VW - The Flying Pig

There's a gal on the Vintage VW list who calls her bug 'Boris.' I mentioned Boris at dinner one night then had to explain, or try to explain, that a lot of Volkswagen owners give their bugs and buses names.

My wife gave me one of those looks, asked what I called my bus. Blank. To me, it's just the Green Bus. Before, there was a Brown Bus, before that a Red & White bus.

I said I didn't give names to things. "But you called your airplane 'The Spirit of Vista'," she pointed out. But never flew it to Paris. "If I ever put wings on the bus," I told her, "I'll give it a name." And muttered something about doing it just as soon as pigs could fly. That cracked her up. It also named the bus. "The Flying Pig?" she laughed.

"I couldn't do that," I muttered. I used to have a buddy who was a cop, spent umpteen years building a helicopter. Called it The Flying Pig. Flipped it during a test flight and burned to death. I wouldn't want to steal his thunder. But maybe El Puerco Volador? Is that right? I'm always getting my Spanish mixed up.

A ham radio buddy came over after supper. He's got some strange plumbing problems. Only way to fix it is to use an adaptor that will allow old thin-wall ABS pipe to mate with new schedule 40 PVC pipe, but now that the box stores have driven all the real hardware stores out of business no one carries the adaptors

So we made some.

Turned them up on the lathe. Took only a few minutes. Lathes are handy things and mine's fully automatic. Just grab the knobs and think about something else while the parts sort of make themselves. I was thinking about Flying Pigs.

While I'm working, my buddy is looking around the shop. There's an airplane engine under a bench, two fully dressed Volkswagen engines on scooters, a Datsun engine sulking over in the corner beside an orphaned 2-cylinder air-cooled Diesel engine that might one day power something strange and noisy. Above the diesel hangs a row of heater boxes.

My buddy looks at the five Volkswagen heat exchangers hanging in a row. Five. An engine needs two, a lefty and a righty. So how the hell did I manage to end up with five heat exchangers? I never noticed that before. All new, too.

Six blower housings. Three dog-house, three flat-backs. One of the dog-house housings is an after-market 36-hp style that proved it couldn't flow as much air as stock, ended up not being used. I've no idea how the others came to be in the shop. You leave the door open, stuff wanders in. My hands make another adaptor and my buddy hunkers down, peering under a bench.

Three 12v alternators, two Motorolas, one Bosch. Two 12v generators. A whole scad of 6v generators. Why do I keep that crap? Blowers. I had a nifty idea for using old blowers to make... I'll think of it in a minute.

A whole bunch of intake manifolds. Oops! Make that a bunch and a half; couple more of them hanging over there. Dual-ports and single ports, several of each. DP Kadron bases. SP Kadron bases. That makes... at least two bunches. And carbs. Lotsa carbs. Box of Kadron carbs. Box of Solex carbs. Whole big drawerful of other carbs including a lonely Bug Spray. Future projects, waiting for... the future, I guess.

Mufflers. Yea gawds have I got mufflers! Four stock bug mufflers, at least that many extractors. It's hard to tell with extractors. You toss them in a pile, they start squirming around, get all tangled together, you gotta spray them with a hose, beat them apart with a stick.

Black, greasy thing under a bench. My buddy gives me a look, brows raised. "Tranny," I tell him. Two more, back in there some place, along with a pile of axles. One of the trannys is a rebuilt, ready to run. I've been planning to install it in the '67. I better make a note to myself to get to it Real Soon Now.

Cylinder heads. Pile of them here, row of them there, two on that bench, pile over beside the grinder, couple over by the welding rig. The bench where I do head work has got this big box of valves, another box of fuel pumps, some old, some new. Shelves hold rebuild kits for carbs and pumps and generator brushes and wheel cylinders and a whole slather of reloading equipment for half a dozen different calibers. The reloading stuff should be over on another bench but that one's being used to test a six inch mirror for a reflecting telescope.

Stack of flywheels over by the milling machine, right beside a stack of stock, original, real VW-type Volkswagen hub caps for an early bus. Should be four. I count them twice. There are four. I feel relieved, give those five heat exchangers a glance. Still five of them.

Bus steering gear and steering wheel shaft leaning up in the corner behind the welding machine, like its waiting for a ride, which I suppose in a way it is.

Overhead, running pretty much the full width of the twenty-two foot wide shop is a pair of airplane wings. Volkswagen engine tin-ware is poked up on top of the wings, the smaller pieces hanging down on hooked hunks of welding rod, handy to get at. A stack of sump plates like little Frisbees. Funny gaskets. Sez 'GMC manifold.' There's an old Jimmy down in the grove. My hands finish another coupler as my buddy gazes at stuff hanging on a wire.

"VW air-vanes," I tell him. "Goes inside those things overt here," I nod toward the blower housings. Two sets of air vanes, one reconditioned, painted with gray epoxy primer, others looking like something out of the La Brea Tar Pits, which tells me they came out of an all-original 1967, never-been-touched engine I recently overhauled. The thing blew an oil cooler seal, pumped oil all over for about six months before the guy sold it to a kid. They were both happy as clams, each sure they'd gotten the best of the deal.

I finished making the adaptors for my friend, chatted a while. "You've got a lot of stuff," he said as I saw him on his way. Strong note of admiration, tinged with something else. Relief? Envy? Is it every man's dream to have lots of stuff?

I came back to the shop to wipe down the lathe, cover it, sweep down. Seeing the shop through my buddy's eyes was a strange experience, like when he stood reading the note on the chalkboard over where the phone used to be: "Pullen - Concrete", a reminder about helping Clint Pullen do a little sidewalk out behind his house so his wife's wheelchair wouldn't get caught on the stones. Clint's been dead at least five years. After I moved the phone, I never used the chalkboard again. We did the sidewalk for Alice back in 1977.

I sat looking at the incredible collection of stuff that has crept up on me over the years, looking at it with mixed emotions. Too much stuff is bad for you, nails you down. But my formative years were during World War II, when everything was rationed, you even had to stand in line to buy food. That's when I was taught that throwing away Good Stuff was a sin. We needed all that Stuff to Remember Pearl Harbor, so we could Slap the Jap and Heel the Hun. They made us chant slogans like that in school, then sent us out to scour the neighborhood for scrap metal, knocking on doors, brow-beat old ladies into giving up their aluminum pans.

And they were right.

Have you ever tried to make steel? It's not easy. Better to keep some on hand in case you need it, like that pile of tubing, or those old door panels. You never know when you're liable to need a door panel for a... whatever the hell it came off of. And an old veedub axel makes a fine gun barrel. Remember Pearl Harbor. And Ruby Ridge.

I sat thinking a little too long, started going a little crazy. Bus right outside, pair of airplane wings strapped up across the ceiling of the shop. Five heat exchangers hanging in a row.

El Puerco Volador. Maybe I could use one of them door panels for the rudder.

Copyright © 1995 Robert S. Hoover

VW - Custom Hat

He kept looking at my head. Every time I reached for a tool, the guy was alooking at me. I finally eased the creeper all the way under his bus and out the other side, got up and took a peek in the passenger-side mirror to see what was hanging out of my nose. Nothing. And no funny smears of grease. Beard wasn't on fire. Teeth hadn't fallen out. But he kept looking at my head!

Finished up, told him he could rebuild the starter if he wanted to but I didn't know any source of new solenoids and that was the real problem. He didn't care; as a mechanic he probably made a fine programmer. Paid me; told me I could keep the old starter if I wanted it. I didn't, which kinda surprised him (I got enough junk to worry about). Then he sez: "I don't suppose you'd consider selling your hat?" My hat?

Took it off to see the gold coins I'd missed. Nada. Old, faded olive-drab looking thingee, kinda greasy around the bill. Got a little VW bus embroidered on one side; you gotta look for it. Over on the other side it sez 'VANS'.

"Where'dya get it?" He's all puppy-eager. Clean hands. '73 Westy, all polished up and neat.

I couldn't recall. "Some race... " SNORE? Some guy was handing them out to the pit crews.

"Would you take ten dollars for it?"

That caught me. It was a second before I started to laugh.

"Twenty?"

Hell, the damn fool was serious! I handed him the hat; he handed me a twenty. He put on the hat, one size fits all. Drove off happy as a clam.

Couple days later I was over by the airport, stopped in at the VANS sneaker factory, picked me up a new hat. $4.95.

"You wouldn't believe what happened to my old hat," I told the kid. But he didn't want to hear unless it involved ten foot waves. Took my money, gave me the hat.

Veedubers is some strange folk.

-Bob Hoover
-July 1995

VW - Camping, Tents, Baja and Buses

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I don't use a tent when I knock around down in Baja, not that it doesn't get cold and sometimes, rarely, there are reports of rain. (I've seen rain in Baja, but only from a distance.)

Standard Baja camping equipment is two tarps and four metal poles; metal, because if you use wooden ones some damn fool will put them in the fire. Lotsa rope; rope is very handy stuff in Baja.

You use one tarp as a shade. The only tree in Baja is in front of the mission at San Ignacio and they don't like you to camp there. So you tie one side of the tarp to the roof rack and prop up the other side with your metal poles, lash everything down with rope. Use bridge spikes as stakes to secure the rope. Bridge spikes are those humongous nails you've seen at Home Depot (and wondered what they were for). Now you know. Bridge spikes are Baja tent pegs. (Because you can't drive a wooden tent peg into the ground anywhere south of Maneadero. And some damn fool will put them in the fire.)

You use the other tarp as a ground cloth. That's where you sleep, on the ground cloth. Under the shade. (Down in Baja it's even sunny at night.) You set-up your table on the ground cloth, and your cot, and your Coleman stove. Leave the porta-potti in the bus, along with the icebox. And the magazines. Put the shotgun near the Coleman stove, down by the propane bottle.

In Baja you fish; that's why it's there. You don't shoot; guns are illegal everywhere in Baja except in Tijuana and then only at night in the downtown section. Everywhere else you gotta use a machete. But a machete or even a pistol is no good against flies, least ways not against Baja flies. Oh, I used to use a pistol on them; most guys start out with a pistol. But if you don't hit them suckers square you won't kill them. And a wounded fly will get madder than hell. So use a shotgun. I know; it's not a sure-thing either, but it will knock them down, give you a chance to go after it with your machete. Once you got the wings off them suckers you can get in close, finish them off with your pistol.

It takes about thirty minutes to set up camp in Baja, unless you've got women along. It takes longer with women along; give yourself lots of time. Set up camp, take a stand, knock down the Boss Fly to let the others know you mean business, then go fishing.

Women always want you to bring a tent along. And extra clothes; stuff like that. Truth is, you don't need that much in Baja; the fish don't give a damn what you got on. But woman are handy things to have around, especially in Baja, what with all that gutting and cooking to do. So mebbe you'd better plan on a tent. And wearing clothes.

If you've got a VW bus you can get one of those nifty little tents that hooks on to the spray rails, sets up quick as bunny, lets you get the boat in the water that much sooner. But they're hard to find; you might have to make one.

Here in southern California they've got these fabric supermarkets, big as a football field; sells nothing but fabric. Sailcloth. Upholstery stuff. Foam. Dacron for airplane wings; every sort of fabric you can think of and all the gee-gaws to go with it. Go down there and get you a buncha' tent-fabric, take it to an upholstery shop. Or a sail loft. Hell, mebbe they even got tent shops; check the yellow pages. The fabric will cost more than the sewing and he'll need a pattern. I'll leave the pattern up to you; mebbe you could ask a woman, they mess with patterns. If your wife is handy that way, mebbe you could just take the tent fabric along the next time you go to Baja; give her something to do while you're out fishing; let her run up her own tent.

-Bob

The Glowing Letter

I recently received an e-mail containing such glowing words of praise I could not answer it immediately. The writer was a woman, obviously perceptive, no doubt beautiful, young, wealthy and well educated. She had discovered the file of my articles maintained by Richard Kurtz and wrote to praise my wit, wisdom and tenacity in extravagant, but wholly justified, terms. In her eyes I was a cross between Albert Schwitzer, Aristocles and Wrong Way Corrigan, with a dash of Hercules thrown in. The outrageously complimentary letter had me strutting about the shop, shaking back my mane of golden curls with various body parts puffed up, jutted out and generally getting in the way of things.

I’m planning to make the run to Inuvik with the other crazies but recently discovered the astronomical price of gasoline as you climb toward the top of the planet. I’m financing the trip from my mad-money budget and the thought of paying nearly four bucks a gallon for fuel had me sweating bullets as I tried to figure some way around it. The Glowing Letter helped. I applied my wit, wisdom and tenacity to the problem and came up with a design for a pair of saddle tanks I could strap under my 1965 bus that would allow me to travel a thousand miles without refueling, the idea being to do so with a load of low-cost fuel.

I didn’t need 155 pounds of steel for the tanks, which should only weigh about forty pounds each, but when you buy scrap steel you’ve got to take what you can get. Forty-one bucks at two-bits a pound.

Sixteen gauge hotrolled steel sheet is tricky stuff to handle on a windy day and getting it into the roof rack was a real chore. Then I thought of the young woman’s letter and the bit about Hercules. I tossed the steel onto the rack and drove outta there.

When you make stuff out of sheet steel the whole secret is in the design of the welded joints. Being fuel tanks, the design was even more critical. Accordingly, my design incorporated a number of joggles and offsets and overlaps and baffles, all held to very close tolerances.

I didn’t have the shear or the brake or the press needed to make such artistic shapes and none of the local shops were willing to tackle the job, saying my tolerances were too tight and the whole thing overly complex. About the fifth time I heard that I started to get discouraged but I remembered The Glowing Letter and pressed on.

I finally found a shop to shape the steel. They immediately knew what I was trying to do and praised my engineering genius as they stood around watching me hump the steel off the roof rack. (Their insurance didn’t cover manhandling steel.) But once I got the material onto their fork-lift, they took over. Beautiful shop. Their last contract had been some hush-hush stuff for NASA. Unfortunately, their shop rates were still in orbit but since they were the only people who appreciated my design and understood what I wanted, I went ahead and pony’d up the bucks.

That was just the start of it. Having procured and transported the steel, and having had it sheared and folded and joggled and offset, I then had to lug it all home, make up a couple of jigs and get busy with the welding, which was pretty tricky in itself, since 16 ga. likes to warp from the heat. But I kept thinking of The Glowing Letter and finally figured out the proper gaps and angles so the seams drew themselves into perfect alignment as the welding progressed.

Of course, the tanks leaked. I marked the leaks with crayon, ground down the welds, did it over. And over.

After only thirty or forty hours of welding, I had my tanks. Beautiful things and no leaks at all. But testing them for leaks had left a haze of rust on the inside. I had to buy four gallons of sulfuric acid and fill the tanks with water and add the acid and seal them up and roll them over and over and over as the acid etched the interior of the tanks.

It was messy work, and risky, too. I got some of the acid on my boots and ruined them. Perfectly good boots, less than twenty years old and just getting broke in good. Then I thought of the young woman. I wondered if she had large breasts. I decided she probably did. I made a note to buy some new boots, perhaps something a bit more elegant than my sturdy boon-dockers.

Neutralizing the etchant came next, after a half-hour of running-water rinse. To keep the etched metal from rusting, I mixed soluble oil with the neutralizer. When I drained the neutralizing solution the soluble oil clung to the metal. I mixed up two gallons of sloshing compound then discovered I needed a couple of gallons of solvent to strip off the soluble oil before pouring in the sloshing compound that would seal the interior surface of the fuel tanks.

I haven’t mounted them yet. There’s still some tricky bits with the vent lines and the filler neck and the plumbing to the electric transfer pump, for which I’ll need to design a fail-safe circuit so it can’t over-fill the regular fuel tank. But that will have to wait until my budget recovers.

Last night I was going over the bale of notes and receipts amassed while working on the tanks. The numbers seemed kinda high. Depressingly high. I pushed them back into the file and checked the e-mail. There was another message from the young lady. I still hadn’t gotten around to answering her first message and this one was even more complimentary. I read it, all wrapped up in a warm fuzzy glow.

She also mentioned that some blue stuff was dripping from her engine that had her husband totally baffled and which the Volkswagen dealer would only look at for an incredible sum of money.

Blue stuff? Husband? MONEY?

Faintly, far in the distance, I heard the sound of laughter. I snatched up the bundle of fuel-tank notes and ran the figures again. I’d spent over three hundred dollars to save forty bucks. So much for wit and wisdom.

I re-read the woman’s first message. My long blond surfer-god hair vanished, leaving me as bald as before. I read the second message again. By the time I finished, my Herculean physique was hanging over my belt. I fired off a snarling note telling the woman to stuff a sock in it, the only Volkswagen’s I knew anything about were air-cooleds. And I obviously still have a lot to learn.

-Bob Hoover (1995)

Nude Riveting

Don't.

Yeah, it's hot. If you're like me, when it gets hot you take off your clothes. Mebbe not all of them but some. Okay, that's better. Couple of fans, canvas water bag hanging there in the breeze. I'm chug-gluging about a quart an hour and haven't taken a piss since last Tuesday.

Temperature in the shop pushes past the century mark and even a cotton apron and pair of shorts is too much. The humidity is about 80% and despite the fans going full blast everything I'm wearing is soaked with sweat, my feet squishing in my boots. Heat prostration is a definite possibility and my wife is visiting the grandkids. If I go down, I'm gonna die. Time for a break.

Cool shower helps. Refill the water bag, find a dry apron, transfer my tools and stand there looking at those boots, barely twenty years old and just getting broke in good. Steel-toed boots are part of the Standard Uniform, a habit of safety rewarded by having a full set of fingers and toes, despite having worked with sheetmetal for fifty years. Which I'm not, today. Today I'm riveting. Hand-setting AD3's to secure two little pieces of metal together, ten lefties and ten righties. Then flip them over and install a third piece so as to form a double-wide flange. I've made a pair of jigs to hold the parts for drilling. Drill, cleco, take them apart, deburr, move over to the vise supporting a hand-set. Form the shop-heads with a few well-placed blows from a skinny riveting hammer. Bench-work; no need for steel toes. I find a pair of flip-flops and shuffle out to the shop, just me, the water-bag and a shop apron. Cool.

I finish the lefties, having to re-do only one rivet, and start on the righties. It's about 2 in the afternoon. I'm wearing a headband that's already soaked through, wrist bands to keep the sweat from running down my arms, I've soaked my hands in Machinist's soap and I'm still sweating like a bitch. About then the UPS truck comes roaring up the front drive.

We live on a hill with a nice view of Catalina Island, when the weather is clear. Bought the place in '65, back when poor people could afford to buy a home. Our front drive is something of an obstacle course, narrow, steep and twisty; more than three hundred feet from the mailbox to our gate, guarded by a discrete sign: 'Private Drive. Trespassers will be physically abused by the gardener.' (Doesn't do much good.) We also have a straight, gently sloping back drive, suitable for everything from a transit-mix to a baby stroller. Or a UPS truck, since it can roll right up to the back door of the shop. The fact this one was roaring up the front drive said it was a new driver, so I went out to show him how to find the back drive which will save him a quarter mile and having to turn around.

I didn't know UPS had girl-drivers. Pretty young thing in shorts. Muscular legs. Surfer shoulders. Blonde hair in a pony-tail. Just filling in, she explains. Regular driver will be on tomorrow and thanks me for telling her about the short-cut out the back drive.

Couple of little packages and one big one. She wants to help me carry it but I am craftily keeping my best apron forward, shuffling sideways to lean the big package against the open gate, telling her it will be fine right there as I back away, Buns of Steel artfully concealed.

She climbs back in the truck, does her paperwork, gives me a smile and a little wave. "I like your outfit," she sez as she fires up the engine and roars off up the back drive. My artful dodging has put me in front of the big plate glass window that gives us such a nice view of Catalina. It also makes a pretty good mirror for someone sitting high up in a UPS truck.

Going back to the shop, it was 95 in the shade. I'm almost afraid to look at the thermometer over behind the milling machine but finally do: 108. I finished the ten righties about the same time I emptied the waterbag. I've guzzled two gallons of water and haven't pee'd since Jonah was a Seaman Deuce. It was about three-thirty and the thermometer in the breezeway had inched up to 97, a nice warm day for coastal California. I decided I'd done enough work and took another shower. Fixed myself a drink, smoked a pipe and sat down to write this, after putting on a pair of powder blue boxers. Nude riveting is bad enough; heaven only knows what naked typing might lead to.

-R.S.Hoover

Neighbors

Since Old Man Foster died back in ‘66 the place next door has fallen on hard times. His son came over from Borrego and sold off about half the acreage and moved into the house but he was a barber and we already had two in town and it’s not that big a town, or at least it wasn’t back then. He finally had to sell out and move. I never got to know him. They was only here a couple of years and I was in the Navy then and it didn’t help that I sported a beard, then and now. Barbers have a natural dislike for beards.

After that, the Foster place really went to hell, first bought by a bunch of hippies who were going to live off the land, except none of them knew a thing about farming nor much about work, spending most of their time talking about things they didn’t understand which was just about everything, and smoking funny-smelling cigarettes.

They lasted about two hungry years, the last one living mostly out of our garden.

Then there was the rock group, flush with cash and eager for a place in the country where they could play loud music day and night. It took about two years to sue them into silence.

Three times. The third time the judge slapped them with a fine so big they decided it was time for another World Tour and left one night without even saying good-bye. Or locking the doors. Or paying the fine.

Our next new batch of neighbors were quiet as the grave. Sorta stand-offish. Lots a coming and going, always at night. Lotsa UPS deliveries of chemicals and laboratory apparatus. Then the ether exploded and put their speed-cooking chemist in the hospital and didn’t do the house much good either. Me and the other neighbors put out the fire; we’re in the country and it was all volunteer back then. Don’t know what happened to the owners. They dumped their buddy at the door of the Emergency Room and kept right on going.

After that the place stood vacant for a couple of years, slowly going to ruin.

It got broke into by wetbacks who let their cook-fire get away from them and burnt off the west end of the back porch before we could get it out. They was cooking up one of the neighbor's prize Nubian goats. We’re all afraid of fire up here on the hill, what with no water to speak of the closest help some distance away. After the second fire we started taking turns checking on the place at night, chasing away the lovers and the wetbacks and the what-nots.

That’s why I throwed down on the new owners with a shotgun, I thought they was burglars or Messicans or some damn thing. It was only loaded with bird-shot so I snuck up good and close before I announced myself. He just about had a heart attack and she peed all down her leg when I shouted “Hands up, you mother lovers!”

Strange car, middle of the night. It seemed. the thing to do. Except I didn’t say lovers. But they got my drift. The For Sale sign went up about six months later, right after the coyotes chased their cat up a tree and ate it. City cats never believe how well a coyote can climb.

The School Teacher Family was nice enough. Man and his wife, both teachers, one little boy about six. They wanted to get to know us and we was willing but the spiders got in the way.

I’m no naturalist but I’m naturally curious and we got some really strange spiders up here on the hill. There’s a big green one with brown spots that makes these beautiful webs, some as big as a bed sheet, nets her dinner then eats it along with the web... then spins herself a new one. There’s another spider looks pretty much the same except she’s mostly brown with green spots, makes a web about the same size. But damn if she don’t patch her web instead of eating it. No kidding. She nets her dinner, wraps it up, hauls it off, then comes back and patches the hole in the web. Damnedest thing I ever saw.

That got me curious as to which is the better strategy, a new web or a patched one, so I started watching those guys real close. The spiders hide-out during the day but you can tell one web from the other because the Patcher always has an odd number of radials in her web while the Eater’s web has an even number of radials.

Each time I’d find a new web I’d figure out who it belonged to, measure the web then come back after dark and measure the spider, keeping track of which kind grew the fastest.

I was hunkered down in the weeds counting the radials of a new spider web I’d discovered when Mrs. Teacher and the boy comes down the drive. I was keeping track of the radials using a mechanical pencil as a pointer, counting my way around the clock of the web as they drove by. Real slow. Heads turning. I gave them a friendly wave and a nod but kept on counting. Some of them webs have nearly a hundred radials and you’d be there all day if you lost track.

The Teachers put up the For Sale at the end of the school year but it wasn’t until they’d gone that we learned they hadn’t seen the web, couldn’t see it from their drive. But they had a nice view of me taking a crap in the bushes while conducting an invisible orchestra, or at least that’s what they told the neighbors. And that I was a Peeping Tom, creeping around at night with a flashlight.

Funny thing is, the other neighbors never doubted them for a minute, not since I clipped the top of the eucalyptus doing a slow-roll over the house in a biplane a couple of years before.

The next batch of neighbors were into horticulture in a big way, growing America’s favorite herb on the back of their newly acquired property, or trying to. I had to show them how to break down ‘dobe soil with acid, helped them get the mulch just right. They lasted about two years. Four crops. Number Three was some primo shit. Or so I heard. Then came The Raid, with helicopters and SWAT teams and insane German dogs and more Deputy Sheriffs than a John Wayne movie.

So what’s this got to do with Volkswagens? Well, it’s like this... We got some more new neighbors, haven’t met them yet but we sent them a Bread & Butter note like we always do, welcoming them and inviting them over for cocktails some evening; their option.

Gave them our private phone number in case of trouble; call the Sheriff, they don’t hardly bother unless there’s shooting involved. But one of the talkative neighbors had already been there, giving them the history of the place and of their ‘strange’ neighbor with the airplane in the yard and all the antennas on the roof. We weren’t expecting to hear from them any time soon.

So I’m laying under this Karmann Ghia that has a bad CV. Got its ass hiked up on jack stands and my legs are sticking out from under. I’ve got the joints all cleaned and go to mark them and I can’t find my white stencil pencil, which is what I use for marking. Snuck in the house and borrow a bottle of my daughter’s nail polish and used that. Neat little ‘L’ on the left axle, little ‘R’ on the right, with perfectly painted little arrows and alignment marks.

It’s not easy, using nail polish laying on your back, holding the bottle in one hand, brush in the other and trying to keep things neat. Sure enough, I got a piece of black gunk on the brush and can’t get it off. Can’t put it back in the bottle or my daughter would kill me. Shuffle out and get all greasy in the process; I’m not using the creeper. Sit down on a sawhorse and try to clean the brush. Bottle’s in my left hand, brush in my right, big greasy thumb right there when I’m looking for something to sorta skim the brush on. Used my thumb nail.

Nail Sticks ‘Pearlescent.’ Real pretty, sorta pearly white. Makes a good marker for CV joints. And it went on my thumbnail neat as anything, nice smooth coat.

I had to just about paint my whole thumbnail to get the black booger off the brush but I finally got it. Looked up and there’s the new neighbor, jaw hanging down to here, eyes sticking out like a couple of boiled eggs.

He didn’t say nothing but you could tell what the damn fool was thinking. So I fanned-out my fingers like a girl, blew gently on the thumbnail and put on a second coat.

At supper my wife asks: “What’s that all over your thumbnail?”

“Met the new neighbor today.”

“Oh gawd,” she sez real slow. “Not again.”

-Copyright 1995 -Robert S. Hoover-

Madam Meeyamo

I’m not allowed to go to the grocery store by myself. It’s because I get these ideas, like the last time my wife sent me to the store for a loaf of bread.

Have you seen what they want for bread nowadays?

I came home with a hundred pounds of flour and this really neat idea for saving money. When I explained my really neat idea my wife said some rude things, including where I could stick my hundred pounds of flour.

Sometimes my wife or daughter will take me to the store but it’s only to push the cart and I have to promise not to read the labels. Some foods got the same chemicals I use in the shop for cleaning parts but it’s considered bad form to read the labels out loud in the store and especially tacky to laugh at what’s in other people’s shopping carts. So mostly, I don’t shop; it had been a couple of years since I’d been to the store.

But this was an Emergency. Wife called, got me out of the shop, told me to run down to the store and pick up something. So I did.

The store had changed a lot since I’d been there last. They’ve got a big new deli over along one wall and even a little restaurant in the back. And a bank, right up front by the registers. Seriously. A one-man bank, right there inside the grocery store. Next to the florist stand and dry cleaners, beside the Madam Meeyamo Know’s-All Psychic booth.

I wandered around for a while looking at things. A lady back near the meat department offered me some barbequed chocolate flavored tofu. Just across the aisle another lady was passing out samples of Chinese microwave pizza on a stick. They was doing a brisk business, yelling out how pizza on a stick wouldn’t rot your gums like that tofu stuff. The tofu lady fired right back, saying her Japanese tofu flavored with Mexican chocolate was one hundred percent American, unlike that Chinese kack on a stick that was guaranteed to cause constipation.

Truth is, both tasted a bit like cardboard.

What with all the wandering around and reading the labels, damn if I didn’t forget what it was I came for. I tried to remember but all I could think about was the IRS conversion I was working on when the phone rang. I reached for my cell phone and found I’d left it in my shop coat, along with my wife’s phone number which is programmed into the thing. I’d have to go back to the house just to call her. I plodded toward the door feeling pretty stupid.

It was a lot harder to get out of the store than it was to get in. There was a press of people lined up to use the bank. Turns out, a one-man bank, or one-woman in this case, isn’t real handy when a hundred people want to use it at the same time. Come to think of it, regular banks don’t do much better.

I worked my way around the crowd, trying to get out of the store. When I came up against the Madam Meeyamo Know’s-All Psychic booth I happened to catch Madam Meeyamo’s eye. She was an attractive woman in her middle thirties wearing a business suit. I wondered if her name was really Meeyamo.

“Actually, it’s Helen Cates,” she said. “The Madam Meeyamo shtick is a franchise.”

I stood there gawking at her. I hadn’t said a word. I wondered if she’d read my mind.

“Of course I did,” she said with an exasperated smile. “I’m a board-certified psychic and I’ll help you with that thing you’ve forgotten just as soon as I take care of this lady.”

Except there wasn’t any lady. And then there was. She came huffing out of an aisle with a frantic look on her face. “I forgot. . .”

“I know,” Madam Meeyamo said soothingly. “That’s why I’m here.”

“It’s for my niece’s birthday party. . .”

“Is that Ellen’s daughter?”

“No, my brother Bill . . .”

“Karen or Halsie?”

“Oh... ah, Karen, the young one.”

Madam Meeyamo nodded her head, wrinkled her brow and stared intently at the woman who waited expectantly. “I see . . . pink! And a . . . cake?”

“The candles! Of course! I need pink candles for the birthday cake. Oh, thank you!” The woman plunged back into the depths of the store. I stared at Madam Meeyamo and discovered my hair really can stand on end if it wants too.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” she smiled. “Everyone forgets things now and then.” She got that intent look on her face, staring at me like a snake after a bird. “I see . . . thirty-something. Oil? Thirty weight oil!”

“Uh, no, that’s for my bus. I was thinking of picking up an extra case, seeing as I was in town. My wife sent me to pick up . . . something.”

Madam Meeyamo gave me that stare again, her eyes all squinched up. “Rubber pucks? I don’t think we carry rubber pucks.”

“Um, ah, that’s for the suspension I’m rebuilding. Sorry.”

I started to explain that I was a Volkswagen mechanic but she cut me off, patting her brow with a hanky. “You’ve got to work with me here, Robert.”

“Most folks . . .”

“. . .call you Bob. I know. But it reminds you of your Uncle Bob who was an alcoholic and you’ve never really liked the name. Okay? Now try thinking about what your wife wanted you to get.”

I tried. I really did.

“Karmann Ghia? Is that some kind of pasta?” She was starting to get red in the face and a tendril of hair had come adrift.

“It’s my wife’s car,” I said, ashamed at not being able to help her out.

“I’m sensing some hostility here, Robert.” She tucked the strand of hair into place. “Maybe you should call your wife, ask her what it was she wanted you to get.”

I nodded, began edging toward the door.

“The phones are over there,” she nodded toward the deli.

“Yeah, but her number is at the house . . . “

She nailed me with those eyes of hers. “552-1381. And there’s a quarter in your left front pocket.”

“Paper cups,” my wife said over the phone. “Two dozen paper cups. It’s for the punch.”

As soon as she said it, I remembered. They were having some kind of a party at her office that afternoon. So I bought her some cups, dropped them by her office and headed home.

Back at the shop I got this Neat Idea, a kind of Psychic Hotline for Volkswagens, some sort of computerized list where folks could dial in, describe a problem and be told how to fix it. But the more I thought about it the more I realized it would never work. Nobody believes in that psychic stuff.

-Bob Hoover