Part Three: Trailer Park Hooptie Repair Hell!

It wasn’t long before I got the news back from the mechanic in Ruston: my 1985 Electra’s engine had blown the intake manifold gasket. It could be repaired, but even in 2007 parts for the baby Buick V6 were hard to find, the shop estimated that it would take about two weeks for the parts to come in. Within a few minutes of hearing their quote (of nearly double what I paid for the entire thing just less than a year previously), I was calling my friend Cliff to see if his Cool Loaded Uncle was willing to hitch his trailer to the back of his green Chevy stepside pickup and help me bring the Electra back to West Monroe so we could figure out what to do with it. 

Simultaneously, I had resumed the soul-searching about my decision to join the military. I had (as I recall) 30 days to provide medical evidence to refute the physician’s recommendation of rejection. My recruiter told me that it was entirely optional and my choice in the end, and gave me time to think. My mother, still fuming from the entire episode (even going so far as to blame the military for killing my car) and likely not wanting her favorite son to participate in the Iraq troop surge, told me that I didn’t have to join up. If I had somehow managed to get accepted into the University of Louisiana at Monroe, at which she worked, I could benefit from a discount in tuition offered to children of active staff and faculty, or I could go to the local community college with its automatic acceptance and get my foot in the door with easy, cheap classes that I could pay for with my grocery store job. I was in no hurry to go to the desert to die in a war that had nothing to do with me (even though I had signed up to do a relatively cushy intelligence job), but neither was I looking forward to the thought of two or four more years of school. I got the required medical documentation to keep all my options open, but I needed to get the Buick running first before I made any final calls on life-changing decisions.

My mother’s long-term boyfriend had returned to our lives after a couple of years in jail. I had never particularly liked the man, but he was a pretty passable mechanic himself in between his stays in various parish lockups, and his attitude at the time was quite good. So, I talked to him about the situation the Buick was in. He agreed with just about everyone else at that point that I really should just get another car, save up for a while and get something for one or two thousand bucks that would last me longer and hopefully need less work, but he understood the fact that I was inseparable from this car, more than anyone else. He was the one who told me that my Buick was virtually mechanically identical to a variety of other cars of the same time period, and that there were much better, more reliable, and more powerful engines available in them that would bolt right into mine. Carbs suck on anything but V8s, he told me, and they especially suck when you’re 17. The plan was massively grandiose to me at the time. We were going to replace the entire engine in my car.  

Late-80s Buick sedans were plentiful in junkyards at the time, and it wasn’t long before we found one in a yard south of Monroe, a LeSabre of the same model year as myself, 1990. Half-Price Days and All-You-Can-Carry-For-One-Price Sales weren’t (and still aren’t) a thing in Southern junkyards, or at least we didn’t know about them, so I had to fork over $300 to get a complete, allegedly-running LN3 3800 V6 and the necessary fuel setup to make the jump to fuel injection. Even on a brutally hot July day, the engine removal process was an awesome experience. So much to disconnect, so many bolts to turn (more like fight with), so much going on, and the feeling of seeing a complete engine in the bare for the first time as well! No Xbox 360 achievement hunt could make me feel as accomplished.

The Cool Loaded Uncle didn’t own an implement with which we could remove and install entire engines, so I had to find a place that did. My mom’s boyfriend knew a guy who knew a guy at a trailer park in Bawcomville (White Trash Central, south of West Monroe) who he thought might be able to help us, so after a couple days I was able to convince the Cool Loaded Uncle to help me bring the Buick out there. The friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend used the old-fashioned chain-pulley-on-a-branch rig, in fact, there was already some ancient Detroit lump attached to it when we unloaded the Buick. I had grown up in and out of trailer parks like these, so while I may not have felt fully at home, I didn’t feel particularly unsafe, even if I was a skinny, Beatle-haired nerd in baggy carpenter jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. 

The engine removal from the LeSabre at the junkyard had been relatively easy, apart from having to fight with a few reluctant bolts, because anything 17 years old will be reluctant to cooperate at times. Removing my engine turned out to be full-on 120-proof Trailer Park Hooptie Repair Hell. Apparently the LK9 had assumed that I would be just as attached to it as I was to the rest of the car (understandable, given the fact that it had been in there well before I came around) and had hoped for the chance to atone for its failure on I-20. Realizing the opposite of this was true, almost everything that attached it to the Electra refused to come undone as it should. I had never used so many groundwater-contaminating chemicals in one place at one time in my entire life. If West Monroe had its own Katrina flood after this was done, the water that would come through here would surely eat right through any matter and leave the entire area uninhabitable. In the process we discovered that my subframe had as many usable bushings as, and the structural integrity of, an earthworm. We ended up going back to the LeSabre at the junkyard and grabbing the much-more-decent subframe from it, spending even more money. It probably would have been best to go to AutoZone and get a new set of bushings, but between the two cars we had a full complement of passable ones, so we used what we had. 

The adventure in Trailer Park Hooptie Repair Hell ended up taking four days of backbreaking and knuckle-destroying work in exhausting heat, leaving my neck and scalp so badly sunburned that even putting a shirt on was a tear-inducing task. When I finally got the LN3 to start for the first time in its new home, I gave a scream that was half-joy, half-pain. I had no idea (and never knew) how many miles it had, but it ran perfectly. The extra 55 horsepower and 65 pound-feet of torque, combined with the leaps-upon-leaps-and-bounds-upon-bounds-better throttle response of the SFI engine, felt like I had attached a pair of JATO rockets to the Buick’s flanks. Taking the first test drive, slamming the gas on the gravel sent the front Mastercrafts throwing back rooster-tails twice as long as the car as the LN3 let off a triumphant industrial-organic roar, an engine noise I would come to adore over the years. “It works, don’t it?” my mom’s boyfriend asked when I returned. “Hell yeah!” I remember gasping in response, half-elated and half-exhausted. The only issue was that the primitive electronics in the dash didn’t quite get along with the slightly-less-primitive electronics in the engine, meaning all the dashboard idiot lights would be permanently illuminated. That gave rise to the Electra’s nickname: Christmas Tree. 

Not only had I made Christmas Tree better by orders of magnitude, the experience with the engine swap and the junkyarding trips had changed my life. The resourcefulness of the tree-engine-hoist trailer-park mechanics, combined with the abundance of parts available for Buicks like mine in junkyards stuck with me. Several weeks after the LN3 installation, I returned to the engine-donor LeSabre and removed its beautiful blue velour seats, front and back, to replace the destroyed vinyl/leather/whatever Whorehouse Red ones in my car. My car was no longer cool because it was a car, it was cool because it had become a perfect road car with just two (rather enormous) modifications. My friends and I began spending even more time increasing the numbers on Christmas Tree’s odometer. 

Ever since getting the car, I had been increasingly active in road enthusiasm. When I was younger, I read multiple editions of Rand McNally’s Road Atlas cover to cover, several times over, following various routes in various states. Having my own car meant that I could finally take some road-geeking adventures of my own. I had begun taking trips where I would aim to drive on every public road in a particular area, or every street in a city, which I would many years later learn was called “clinching”. The LN3 upgrade made Christmas Tree into a superb car for this, it offered great power and was substantially more economical than the old carbed engine. Some of these trips involved me driving over 200 or 300 miles in a day in order to collect more routes and termini. Sometimes I would take friends along with me, although most times I was alone. 

During one long trip that took me out to Claiborne Parish, I mentioned to the clerk at a wide-spot-in-the road gas station/grocery that I was considering joining the military. Seeing how much his demeanor changed when I mentioned that fact, and his own fond reminisces of service in the late 1970s, along with the feeling that, despite all my sense of accomplishment with improving my car, it was still the best thing I had going for me at the time, I made my mind up. On July 31, 2007, I returned to MEPS, medical records in hand. There was a new physician there that day, who talked about how baffled they were at why the previous one denied me while they signed me off. Just a few hours later I raised my right hand and took the oath. Unfortunately, my mother had been unable to make it out for that ceremony, but I knew how proud she and everyone else were. Between that and everything I had done with the car, I had a lot to be proud of. I was going places, both physically thanks to the vastly-improved Christmas Tree, and in life, I hoped, thanks to the Navy.