The Adventures of Cadillac Girl! Part 2.5

Speeding through the neighborhood, barely stopping for anything--stop signs, speed humps, kids on bikes--my mind also ran way too fast.

What the fuck do I do? Call the cops? Ha! I imagined how that conversation would go: "Yes, 911? Yeah, I've just gotten in a gunfight with some yakuza thugs in the middle of the fucking street, can you help?" Call Mr. Arigaki? This would be the obvious choice, but perhaps I ought to get his daughters well removed from danger first. How far is "well removed"? My place? If the gang found out the girls' AirBnb, how likely was it that they knew my address? But where else was I to go? Not like I've got an underworld connection or anything.

I looked into the rearview mirror, which swung wildly back and forth on the wire connecting it to my backup camera. I set my gun atop the sea of glass in the passenger seat, then steadied the mirror, seeing through what was left of the glass that no one was following us, then turned it down to face my passengers.

"Are you guys okay?" My voice was uncharacteristically loud and harsh. "Are you hit, are you cut?"

They frantically shook their heads no, although the tears on their faces catching the light, the hyperventilating, and the full-body shaking made it hard to tell which question they were responding to. "Hey, I'm getting us out of here," I said, trying hard to soften my tone, "I'm getting us out of here, it's gonna be okay."

We turned right onto La Cienega. I decided the best course would be to hit the eastbound 10 freeway, where the chance of other motorists and cops noticing us was slightly lower than on the surface streets. The 10 also would take us toward my place--which I guess I would find out when I got there whether or not it was compromised--and the makerspace where my other Cadillac--the 1981 Fleetwood Brougham V6 I picked up a couple weeks ago--was kept. So the plan was (1) "drive casual", (2) swap vehicles, (3) take the girls back to my place, and (4) call Mr. Arigaki.

Right, "drive casual". Yeah, super easy when you're driving a Cadillac with a windshield that now better served as a colander and an interior full of shattered glass, shell casings, and passengers in absolute hysterics. I turned up the radio a little bit--80s on 8 was playing "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Belinda Carlisle--took a peek at the gauges--oil pressure was fine, volts were fine, temp was okay for now but the radiator probably had a couple holes in it--took the rearview in hand to take another peek, seeing no one threatening behind us, I yanked it out of the ceiling and threw it into the passenger-side floorboard so its swinging wouldn't attract any more attention than we already were. The myriad of bullet holes in the windshield caught the light and scattered it into a galaxy of chaos as we drove casually.

It wasn't until we reached the red light at Pico that the realization dawned on me that I was in the worst shape of anyone in this car. The first thing I noticed is that my hands shook uncontrollably any time they weren't attached to the steering wheel. All I could smell and taste was gunpowder. Somehow my mocha Frappucino hadn't been knocked over or sprinkled with glass or brass, so I took a hungry sip through the straw. It tasted like gunpowder too. Each heartbeat echoed through my skull, building into the harbinger of a debilitating migraine.

Fucking A, Britt, why did you shoot the fucking gun inside the car?

Each heartbeat also echoed through the sizzling pain in my arm--oh fuck, I got shot! In the semi-darkness--not wanting to attract too much attention by turning on the dome light--I couldn't tell much under my black sweatshirt (my favorite fucking Future Fantasy Delight sweatshirt, mind you) apart from the surprisingly neat slit just below the shoulder, the fact that most of my sleeve between my shoulder and elbow was soaked, and my upper arm was sensitive to the touch all over. But it still worked, and I had a first-aid kit in the trunk, so I guessed I could figure that out once I got to the makerspace too. In this situation I was extremely thankful for the general obliviousness of the typical late-night Los Angeles driver as they passed us in their shiny LED-lighted crossovers with shiny legible dmvdotcadotgov plates with a first digit of 8, not noticing anything wrong with the giant, slow, brown land yacht.

Just another night in L.A.

The Adventures of Cadillac Girl! Part 2 (WIP)

In my headlights the four gangsters all looked like caricatures of bad greaser cosplayers, their noses pointed skyward like an MD-88 mid-takeoff while their eyes fixated upon me and my passengers. Only one was visibly strapped, holding a shorty AR-15 with a drum magazine horizontally across his waist, but I knew the rest of them were packing as well. The second one from the left stepped forward. He was the only one not dressed in black, with an abstract shirt under a blue-and-white jersey jacket that glittered in the light, and a pompadour so over the top I wasn’t sure if it was meant to conceal a weapon or be used as a weapon. Just like his style, every step was dramatic, thrusting his hips and making sure his boots clacked loudly against the pavement.

I invisibly took a deep breath, licking the roof of my mouth and my lips. My left hand stayed resting on the sill of my open window as it had been, while my right slowly moved, first into the back seat to make the universal “stay calm” gesture to my passengers, then to my hip to slowly work my Glock out of its holster. The unicorn--I’m just going to refer to him by that--came to a stop near the front of my car, clacking his boots like a Russian honor guard, sweeping the tails of his jacket to reveal a rose-gold 1911 on each hip, and sweeping his head around to point the tip of his hairdo at me.

A tense silence, then he spoke, in a Nicolas Cage-grade Elvis impersonation: “You--” dramatic double finger guns at me “--got something I--” some exaggerated hand gesture to lead into double thumbs pointed back at himself “--want.”

I shrugged, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, bud. Now why don’t y’all move it along, I got places to be.” My Glock was out of its holster and in my lap.

He snorted, then laughed toothily. “Tell ya what. I’ll make this real simple. You--” finger guns “--give us the girls, and you walk--” waving-off gesture “--or we--” waving toward himself and his fellow thugs “--take the girls. Over your--” finger guns again “--dead body.”

My grip tightened on my gun. “That’s not going to happen.”

He laughed again. “So be it.” He turned around with a full 360 spin bookended by a clack of his boots as the rest of his gang who hadn’t already done so produced their weapons, forming a firing squad in the middle of the street

I took a deep breath. “Get down,” I said to my passengers, looking at them in the rearview.

The clack of his boots was a countdown. Clack, clack, clack, clack…I took another deep breath. My left hand moved to my Glock, my Glock moved toward the window.

And with the same dramatic spin move, the unicorn produced his 1911s and then shit hit the fan.

I don’t know who on the gang shot first, but I know who on the gang I shot first. The unicorn went down with three shots, his legs kicking out parallel to the ground with a drama that I wasn’t sure was due to the 180-grain 10mm Auto bullets or him being just as dramatic in death as in life. Bullets slammed into my Cadillac’s hood and through the windshield. My passengers screamed hysterically, fighting each other for the slightest extra millimeter of cover. I took down the next thug with another three shots, then thrust the shifter into reverse and put my right Chuck Taylor through the firewall, the giant land barge lurching backward with a chirp from the rear tires.

I couldn’t hit the other two without half leaning out of the car, so I half-winced, half-cringed at the ugly necessity of what I was about to do as I took aim and drained the rest of the magazine through the windshield at the remaining two thugs getting smaller--and less well-lit too, as one of their rounds took out my right headlight--as we accelerated away from the scene, each report going off like a grenade inside the car.

The slide locked over an empty chamber, so I threw myself over the front seat to drop the empty magazine and reach for a new one. As soon as I got my hand over the fresh magazine, a round burst through the windshield and sliced across my left-shoulder with a searing white-hot pain. My passengers screamed even louder, I made some very un-lady-like noises, but my arm still worked, slamming the magazine home and yanking the slide.

With a bit of distance between us and the remaining gangsters, I stood on the brakes and wrenched the wheel to the right. Tires squealed in agony, the car listed heavily to the right then the left like an ocean liner in heavy seas, then the car simply stopped broadside across the street with an abruptness that nearly threw us all out onto the pavement if only the doors weren’t in the way. Shit. My J-turn attempt failed and now we were in an even worse position as the thugs continued to fire at us. Rounds thudded into the doors and blew out both right-side windows, showering us with glass. I took aim again, seeing only one gangster left, the one with the AR-15, approaching us almost casually from a few car lengths away, sending us a burst here and there. The distance was stretching the limits of what my subcompact could hit, but I did what I could to steady myself before I rapidly squeezed off five or six rounds, each muzzle blast rattling my brain inside my skull. I wasn’t sure if I hit him, but he fell or stumbled to cover between two SUVs, and that was all the time I needed. I mercilessly neutral-dropped the Cadillac and we sped off, tires and passengers screaming into the night.

The Adventures of Cadillac Girl! Part 1

As a ravenous consumer of all things 24 Hours of LeMons for the best part of a decade, I have come to develop a particular appreciation for the awful in automobilia. Hundreds of races have brought out of the woodwork all manner of vehicular ideas that were better kept on the drawing room floor, yet somehow made it all the way through to production in some form, enough to end up abandoned in the desert, or in a forest, or in some survivalist compound where a racer can snap it up for an alleged 500 dollars. The "Class A" cars--the Miatas, BMWs, and other cheap, produced-by-the-million sporty cars--that actually have a stone's throw at collecting the most laps in a race, and attempt to do so multiple times a year, might pay the bills at LeMons HQ, but the most nickels are given to the Index of Effluency, awarded to the worst car that managed to do the best.


My favorite things to see in LeMons are horrible engine choices. The way I see it, there's nothing wrong with something overly complex (like, say, a Volvo 960) that swapping in some Malaise-grade downsized engine option, wheezing through a single-barrel carburetor and miles of restrictive smog hardware, can't cure. In fact, it's been shown several times over the course of the series that de-contenting an overly-complex or overly-cheatified vehicle in such a way has actually produced better results for the team involved. Even better, the Malaise Era gifted the world with a plethora of vehicles that offered some of your most fever-dream nightmarish wonderful bad-engine-swap ideas from the factory!


I'm a lifelong Buick V6 fangirl. General Motors installed millions of Buick 231 and 252 V6s (predecessors to the 3800 V6 that did a much better job of powering another couple million full-sized front-drive cars through the end of the 2000s decade) from 1976 through the mid-1980s. Sitting in gas lines and reeling from Nixon Shock and/or stagflation, thrifty-minded Americans found that the extra hundred bucks or so saved by ordering a new two-ton sedan with a 110- or 125-horsepower engine with two fewer cylinders, as opposed to a 150-or-so-horsepower V8, suddenly began to look a lot more appealing. The world got the 231 V6 in the first place because General Motors, looking for a quick, cheap "solution" to the contemporary oil crises, found a 1960s-vintage Fireball V6 (based off the aluminum V8 that would later become more famous as the Rover V8) and installed it into a new Buick sedan. By the middling standards of the day (remember, this is the same time that GM made a 500-cubic-inch V8 rated at 190 horsepower), it worked so well that GM bought back the tooling from AMC and installed it as base equipment across the lineup. It was even the base engine for the 1976 Buick LeSabre, in its final year in grandiose-70s-land-yacht form; imagine a vehicle the length and weight of a new Chevrolet Suburban but with the power output of a base-model 2002 Pontiac Sunfire. Truly, a 1976 Buick LeSabre V6 is the Shitty Car Holy Grail, but it was so execrable (and not to mention that GM "forgot" to advertise it at the time) that I doubt I'll ever find one in this lifetime. However, I try to be an optimist, and if I really buy into certain levels of transgender philosophy, I can just say I'm on a new lifetime, where everyone drives 1976 Buick LeSabre V6s! (Actually, please don't give me that, but I will take one even if for only one chance at 40-pounds-per-horsepower Index of Effluency gold.)


I spend most of my homebound moments with a tab open to various California Craigslist pages. I usually start with price below $2000 (not just looking for "sub-$500" LeMons race candidates, but also for the budgetless LeMons Rally), and sometimes I use search terms like "project", "ran when parked", and "needs work". Occasionally I also go onto salvage-auction sites like the CoPart network, for a more modern, but slightly more dents-and-dings, option, such as a prosperity-theology-preacher-spec Buick Lucerne with a 3800 and a landau roof, or a Mercury Milan with a manual transmission. A couple months ago, I placed a snap $499 bid on a hail-damaged 2011 Saab 9-5, relishing the images of fire and brimstone that would come my way from the Saab Completionists for gutting up the Last Of The Saabs to race in LeMons, but sadly I got beaten out on that one. Old-fashioned ways, like newspaper classifieds, are another good option, although as a relative newcomer to the Los Angeles area I've been wary of following a half-inch-by-half-inch square of vehicle information to some neighborhood where wearing the wrong color is grounds to be hemmed up like Warren G. However, I would ultimately be surprised that I would stumble across my very own slice of malaise without the need for any of these aids.


Its license plates were what drew it to me at first. They were the yellow-on-blue six-character plates, run out by mid-1980 but valid as long as the owners kept them that way, and this one had to be from 1980 because its serial was extremely late in the series (the letters are ZYV, also a combination I saw frequently in my hometown in Louisiana). One of my goals when I moved to California had been to find a vehicle with yellow-on-black, yellow-on-blue, or Sunset plates. Of course, I ended up not getting any of those when I ran across my current daily driver at the massive Toyota dealer in El Monte; it was really hard to argue with a brown-on-brown '91 Cadillac Brougham with the 350 TBI, tow package, and velour seating, even with the lack of Old Car Aesthetic plates (mine had Sesquicentennial plates, which I've since replaced with personalized plates in the new yellow-on-black style: “HOSONO”) and if my salesperson didn't pay the tab for my frappucino at the onsite Starbucks. It's just about the best Los Angeles daily driver I could imagine, in a very romanticized sort of way, ignoring appreciating its flaws, like its appetite for fuel or the necessity to put in a hidden fuel-pump kill switch to stave off thieves. I've also been preparing it for duty as a LeMons-worthy tow vehicle, installing new and upgraded cooling systems and a hitch to take full advantage of its 7000-pound tow rating. It's my commuter for my day job typing cute, witty descriptions (and occasionally modelling) for the items on a major "alternative fashion" retailer's website. I also use the Cadillac for rideshare. I prefer to make long-distance arranged rides to and from the various L.A. area airports, I've been able to establish a small clientele of people who would prefer to sit in traffic be hustled home from LAX at 4 AM after a cross-Pacific flight in a plush Cadillac instead of another 2014 Prius with 5 pounds of air fresheners installed.


I haven't done much to cultivate a reputation as the Cadillac Girl, but word-of-mouth is word-of-mouth, I guess, when after dropping off one of my regulars for their biweekly flight to Tokyo or wherever, I got an unexpected ride request from a couple of young ladies who wanted me to drive them to Coachella, telling me I came recommended. Now, Coachella is about 130 miles from LAX, but if a $250 ride (the standard app fee plus whatever tip to make it that even amount) all the way out there in the brown velour back seat of a '91 Cadillac is what gets them into the proper mindset, I'll take it. Turn off the A/C, roll down all four windows, and set “White Rabbit” to maximum volume and infinite repeat. Anyway, after a three-hour slog through traffic (the 10 freeway conveniently takes you along the longest possible path across Greater Los Angeles into the sprawl of San Bernardino and Palm Springs), I dropped them off as close to the festival festivities as I could, and then drove all the way through Indio to find a gas station by the freeway so the Cadillac could drink deeply of $4.00/gallon desert unleaded and I could drink deeply of Rockstar. There was the aforementioned yellow-on-blue-plated vehicle, most likely a 1980 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. It had been black but a great deal of its paint had been burned off by the sun or blasted off by sand; the "PALM SPRINGS" on the top half of what was probably a dealer plate frame long snapped to pieces giving the clue that this car had lived here in the desert all its life, and it was now about halfway grey. I gave it a few quick glances as I nosed my own California Cadillac into position alongside a fuel pump, noticing the For Sale sign in the windows, but then what I saw next had me doing a double take...V6 badges.

...V6 badges?!

If you were able to get through my Exposition Session about the wonders of the Buick V6 engine, you read that GM installed it in just about every passenger car it offered, big or small. Toward the end of the Malaise Era, this also included Cadillacs. The 252 V6 was briefly offered as a credit option for the Fleetwood Brougham and Seville models for the first year or two of the 80s. One could call this the nadir of the Malaise Era, where the malaise-option downsized engines made it all the way to a brand once considered the "Standard of the World", but I believe history ultimately cleared the 252 as probably the most reliable engine option available for Cadillacs in the early 80s, at least for the 7 or so people who bought it. I imagine the bluehairs who owned them heard the stories about their friends with V8-6-4 or Oldsmobile Diesel Cadillacs spending more time in the shops than on the road (and ultimately getting Olds 307 or 350 swaps under warranty) and chuckled at the thought of the 200 dollars they saved by getting theirs with the V6, even if they had trouble keeping up with automatic Ford Tempos and Toyota Tercels on freeway grades and their fuel economy was no better than that of the V8s when they actually worked.


After filling up my Cadillac's tank, I checked out the old faded one up close. The For Sale sign on the windshield stated it was indeed a 1980 Fleetwood Brougham V6, in addition, it offered a clean title (the old plates were even still in date, if only for about a month, bonus!), 175000 miles, but failed smog; they were asking $800. I would have to see it in the iron to make sure it was really a V6, but my Shitty Car Fangirl Freakout Level was at about an 11. I decided to text the number immediately, because this is the 21st century and no one calls first. While taking some photos of the old Cadillac for Fangirl Freakout posts on social media later, I received a text back, not from the seller but from an automated system number, telling me that I had in fact attempted to send a text message to a landline telephone. Well, I guessed I knew what kind of seller I would be dealing with. Deciding to give them a call the first chance I had when I got back, I got back into my Cadillac and set the controls for the fading sunset.

I had decided to wait until Monday, mostly to avoid sitting in the parking lot that was every single road in and out of Coachella, but also so I could call this my birthday present to myself (or, as a third possibility, to give the Fangirl Momenting a few days to calm down). What better way to temporarily forget that every day I’m further away from youth than to purchase for myself one of the most punitively slow vehicles of the late Malaise Era and turn it into a rolling chicane for turbo Miatas and LS-swapped E36s at Buttonwillow? I made the call while sitting in the parking lot at work during my lunch hour, after making the waistband of my Bodyline skirt (which is not really intended for six-footers) significantly tighter with a good helping of In-N-Out Burger. I took a deep breath to prepare myself while the phone rang, and rang...and rang...until the friendly robot lady told me to leave a voice message at the tone. Of course, I should have expected this.

“Hi, my name is Brittany, I was calling about the 1980 Cadillac you have for sale at the Circle K in Indio, if you could give me a call or text back when you can, I can be reached at … anytime. I’m interested,” I started in my superbly practiced Telephone Customer Service Voice, unanimously described by my friends as my most feminine tone possible, then decided to add, “...as long as it is still a V6. Thanks, hope you have a great day and I look forward to hearing back from you soon!”

As the call ended and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu started playing through my YouTube Red playlist again, I thought for a second if being specific about how much my specific desire for the V6 to be intact affected my chances of getting it. Sure, finding a 400 and a four-speed out of some old Chevy pickup and dropping it into the Caddy would have been pretty punk rock, but I needed that raspy, unrefined 90-degree V6 noise. The seller didn’t return my call that day, or even first thing the next morning (which was my birthday). The whole time I imagined them scoffing at my voicemail over breakfast in their Other Desert Cities home, as if it was really a valid question that anyone would have kept 252 power in their Cadillac past approximately 1992. (It is also possible that I had entirely forgotten that the sign in the windshield specifically mentioned it was a V6.) It was later that evening, after I had taken a shower and was trying to figure out what tights to wear for a subdued celebration at a little bar not far from work (when you own all 51 We Love Colors colors, this is often the longest part of your daily clothing-selection ritual), that I saw I had a missed call from the seller. There was also a voicemail, which sounded like it was recorded from a flight of stairs above the receiver:

“HI BRITTANY THIS IS RETURNING YOUR CALL YES I DO HAVE THE CADILLAC IT IS A V6? EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS”


I hit the callback button immediately, but just like before, the phone rang and rang until I was again prompted to leave a voice message at the tone. Now I had the archetype of the seller just about nailed down, they were the kind of person who moved to the desert to avoid cold temperatures and people, but grudgingly assigned time each day to assure abandoned loved ones and inquisitive potential Cadillac buyers that they were still alive.


“It’s Brittany calling you back, sorry to miss your call. I am definitely interested in the vehicle, I was wondering if there was a chance you could meet me back at the location one day soon, the best time for me is usually the weekends. Please call me back when you can and let me know, thanks!”


I heard nothing more from the Cadillac seller that night, probably good because I try to avoid making financial decisions while intoxicated. The next day, which I had also taken off work to recover, I woke up around noon and saw I had yet another voicemail from them, with the exact same volume, echo, and tone, telling me that they could be free this weekend and asking if 11 AM Saturday would be a good time. I’m an hour and 45 minutes from Indio on a good day, but I returned his call (again, by voicemail) and said that 11 AM Saturday would be a good time. This was the last I heard from the Cadillac seller, even after sending him another voicemail on Friday asking if everything was still good for our meetup. My Marine officer friend Matt made the drive from Camp Pendleton to see me for my birthday, so I decided to shanghai him into waking up before 9 AM on a Saturday, getting into my Cadillac and driving out to Indio with me, I really didn’t want to go all the way out to the edge of nowhere for a shitty old V6 Cadillac offered for sale by a man I had hitherto spoken through exclusively through voicemail. My usual style, somewhere between “Kyary Pamyu Pamyu backup dancer” and “whatever looks good with really bright tights and Converse”, wouldn’t really work for this instance, so I put on some regular jeans and an Achievement Hunter T-shirt with my least-homosexual pair of Chuck Taylors. Matt dressed like he normally did, like we were instead driving to the yacht club, although a yacht club in the middle of the desert would have been an unusual sighting. I stopped by my bank to withdraw $800 in fifties, of which I kept $500 on my person and gave the rest to Matt to hold onto to produce an illusion that I came with just $500 and intended to leave with either cash or the car. We loaded up with roach-coach tacos, then turned onto the 10 east for Indio, best speed.


The 10 was pretty clear as the morning heated up from light-jacket-and-windows-down weather to air-con weather, we made it to the gas station where the Cadillac was with a few minutes to spare for our meeting. The Cadillac was still there, but no one around that gave the appearance of the person selling it. I parked next to it, then we went in for drinks and bathroom breaks before waiting for the seller. Matt suggested that I call them, but I reminded him that the seller did not have a cell phone and seemed only to return calls once a day. 11 AM came and went, then it was 11:30, and there we were still trying to not look shady in this gas station parking lot. We speculated on what kind of car the seller would drive. I suggested that he would show up in a Fleetwood Brougham or Sedan DeVille much like the one I was here to buy, but with a much more freeway-friendly engine option. Matt was generally bewildered by my inexplicable vehiclular fetishes and interests, and didn’t offer much of an opinion. I coached him to not immediately mention that I planned to use the Cadillac for the 24 Hours of LeMons, concerned that such a mention would cause the seller to change his mind about the sale, as if suddenly this $800 hooptie that failed smog was suddenly a priceless collector’s item deserving of a prime spot at Concours.


Around 11:45 or so, a white 2000s Buick LeSabre, much like the one my grandfather bought new for his 75th birthday, then I bought after he passed away (and had my own LeMons ambitions with before selling it), with “5DRY” plates hopefully humorous to someone besides me, rolled up to us. It stopped hard enough to nosedive slightly, the elderly male driver leaning out of his seat to squint through the passenger window at us, before lurching away like it was a manual car driven by an inexperienced driver. I watched it make a full circle around the building before it came back toward the two Cadillacs.


“That’s him,” I said.


The Buick pulled up to two parking spaces opposite the old Cadillac from us. The seller was a man named Larry, who was similar in appearance and mannerism to a man of the same name I had worked with in my old life in Louisiana. He was retired Navy, started his enlistment with the Forrestal fire and ended it before the Navy could acrimoniously merge his rating with another, then moved to the desert so he would never have to experience snow or freezing temperatures again in his life. He now lived in a retirement community in Indio, and simply did not have the parking space for the Cadillac he had owned since 1992, but had now become a difficult project. He was a little surprised when I told him that I was a former hospital corpsman myself, which I understood, since it’s not every day a six-foot-two lady tells you they spent time handing out Motrin and clean socks to Marines in a past life. I explained that I was transgender.


“Oh! Well, you turned out pretty pretty, didn’t you?” he said, going on to tell me about how a Chief he worked under was known for crossdressing at liberty ports, and reminiscing fondly about the experiences he and his friends had with this Chief.


Not quite sure how to respond to this, I coyly thanked him (quickly turning to Matt with a “well okay then” look), then asked if he knew the exact issue that caused it to fail smog, still playing up the appearance that I was merely a collector of automotive oddity. He went into an impassioned rant about the dubious necessity of smog checks and how difficult it made keeping up with a vastly superior older car, which I again understood; the Bureau of Automotive Repair, in the righteous quest for clean air in the most populous and crowded state in the Union, had as a byproduct antagonized the car enthusiast in general. The real issue could have been any one of things, none of which would have been super important for racing, but a pass would make it a lot easier to update the registration for the LeMons Rally (and even driving it to races). Larry produced the key and attempted to start it, but in the however long it sat at this Circle K parking lot the battery had grown flat. Prepared for this eventuality, I brought a new-ish battery with me (along with various other small parts, cleaners, and tools, just in case), so we popped that in and after a few maximum-effort cranks, the old 252 fired up and the “FUCKING MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?” Juggalo exhaust note instantly lowering the property value of the still-new gas station. Larry took pride in his upkeep of the four-barrel carburetor, but mentioned that the brakes could use some work. The 252 settled into a ticky idle without assistance, so I decided to ask Matt to stay there with my car while Larry and I went for a brief test drive.


The interior had seen just as much abuse from the desert sun as the exterior had. The dashboard cap was cracked in several places and I figured the Mexican blanket was the only thing between me and the bare foam cushion. The brake and coolant warning lights illuminated on the dash. But the column shifter still slammed into “D” with the force of a Freightliner crushing an S-10 against a freeway guardrail, and the old 252 took no offense to being put in a forward gear in this manner, so off we went. It was creaky and grindy, the brakes were lazy and noisy, the throttle was lazy on tip-in and tip-off, which was most fun when trying to stop, and most of what came through the A/C vents was the scent of a very tired engine.


Therefore, it was perfect. We returned to the gas station.


“All right, Mr. Larry--” I started, putting one hand in the pocket with my cash.


“Oh, don’t call me ‘mister’, I worked for a living,” Larry interrupted.


“Okay, Larry, what do you think about $500?”


“Ohh, I knew I shouldn’t have trusted a Corpsman!” Larry turned to Matt. “Never trust a Corpsman!”


“Oh, come on. I can do $500.” I put my other hand in my pocket to indicate I was standing firm.


“$600.”


I stopped, thinking about it for a second. “$550?”


Larry took a moment, tossing his head from side to side and nodding with increasing flamboyance. “Ehhhh, I guess I’ll take it.”


We shook hands, Matt slipped me the extra fifty, and the deal was done...well, in the financial sense anyway. Expecting a tire-kicker, Larry had neglected to bring the title along with him; I gave him my work address and care-of, and told him to send it there. I also had not worked out my logistical plan for this. Sure, I could have put Matt in the old Cadillac (actually, probably put him in mine) and we could have just driven it back to my place, but I wasn’t entirely sure if I trusted it. We decided to put my Cadillac to its first real test of towing mettle by renting a trailer and towing the old one, so we went to the U-Haul renter in Indio. Normally, U-Haul militantly refuses to rent one of its car trailers to anything less than a 4500 diesel duallie, but the clerk here was evidently still not down from several days of washing down cheap mind-altering substances with cheap beer and Monster in tents at Coachella, and thus had no qualms about renting us their largest twin-axle car trailer. We got my new slice of malaise on it with no problems, then steered it onto the 10 west with an eye on the temp gauge on my 1991 Buick Park Avenue gauge cluster and the aftermarket transmission temp gauge I’d added. The old Cadillac bounced and bobbed with the winds and bumps, transmitting its movement through the trailer and into my car. 60 mph was the maximum speed I really felt comfortable driving, thankfully, traffic still wasn’t bad. The coolant temp pushed the far end of the “200” on the gauge on the more severe grades, but overall my ‘91 didn’t have too much issue towing the older version of itself all the way back to L.A. I made a note that I should consider rear airbags or heavier-duty rear suspension for more confidence through the worst of the motions. We made it back to my rented shop space in one piece and no leaks. We pulled the old Cad in, locked it up, returned the trailer, went home for a shower and change, then hit up a dinner spot to unwind and celebrate my pending LeMons domination, and also my birthday.


Gotta say, it was a good day.

Part Eight: Summer of Suck

I arrived at Camp Lejeune in May to begin my summer of Personnel Student Input before I started my official training to become a field medical technician. On paper, this is a great idea because it gives budding 8404s (the enlisted classification for the job) the chance to experience what their unit does firsthand, becoming a part of the unit enough that when they come back from FMTB, they can jump right in without any learning curve. In reality, it is an utterly miserable time. You’re stuck wearing the Navy blue camouflage uniform in brutal Camp Lejeune heat and humidity, constantly being interrogated by Marines as to what the hell you are, losing any credibility you might have had when you have to admit you’re just a boot. Most of your leadership treats you like shit as a way to get you ready for the instructors down at Camp Johnson to continue treating you like shit. I have tried hard to block this summer out of my memory, aside from one or two things, such as the memorable incident where the M4-toting guard at the main gate refused to believe Great Lakes was an actual military installation, subjecting me and my passenger to a search and interrogation at the side of the road before his dispatch convinced him that it was indeed more than “just the lakes, dude”.

(I should take a moment to say that, even though I was still in the Navy, I will frequently talk about the Marine Corps and use terms like “in the Marine Corps”, because many of the oddities and experiences I had at Camp Lejeune are endemic to that particular organization.)

I was also introduced to the Marine Corps phenomenon of vehicle inspections. Many states have vehicle safety inspections (although Louisiana’s, in many cases, amounts to paying a guy at a Shell station $20 for a two-year sticker), but the Marine Corps version takes on a different form. Before any four-day weekend or leave period, your E-6 (who may look like the offspring of Dana White and Jim Cantore) will take one look at your $300 car, with its broomed-on Rustoleum paint job and mismatched interior, and his first question will be, “Why the fuck are you still driving this?” His inquiries will take on ever more rhetorical forms, as if he’s never heard of an E-3 fresh out of boot camp (even if you are nearly two years removed from boot camp) who knows how to work on a car older than he is. He will ask you how much money you have saved up, believing that you’re too naïve to not see right through the logic that a more expensive vehicle saves on repairs. This irony is best appreciated when you’ve just come out of a two-hour personal finance class where you’re told that any decision involving money or credit is a poor one, since after all, your number one reason for being here is to go to war to die. I would have thought that, being a command entirely composed of corpsmen and Navy medical officers, there would be more common sense at hand about such things, but I was proved wrong. Having normal adult human problems is something the military is simply not equipped to handle.

As I had at Dam Neck, I was tempted a time or two to get a newer car, one which wouldn’t attract as much unfair ribbing before every 96. Like any military town, Jacksonville has no shortage of shady “BUY HERE PAY HERE” and “E-1 AND UP APPROVED” car lots, all of them eager to cash in on the guaranteed money of service members. With all respect for Marines, the typical junior Marine does not use their first credit approval on the most practical or tasteful of vehicles, and most of these lots were stocked with body-kitted-up Mustangs, Civics, or two-wheel-drive pickup trucks with suspension lifts and big tires on big wheels. I didn’t find any of these vehicles interesting enough to take a long-term commitment on. Most of what I was interested in was either overpriced, a polished turd, or both. I came close to handing in the Electra for a 2001 or so Park Avenue Ultra, but the dealer tried to tell me that the whining power steering was actually an artifact of the supercharger, so I walked out on that deal.

I was slow to begin exploration of the world outside of Camp Lejeune. My barracks was six miles from the main gate, which took almost an hour to get out of on some weekdays (this was before I discovered the other gates out of the base) and the “it’s just the lakes, dude” incident made me wary of passing through it lest I get interrogated by another M4-toting guard who went to the Marine Corps school of geography. I had also learned the hard way of the existence of the “blotter”, a report the local police agencies send to the base commander every so often on service members who commit infractions out in town. I was unpleasantly lectured on the importance of sticking to the speed limit, and how lucky I was that there was a new commanding officer, because under the old regime even my 49 in a 45 would have had me reduced in rank and thrown on restriction for 45 days. Since I felt I was being treated like one anyway, I went back to my high-school freshman hobby of playing video games, figuring it was less risky than going out and driving the car I paid for with my own money and worked on with my own hands.  

In August, coincidentally the same day I arrived at Great Lakes for boot camp two years earlier, I headed across town to Camp Johnson to report to Field Medical Training Battalion, where I was reintroduced to 80-man rooms, squad showers, and marching everywhere in stifling heat and humidity. The day-to-day grind at FMTB was no less miserable than PSI, but it did feel good to put on my Marine desert cammies on for the first time. Finally, the feeling that my career was going somewhere and I might even become someone! Eager to get out of the squad bay and the depressing run-down industrial confines of Camp Johnson, I returned to the Buick, taking tentative trips down U.S. Highway 17 to Wilmington, then up it to New Bern, and driving all over the Jacksonville area in between. The Buick would turn out to be an ideal U.S. 17 vehicle, and this was just the first few of many, many miles the two of us would plie on its length through the Mid-Atlantic.

Part Seven: The Electra's New Clothes

After my grandfather’s death, combined with my beloved Buick’s surprising spate of unreliability and the continuing downward spiral of my military career, I rediscovered alcohol, thanks to a recent and unexpected move to the “cool” barracks, Building 550, where alcohol was allowed. It had been quite some time since IS students were allowed to live in 550, but since I had been on hold so damn long, the barracks managers took pity on me and found me a room there. Sure, my room in 550 was smaller, my shower didn’t drain all the way, and no electronic signal could pierce the walls, but I felt like I had finally made it, allowing the legend that had built around me and my circumstances to grow. And now that I had access to booze (even though I was still underage and could get in a lot of trouble if I had a particularly bad night), I had another outlet for my resentment and disillusionment, albeit an unhealthy one. With no one to go with me and a little wary of what might break next, I didn’t take the Buick on any extended trips, just driving it to and from the schoolhouse and the occasional trip out to Lynnhaven or Norfolk.

In November, right around Thanksgiving, I got the final word. I was being denied a top-secret clearance. Since I needed one to go to ‘C’ school, that also meant that I would no longer be an intelligence specialist. As I was escorted out of NMITC for the last time, I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do with my future, except that I was, at least in my head, effectively done with the Navy. I transferred to the base training command hold, where most of my days consisted of sitting in a classroom all day, trying to find the one spot in the room where I could get cell signal, punctuated by the occasional manual-labor working party. I met with a career counselor who provided me with a handful of ratings I could transfer into, I told them that at this point I really just wanted to be out, but I was reminded of the fact that I had given the Navy six years of my life so I had to pick something. My options were undesignated seaman/airman/fireman (a phenomenon unique to the Navy, one can opt, or be forced, into a general job group and have the opportunity to move into a specific rating later), hospital corpsman (military medic), dental technician (an extension of the last), engineman (diesel mechanic), and musician (which required an audition so I didn’t bother with that). I originally chose engineman, given my decent abilities spinning a wrench, but that rating closed up before my orders were finalized and I ended up deciding upon hospital corpsman. I was not looking forward to being in a job I had no interest in, and which had a 95 percent chance I would end up in Iraq or Afghanistan, but everyone above the rank of E-5 I spoke to seemed to be positive about its career opportunities, and I felt that it certainly beat going deck (undesignated) anyway. I packed up the Buick and left Dam Neck for the last time the week of Christmas.

At the time, the ‘A’ school for hospital corpsmen (hereinafter referred to as “corps school”) was located at Naval Station Great Lakes, north of Chicago. I had already been there for boot camp in the summer, but I had never experienced a true Midwestern winter. With all the work I had done to it over the past several months, it would certainly make the trip just fine, but the car had never (as far as I knew) experienced the wonders of road salt, applied to the roads by the cubic acre in the part of the world I would be spending a winter in. The original champagne paint, rough when I bought the car three years earlier, had now worn all the way to bare metal in some spots. Most of the hood by the windshield was now bare, surface-rusted metal and the roof was almost completely so. The landau roof had no length more than a quarter of an inch between brittle cracks, many chunks of vinyl or whatever it was made of had peeled away. Taking advantage of temperatures hovering in the 60s and 70s (pretty typical for Louisiana in December), I went to Home Depot and bought out their entire stock of Rustoleum paint in Safety Red and Flat Black, as well as a massive supply of duct tape and Rustoleum Leather Brown. I took the car through the cheapest setting on an automatic wash (the only time it was ever washed) to get all the pollen and road grime off, then parked it on a couple of blankets I got on clearance at Wal-Mart and set to work.

Automotive paint is best applied by stripping the car to bare metal all over, applying a coat of primer, and then spraying the color on. I had simply bought a selection of rollers and brushes, with which I broomed on a couple coats of Safety Red to the body of the car, even using some detail brushes to get in between the logos and around tight spots. On the underside, anything that wasn’t directly involved with the performance of the running gear, or keeping it affixed to the body, was hit with a thick smear of the Flat Black. My work with fixing the landau roof was equally ghetto fabulous. I used four full rolls of duct tape making a staggered lattice structure over the destroyed vinyl, taking care to tuck sufficient edge under the top’s edges, then threw on a couple coats of the Leather Brown. If the Buick wasn’t ugly before, it was certainly ugly now, with the red having an even rougher texture than the destroyed clearcoat had, and even under the paint, one could clearly see the intricately latticed duct tape work on the landau section. Of course, I loved it, because I had done it all myself.

I needed the excitement and sense of accomplishment that re-painting my entire car by myself gave me, because around that same time, I called an end to my longest and most meaningful relationship, my relationship with Kirstie. Before kicking me out of the building, the NMITC special security officer gave me a copy of my complete investigation report, of which nearly a full page was the investigator’s opinion of my interest in furries, which Kirstie had described in detail. In hindsight, I knew it was not her fault because she couldn’t have known the damage that did to my career, but at the time I laid all the blame for everything that happened to me on her. Although I would continue to appreciate them, I also ended my active participation in the furry community. I kept my Anthrocon 2008 badge hanging from the rearview mirror as a token of the first big trip I took in the Buick. It was now the one companion I had left, and with my entire life in its trunk, I hit the road bound for my new future as a corpsman.

I wasn’t sure what to expect as I headed north on I-55 and I-57, where the temperature fell as steadily as the miles clicked by on the odometer. The stories I had heard about the Great Lakes training commands from the engineering and gunnery ratings I met while on base hold, that the instructors were actually boot-camp company commanders who moved to the school side (true for most of those schools, they are called “SDCs”), along with the impression that corpsmen are basically just slightly-diluted Marines, made me look forward to my time there even less. There had also been a great deal of confusion as to whether or not I needed a secret security clearance to be a corpsman. Since I had lost my clearance eligibility entirely in the hullabaloo at Dam Neck, I fully anticipated another long-term hold at Great Lakes, under the corframs of a much less pleasant regime.

My anxiety levels through the roof after passing by boot camp and a Marine reserve command I thought was corps school, I arrived at the actual command late at night after some 13 hours on the road. I was chided by the chief petty officer on duty for not reporting in dress uniform, so I had to go back out to the parking lot several blocks away in the 15-degree cold to retrieve it. After waiting in the freezing lobby of another building to get linens, I was given a room with two other students in a decrepit barracks with squad showers, no Internet, and walls so thick no electronic signal could penetrate them. The big slap in the face would come when I was informed that, since I was an E-3, and even though I had come from another command and had been in the Navy for a year and a half, I would be stuck on Phase 1 liberty until two weeks after I classed up. That meant I was not allowed to wear civilian clothes, or drive or ride in a personally-owned motor vehicle. It may just be me bitching, having lived pretty softly for a year on hold and now exposed to a real military training command, but my motivation had hit a new low.

The world of corpsmen is substantially different from the rest of the Navy, not least because of its strong connection to the Marines, but also given that it is a rating that allows one to be everything from a desk clerk to a mortician. I felt that most of the instructors there were assholes, but they had earned everything they had, including the right to be complete assholes to students. It was immediately apparent that I did not fit in with this culture, and it showed. Even though I wasn’t technically allowed to, I would drive the Buick to the USO or the Exchange, mostly so I wouldn’t have to walk out there in service uniform in 15-degree weather. I eventually classed up by the end of the month, which felt like the longest month of my life. My instructors immediately seemed to dislike me. I made little attempt to hide the fact that I was wholly dissatisfied with my new environs, and my effortless grasp of the material at hand made me an idiosyncrasy that they could neither understand nor break. There was also the inconvenience of helping me get my car properly registered for base. In the entire year I was stationed at Dam Neck, I had never been able to get permanent base registration decals, since I was at a “temporary” command (I ended up getting five 90-day base passes while I was there). Their irritation was evident as they guided me through the necessary steps to get everything done.

Once I passed the second test and got my Phase 2 liberty, I found that having a car, even one as ugly as mine, made me a very appealing friend to have at corps school. My fee was significantly less than what the cabs charged, and my car was probably a lot more comfortable than the urban-warrior cabs that lined up at the Metra station across the street every Friday evening. Although weekend-long stints of barracks duty limited my Buick adventures, I spent as much time as possible in it and off base. Wanting to avoid the instructors and company commanders at the Gurnee Mills Mall, just up U.S. 41 from the base, I began broadening my horizons, offering trips out to the other suburbs, mostly to the substantial mall in Schaumburg or up 41 and 94 to Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Buick offered a degree of anonymity, appearing to be just another ghetto hooptie while in the shady environs outside the base, or a winter beater that hadn’t been parked yet in the nicer areas to the west. After I removed my “UNITED STATES NAVY” window sticker and license plate frame, no one would have been able to tell that I or my passengers were military, even with my out-of-state plates. My MasterCraft Avenger tires (bought just as much for their 440 treadwear rating as their awesome redneck-chic raised white letters) never had a problem with the snow or the barely-improved roads around the area, and if my self-applied Rustoleum undercoating wasn’t doing the job I hoped it would, I wouldn’t find about it until much later anyway.

I maintained a high class average, always staying in or near the top 10 out of the roughly 60 students in my class. I never studied outside of class, simply paying attention to each instructor’s generic lecture style and reading ahead in the book was enough for me, although the brief wait between submitting my tests and receiving the grade was always a bit nerve-wracking. About two-thirds of the way through the course, it became time to pick orders. As a fleet returnee, I knew I would have a different pick of orders than the new students, so I was looking forward to a quiet clinic or small naval hospital in a decent area. Almost all the new male students in my class got orders to Marine divisions (infantry), and when the detailer segregated the actual fleet returnees from the school returnees like me, I got a bit nervous. My spirits sank when I got the list: Marine Logistics Group or Medical Battalion, 1^st or 2^nd, Camp Pendleton or Camp Lejeune, the absolute bottom of the barrel. Not really wanting to go to California, feeling that it was far too expensive, I went with 2^nd Medical Battalion at Camp Lejeune. This would also mean that I had to attend Field Medical Training Battalion, the actual watered-down version of Marine Corps boot camp for Navy sailors. The Navy had just gotten me with another big fuck-you. I would have rather been on hold for another year.

Although I was no longer looking forward to it, at the end of April 2010, I graduated corps school, seventh in my class of about 60. I had a little bit of pride that I finally had an actual rating in the Navy. Since I had no real reason to spend time there any more, I considered taking leave elsewhere before heading on to Camp Lejeune. A friend of mine had invited me to spend some time at his place in Massachusetts, but I ultimately decided to head back home anyway, packing up the Buick yet again and heading south. The rough winter in Chicago led my old Pontiac alloy wheels to again shed several weights, so shortly after arriving home I visited a used-tire shop and bought a set of late-90s Buick LeSabre alloys for $50, then took them to Wal-Mart to have a fresh set of MasterCrafts installed. I also kept myself busy by replacing the rotors and pads at all four corners. Soon enough, it was time to point the Buick east and head to my first real duty station, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.