Truck: On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures by John Jerome

Author:John Jerome [Jerome, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UPNE
Published: 2014-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Junkies

IN THE BEST JUNKYARD you will ever find, the office will also be the home of the owner. It will be located in one corner of the yard, a portion of its walls indistinguishable from the fence that delineates the junkyard proper. Somewhere back there in the bowels of the house will be a house trailer, vintage 1948, the essential living unit which has grown, carefully and slowly, by an accumulation of ells, add-ons, pantries, skylights, stoops, and covered walkways into home-and-office.

To enter the office is to enter the owner’s home; when you are in the door you are in the kitchen, and Mrs. Owner will be sitting, in cotton housedress, curlers, white socks, and split-at-the-heel sheepskin slippers, drinking coffee at a chrome and Formica dinette set. She will be smoking long cigarettes, with longer ashes clinging to them, and she will have a very deep voice, when and if you ever hear her talk.

You will not likely hear her talk, however. It will be very quiet in that kitchen, office, trailer, home. There may well be some other people sitting in it; they will average about 200 pounds apiece, male and female, and while they may not all be drinking coffee, they will all be smoking cigarettes with long ashes on them. Nobody will say anything. There will not be a solitaire game going, a soap opera playing, not even a radio breaking the silence. It will be 9:30 A.M. on a gray and overcast late fall morning, all these people will be sitting around in straightback chairs smoking and not talking to each other, and about twenty seconds after you enter you will be stricken with a kind of nervous sweat. You will feel that the world has gone . . . strange.

Persevering, however, you will blurt out something introductory, aimed at the general group: “You have any old Dodge pickup trucks back there? I need a gas tank for a fifty model . . .” This will serve to locate which person is the proprietor, who will then tell you that he’s got a ’53 but the gas tank’s no good, and he thinks there may be a ’49 back there somewhere but you’ll have to find it. This is the one statement, in an infinite universe of statements, that you want to hear. It means that you can then wander with your tools through his yard, browsing as in a bookstore. It means he will trust you, and trust from a junk dealer is absolute. If it isn’t there you won’t be allowed past the fence, and you will expect your car to be searched when you leave. If trust is there, you have to stop on the way out to press money on the owner for the parts you have acquired.

That is to say that there are all kinds of junkyards in the world, ranging from half-acre car piles, ignored by their collectors, in the back corner of some other kind of vaguely automotive

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