By Buster McNutt
Hello, my name is Buster, and I am no longer a Clunkaholic. I’ve been “sober” for 16 days now. How embarrassing — I don’t own any vehicle that was built before 2005. The old S-10 wasn’t up to towing the 24-foot pontoon boat and trailer at the same time, no matter how many helium balloons I attached to the boat, and no matter how many round logs I put under the trailer (hey, it worked for the pyramid builders). So I got on Leroy’s List (the North Central Florida version of Craig’s List) and found a 2006 F-150 4WD with 70,000 miles and a cassette player. I was really sweating bullets about having a brand new used vehicle with no way to play my “Dr. Demento’s Greatest Hits” cassettes. I didn’t want to contemplate a motoring life without “Pencil Neck Geek,” “Fish Heads,” “Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun,” and, of course, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” which just happened to be the theme song at my and Lady M’s wedding (raise your hand if this surprises you).
I’ve pretty much worked through the five stages of post-clunker grief: 1) Denial: “Humbug! It was just a bad dream, caused by an undigested bit of beef, or a fragment of underdone potato”; 2) Anger: “You so did not sell the S-10 to that nun with the leather boots and the riding crop!”; 3) Bargaining: “If you’ll only bring it back, I promise I’ll never leave the toilet seat up, mow the front lawn in my Speedo, or reuse the same piece of floss more than two times in the same week!”; 4) Depression: “I’m totally bummed, losing my clunker truck and misplacing my bag of used floss in the same week. Is death really nature’s way of telling us to slow down?”; 5) Acceptance: “Fix it/Flush it/Forget it. And let’s buy another clunker!”
And that’s the plan: Let the Replacement Clunker Quest begin!
Actually I really thought I’d found one last week. I was passing by the Pricilla Baptist Church on the way to the boat dock to watch people launching and trailering boats — things they don’t teach you in public schools. Think about it. Which is more likely in your lifetime: you’d need to tow, launch and recover a watercraft, or you’d need to solve a quadratic equation, conjugate a Spanish verb, or memorize Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha”? EAR WORM SPOILER ALERT! “On the shore of Gitche Gumee, Of the Shining Big Sea Water” … Ahhhhh!
I’d noticed this car before but hadn’t paid that much attention since I wasn’t in Clunker Heat at the time. It was a 1992 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon — the spiritual successor to my beloved 1986 Estate Wagon. And it was in a church parking lot, which meant it must be a signal from above (way better than a burning bush, given the drought we’ve been going through).
So I tried to open the church door, but it was locked, and there was one of those little “Will Return” plastic clock signs on the door, only the hour hand was missing and the minute hand was on twelve, which essentially told me that whoever would return would do so at some time o’clock (about as useful as knowing the total of this week’s winning Powerball numbers, but not knowing the individual numbers, and knowing you could probably solve that with that quadratic equation stuff, and remembering that when Ms. Smith was teaching that in Algebra class, you and Latrell were at the back table playing triangle paper football. How’d that work out?).
I figured I’d put a note with my phone number on the Roadmaster’s windshield and then head on down the road to resume boat launching/recovery 101. Just as I was leaving, a thin man in a top hat comes out, introduces himself as the Pricilla Baptist Church preacher, Reverend Shane. Now, you need to understand that our tiny little community of maybe a thousand people has 23 churches. Only one ever has more than a half dozen or so vehicles parked on Sunday mornings, and that’s because they also run the weekly senior citizen bingo game, and the rules clearly state that you must pray there to play there. So, almost all the preachers need to hold other jobs as well. Turns out Reverend Shane had two; he was a chimney sweep (explaining the top hat, which is yet another thing I’ve never understood), and he ran the county pet cemetery and crematorium, although I may have the order backwards. This also explained why in the back of the Roadmaster there was a tiny casket with a box of hamster treats on the lid. I was no longer as smitten with the Roadmaster. Growing up I had a hamster (“Spinner”) and my sister had a “small” boa constrictor (“Gobbler”), and one week she decided to spend her allowance on Barbie Prada shoes rather than live white mice for Gobbler. Well, rather than letting the snake go hungry (animal cruelty), she simply moved the two cages together, opened the doors, and let nature “take its course”; in this case the main course was Spinner. To this day I can’t watch that YouTube video of the snake eating the live mice, without wishing that at least one of those mice had my sister’s face. Sad, huh?
So I passed on the Roadmaster just as I’m sure at some point Gobbler passed Spinner. Now I’m putting together a list of what I’m looking for in a clunker. I’d wanted another wagon, but now I’d always wonder if it had ever been used as a hamster pet cemetery hearse. So I’m thinking four-door sedan with all the doors working (preferably the same color) and the drive-through window and at least one more functional window, a V-8 engine, rear-wheel drive, and a minimum of 150,000 miles on a working odometer. I’m past the age of wanting to break in an underused clunker. Obviously a cassette player for the good Doctor Demento. I’ll keep you posted on my progress. Right now I’m thinking about Spinner and I’m sad. I need to think about something else.
“On the shore of Gitche Gumee … ” •
