By Buster McNutt
Another birthday. It’s getting to be, like, an annual thing. I gave myself floor mats this year. I can’t remember the last time I bought floor mats. I think maybe Carter was President, and that older guy in the white robe who was always waving and speaking in Latin on television was Pope. Or maybe he was speaking Italian. I didn’t take either one in high school. Even back then Latin was considered a dead language, so I didn’t see the point in studying it, since I hadn’t planned to spend a whole lot of time speaking to dead people (this was way before the zombie movement started). I wonder if zombies speak Latin. Ms. Torrance was the Latin teacher, and she was about 80 and change, so chances are when she was a little girl they probably spoke acceptable Latin down at the soda shop, the laundry mat, and the buggy whip outlet store. Or, maybe she was just an early prototype zombie.
I might have taken Italian, but they didn’t offer it. After high school I bought a used Fiat 850 convertible, and the owner’s manual was written in Italian, so it would have come in handy to be able to read it. This one had the “Sport” engine, which on a good day had 50 horsepower and could hit 80 mph with a tailwind of, say, 85 mph or so. But above 60 things started rattling and sometimes even falling off — that happens to a lot of us “above 60,” but I digress. At one point in the early ’80s the U.S. Government actually recalled 10 years of the 850s for “chronic rust problems.” You think? Italy retaliated by placing a 10-year ban on the importing of Tater Tots, Silly Putty, and Donnie and Marie Christmas albums. Those Italians hit you where it hurts the most.
I’ve been told you could put an 850 in a garage, turn out the lights, and if you listened real well, you could actually hear it rust. My sister had an early Chevy Vega, and she said you didn’t even have to turn out the lights to hear it rust, which was mostly a never-mind, because neither one of us had garages at the time. And she had those hearing aids from when she fell down the well during one of our pogo stick races. I was doing my Fireball Roberts imitation, so I might have nudged her just a bit. It’s a pogo thing.
So, what with the rust and all, I’d gotten used to body parts coming loose, so when they started looking a little exit prone, I’d do some preemptive duct taping. I once got questioned by a policeman, because he ran my plates while passing through the Kmart parking lot. He thought it was suspicious that I would take a red Italian “sports car” and paint it mostly a dull grey, which, of course, all of us in the non-Officer-Opie world know was the color of the duct tape. Well, seeing as how back then red Italian “sports cars” were somewhat rare in our town, and he assumed expensive, then it followed that the owner was quite likely some sort of international drug dealer, money launderer, or, at the very least, the owner of a soccer team. In those days soccer was considered a communist plot to get our children to lose the effective use of their hands. Rather than take the chance of a Blue Light Special, parking-lot shoot out, he called in backup.
I come back to my car, assuming that the police were there because somebody had tried to break into my car (as if…), or the store management was getting complaints about the loud rusting noises in the parking lot. When I tried to explain the situation, Officer Opie said, “For an Eye-talyun you sure speak good American. I’m thinking you might be a spy.” And they put me in the police car and took me to the station where the whole matter was quickly sorted out. Unfortunately, they also decided to tow my car to the “impound lot,” at which point the engine mounts for the little rear engine car took the ultimate rust nap and the engine hit the pavement. Kmart actually tried to sue me for the damage to the parking lot!
I bought a lot of floor mats for the Fiat to cover up all the rust holes in the floorboard. I didn’t want to resort to Fred Flintstoning my way down the road. It rusted through anyway, so my brother and I cut up an old Maytag washing machine and screwed that in and started putting floor mats from the salvage yard over it. That was before recycling got big, so I guess we were just ahead of our time. Or probably we were just cheap. It’s not like we could go to the Fiat dealer and buy replacement floor mats. Fiat was down to just a few dealers, and most of them were combining with furniture or adult entertainment stores, so people would actually pay attention to their weekly going-out-of-business sales. You could go into the remaining Fiat “dealerships” and get a good deal on a “big screen” TV and some, ah, decidedly non-Disney VHS tapes to watch on it. Interesting times …
But I enjoyed that Fiat 850 Spyder, not so much for its mechanical “uniqueness” or great fuel economy (the more it rusted and pieces of it fell off, the less it weighed and the better gas mileage it got—maybe today’s automakers who are always complaining about high fuel economy standards might want to give this some thought). No, as bad as it was in both mechanical and structural integrity, the little topless car was a babe magnet. Mostly short babes, but babes nonetheless. And at that time I could use all the help I could get in that department. Now, fast forward a “few” decades and, well, I could still probably use some help.
But once the Fiat reached the same ending as Beethoven (he de-composed), I’d had my fill of cheap, unreliable European sports cars, and I decided to go adult and buy a brand new, reliable American car, but one that still had some personality. It was love at first sight — a Pontiac Fiero! It turned out to be a good/bad/more good news story. The good news was that I had absolutely no rust problems with it. The bad news: the mid-engine caught fire and it burned up. The more good news was that it burned up in, wait for it … that same Kmart parking lot! Kmart must have gotten a great deal on a whole bunch of non-flame retardant asphalt.
File under “What-Goes-Around-Comes-Around,” or maybe, my Karma finally ran over their Dogma… •
