Part Two: Road Trip

Note #12

“Hey, they got them scratcher lotto tickets out there in California like we got here?” Aunt Louise asks Jenkins. He’s sitting on the couch in the Acorn Parkway shack messing with the guitar we brought along. “I heard they got all kindsa lotteries out there. Heard they had this giant plastic clear ball with a buncha different colored ping-pong balls with the numbers on ‘em and then one of ‘em comes shootin’ out..., bang! And that’s the winner. What’s the jackpot up to on that now? 60 million or somethin’?”

Jenkins stares at the space in front of him for a few seconds trying to make a bar chord apparently befuddled by the question. “Ah..., I don’t know,” he finally mumbles. “I don’t know anything about that stuff... I never bought one of those tickets.”

“Never bought one of those tickets?!” Louise is shocked. “I heard that California jackpot is the biggest in the whole country...! You oughta try it when ya get back.”

“Ye-ah..., I might do that,” Jenkins lies trying to be polite.

“Hey dude...,” I interrupt the lottery discussion, “let’s go over and check out Fred Brown’s junkyard... It’s cool. Me and my dad used ta go there all the time when we lived here. It’s over on Hilton Parkway, tons uh cool old cars there.”

Me and Jenkins are heading out the door when Louise stops us, “Hey Jackie, you got a couple bucks you can spare? I’ll pay you back when my check comes in the mail.”

“I ah...barely got enough money to buy another car,” I feel a little guilty as we’ve been devouring her food like starving pigs. We’ve been raiding her fridge day and night, not buying anything ourselves. But I know she just wants to go and buy some of those ‘Lotto Michigan’ scratchers.

“Oh come on honey...,” she now shows her hand not even mentioning what she wants to buy. “We could all go in together..., and then..., when we hit that jackpot..., we can split it. It’d be somethin’ like five million apiece.”

“You want me ta ask Fred Brown about a tune-up for yer car?” I change the subject as I have noticed that Louise’s ’66 Chevy Brisbane has been miss-firing something awful.

“No...! That car don’t need no damn tune up!” she comes back a little pissed.

I pull the Cheyenne into a dirt driveway past a gate and park behind a row of used cars at Brown Salvage and Wrecking, or what most people call Fred Brown’s junkyard.

I wonder if Fred will recognize me. The last time he had seen me I was a teenager covered in grease. At that time I was regularly helping my dad on various tasks at the junkyard.

“Yeah..., yer Jim Sturm’s kid..., right?” Fred queries from beneath the visor of a sixties cop hat. He’s leaning under the hood of a ’77 Thunderbird parked in front of a barn that functions as a garage. “Yer dad sure could make that ’55 Century go.” He now refers to a car that sits somewhere in the junkyard rotting. My father had throttled that Buick to many victories in the quarter-mile in the early-sixties. He had been well on his way to success in the field of professional drag-racing until he found God and left the sport behind.

“Is it OK if we take a walk around the yard?” I ask Fred after we have a little chat which includes California, its cars and the consequential topic of the lack of rust on vehicles in the ‘Golden State,’ a phenomenon bewildering most Michiganders.

“Yeah..., take a walk around..., couple uh yer dad’s cars back there.”

A big mutt asleep under an oak tree barely notices us walk by. I wonder what had become of the black collie which previously had occupied the same spot. On numerous occasions as a kid the vicious half-breed had scared the living shit out of me. Regularly sending a shot of adrenaline down my spine as I was careful to walk, not run, when encountering the snarling beast.

We follow a two-track past a small mountain of transmissions then head deep into the wooded part of the junkyard.

I lean up against the fender of a ’41 Plymouth while pulling a plastic bag with a half-smoked joint in it from my pants pocket. I light it, take a drag and pass it to Jenkins.

“This used ta be my dad’s,” I nod towards the Plymouth. “Like sometime before he met my mom. We got a picture of ‘im workin’ on it.”

“Fuck...,” Jenkins lets out a blast of smoke. “Trip out.”

Jenkins passes the joint back to me, I take a big hit, hold it in.

Then we’re both really high and heading deeper into the woods.

The cicadas are in full throat as we wander around the yard. We pass a two-tone pink and black ’56 four-door hardtop Buick Super. The car had belonged to my Uncle Monroe some twenty years earlier. We meander off the two-track trudging through thick weeds passing a row of wrecked cars stacked three high.

We cruise past uncountable wrecks. It’s like we’re in some alternate museum taking in differing designs from a mixture of eras dating back to the thirties. The heaps sinking into the dirt, rusting away under maple trees, white oaks, and an occasional pine or beech. So many times, with my father, as a child I had been out here scavenging parts from these old hunks of metal. We take a right past a ’61 Pontiac, stoned, totally tripped out on the pot, hypnotized by the cicadas. My grandpa Cragganmore’s maroon two-door sedan ’49 Buick Roadmaster lies on its side before us and for an instant, a flash, I’m four years old again looking on this scene.


Photo by CirrosisAguda