WRITING

This time of year means a lot of things to me, everyone is constantly scrambling from place to place getting ready for the holidays, the weather in California finally catches up to us and we bust out the winter gear for our few frigid nights in the sub 50’s, and bloggers like me get a little time to get caught up on unfinished business while our coworkers are enjoying eachother’s company at holiday parties. Before I sign off for the end of the year I wanted to revisit a post I made a while back on the Los Boulevardos Forum, which was the first place I got to dip my toes into the world of online communication and longer form writing. This one always comes to mind this time of year because I can still feel the cold hopelessness of banging on an empty warehouse door looking for answers and not knowing how this was all going to end. If you’re a romantic like me about old metal shops and local hot rodding history I think you’ll get a kick out of it too, so here it is: my story of  (to the best of my knowledge) the last Mor Drop axle.

My rage is quiet, it seemed to have slipped out of bed hours before me and circled the house before I awoke. I found my rage sitting silently in the bathroom, seeping into the broken tiles, lurking behind the peeling wallpaper. I thought I saw my rage hiding in the bare cupboards, in the maggots in the rice, the eyes on the potatoes that grow completely unswayed by their lack of earth. I go to turn on the stove but my rage snuffs the flame. Not today. Today you don’t get comfort. Today I win, today I control you.

For the past 15 years of my life, without fail at some point while I’m drifting off to sleep this car enters my thoughts. I’ve built it a million times over in my head, in my mind it’s been a dozen colors, had endless wheel and tire combinations, and countless custom touches. The reality of this car, however, until very recently had been much less exciting. In the past year I finally was able to start breathing new life into it, and I’ve finally been comfortable sharing my work and vision for my 56 Chevy with the world. I try and keep a build thread over on the Los Boulevardos forum maintained http://www.losboulevardosmessageboard.com/showthread.php?7472 , but for those of you not familiar with the forum here’s the story so far: I bought the 56 when I was 16 years old. At the time I worked during the week at 6am-9 am and full days on the weekend at our local bagel shop in Livermore. Being in a small town, the bagel shop was one of the few places that weird looking punk rock kids like me could find regular employment, so every morning I’d hop on the 10 bus across town to bust my ass stocking shelves in the freezer and making breakfast for rich people on the way to their jobs. Every day I’d walk to school and daydream of finding and buying my first car. I really didn’t know…

I felt the chill of the last cool breeze of the morning on my face as I saw the Sun start to creep over the hills to my left and light Highway 5. Only a few hours into the drive and already a strange battle between my old friends Tired, Scared, Excited, and  Anxious were all fighting each other for dominance in my mind  as I sped down the empty towards Southern California.

Continued from: The Epic Tale of my 1963 Econoline, AKA: The Van Story- Part 1 &   The Van Story- Part 2, Past the Edge of Oblivion We pulled into the U-Haul on the edge of Las Vegas and spat out our thinly rehearsed lie to the kid at the counter, and at first it seemed to stick. He ran the info through his computer, but eventually we hit the same dead end. Unsafe, they couldn’t get a truck, they couldn’t rent a trailer, we were fucked. Again. Outside the sun was slowly falling and the darkness began to come creep over the desert. I could feel the world pulling us in, trying as best as it could to hold us in this god-forsaken Valley of Fire. The kid behind the counter had a devilish smirk on his face, and you could tell that he was the type of guy that gets off on the tiny sliver of authority they grant him there. Josie and I stepped away from the counter, defeated and tired. Josie, unable and unwilling to succumb to defeat, suddenly saw something that made her jump. ”What about that? That could work!” she yelled. I turned my exhausted and sun burnt face to see the object of her attention: a bumper-mounted tow bar. When I saw the tow-bar she was pointing at, our eyes met, we both nodded at each other, and we made a silent pact there on…

Part II- Past the Edge of Oblivion Continued from: The Epic Tale of my 1963 Econoline, AKA: The Van Story- Part 1 When we got out of the truck, a old man wearing aviator shades was walking out to greet us. He introduced himself as Walt, and we got to talking. The more Walt, Josie and I talked, the clearer my understanding of this place became; this wasn’t a place that people came to by choice, but rather a place of last resort for people who had expended all of their other options. Walt had been married once before in Utah; his wrinkled forearm still bared her name on a tattered banner over a shaky rose. He was living here, not sure for how long, seeing how things went with a much younger girlfriend out here in the trailer park. Everyone here, it seemed, had some story about how they were just passing through. Nothing about this town had any sense permanence about it; it was as if the whole goddamn place could just pack up and leave in the middle of the night without a trace. Walt told me he had a couple of vans back in his heydays, and how he had picked this one up as a project a few years back to relive some of those wild times. The 300 six-cylinder in it that his daughter had insisted over the phone was rebuilt and running seemed to…

I decided I should post up the long and strange journey that is my van build-thread from the LBCC board. I’ll post it up in a few installments. Enjoy: Part I- In the beginning: Josie and I left for the desert at about seven o’clock at night. Still being at the height of summer, the sun hadn’t fully set, but it was steadily on it’s way there. I hadn’t even unpacked from Paso; my duffel bag sat in the back seat of my dad’s crew cab half full of yesterday’s dirty laundry as we climbed the Altamont. My heart pounded as I held the wheel of the truck, swerving around potholes with one hand, pounding an energy drink with the other while my brain went over all of the important details of our trip: We were heading for Nevada, and tomorrow I would be pulling home my Econoline. We left so quick I didn’t even bother to get directions; I knew we were staying the night in Vegas, a drive I’ve made a handful of times, and finding a room should be easy. We would call Walt in the morning to go see the van, thus far I had only spoken to his daughter who had posted the van to the Las Vegas craigslist for her computer-illiterate father. This whole ordeal started from that ad and a picture she emailed me before Paso: She had said that there was a…