalflake blue, these huge L60 rear tires and Cragars all around. The car looked like it was going 100 miles an hour sitting in the driveway. Which is where it needed to stay, if it was gonna win any races. This thing was the Ultimate Pig-In-A-Poke. Under the hood lurked
. not a 396, not a 327 or even a wimpy li'l 307, but a straight six hooked to a Slip-n-Slide Power Glide 2 speed auto. What an absolute embarrassment of a car! When I'd drive this thing (which was often; Jill let me take it when I couldn't drive the GMC) and dudes would pull up next to me, get a gander at the tires and wheels, and start gunning the motor, I'd slink down in the seats in utter embarrassment, knowing this car couldn't get out of its own way. I don't believe it really ever was an SS Nova. I think the guy that owned it just slapped the badges on it. Jill never really liked the car after about the third day of ownership, and a new plan began to formulate
as in; big block Rat Motor. Chevy. Nova. Mine. Cheap. I knew you could pick up a used 454 for a couple hundred bucks out of a truck or something. Once I found a 427 Rat Motor in the paper for 600 bucks out of a Vette, and drove 30 miles only to find someone had stolen it out from under me an hour earlier with cash on the barrelhead. Rats!
The highlight of Junior year was, of course, Auto Shop. I'd been waiting on this for years. Howard was in the same class, and I think it took the teacher about two weeks to figure out who knew what, and we sorta got the run of the place after that. We were all assigned engines to work on. Howard and I got not your run-of-the-mill Chevy 6 or VW engine, but a Ford big block with a four barrel to work on. Pretty soon we were the darlings of the junior auto shop class, helping the other guys get their motors back together and such. When we got into suspension and driveline later that year, it was all new to me and terribly fascinating. Later that year, Howard got his license and his mom gave him the use of one of the family cars; a Chevy Impala with a 350 that needed a valve job, so we yanked the heads and did valves and guides right there in auto shop! It was not unusual for either of us to walk into any class with an armful of books in one hand and a Quadrajet in the other; sliding the Q-jet into the basket under the desk seat with our books made us feel cool and somewhat dangerous, sorta like James Dean for some reason. (I think the chicks dug it as well, although all they did was complain about the stink). Chicks are like that, though. They complain about your dirty, gas-smelling, oil-soaked holey blue jeans, but all the while theyre digging it. Anyway, we became known as the Motorheads or Gearheads around the school. I didn't mind. Everyone needs something to identify themselves with; for us, this was it.
