Never the Same IC#20 Deadlines VS Diversions

Kirk had better get his head out of his ----because the deadline for the racing season loomed.

Cue: “The Circle Game” https://youtu.be/V9VoLCO-d6U

 

No doubt Kirk could have been classified as a lone wolf, albeit a quiet timid lone wolf at that because that’s how he grew up, alone and on his own. His family was always around but there wasn’t all that much interaction, so Kirk could do as he please. He wasn’t all that adventurous and outgoing, so he didn’t get into trouble�"much. Maybe that’s why he bought that motorcycle when he had the money, so he could go out on the road all by himself especially seeing that none of his friends had motorcycles. So, there he was at this point�"a solitary, unsure of himself, aimless 20-year-old.

We all get that Kirk loved riding his motorcycle. He loved his shiny red two-wheeled vehicle. He loved the sound of the engine as he went through the gears, the rush he’d get with the acceleration, and the feel of the wind on his face and body. If he didn’t have to pick up and haul anything significant, he’d ride his motorcycle. He’d ride it if he went to Farrah’s, that is, if they weren’t going out anywhere because, remember, her mother wouldn’t let her ride on the back with him. Safety wise, back then, motorcyclists weren’t required to wear helmets, even though Kirk did wear one, and they weren’t required to ride with headlights on at all times, but of course, duh, lights were necessary at night.

There’d Kirk be tearing down a pitch-black back road in the dark of night, after sundown, after hours, later on in the dark. (Sorry, the setting got away from me there.) The one headlight beaming a short distance out ahead that Kirk would cover in a split second. Anyway, the point being, well, for some reason Kirk’s motorcycle would blow out headlamp bulbs especially when he revved the engine for extended periods of time. This was a particularly bad situation when he’d be ripping off to somewhere going 80 MPH plus and suddenly, abruptly the headlight would go out. No warning, no flicker, no dimming, the road would just go black. What a thrill! Kirk never ran off the road and crashed, but he learned to be prepared for sudden blackness, but nevertheless, those times of sudden blackout always gave Kirk a chilly thrill.

A lot of days after work, Kirk would cruise over and spend a lot of time with fair Farrah. Kirk liked Farrah. No doubt calm, emotionally balanced Farrah proved a steady irrefutable positive influence on Kirk’s spiritual and morality health. She wasn’t the type of girl who’d artificially boost a boy’s ego with undeserved compliments of wonder and worth, but she was a stable effectual girl that brought out a Kirk who felt comfortable and warm inside. That’s what he needed most of the time, and when he gazed into her beautiful green eyes and touched her silky red hair, Kirk could melt with her presence not to mention those soft warm velvety lips that she freely shared in a most delightful manner.

Even though Kirk perpetually pined for his first steady girl, Dee, Farrah proved to be a longstanding steady girlfriend for him this being the second time around for them. Red-headed Farrah was a pretty, stately young woman of gentle demeanor and mild words. They’d spend a lot of quiet time together both most happy in each other’s company. As told earlier in the episodes about Kirk’s love life, Farrah was undoubtedly a keeper, a girl that a boy could settle down and live contentedly with for the rest of his life. But we all know Kirk had emotional issues namely his memories of how blissful he had felt with young Dee. Her memory was ever present in Kirk’s mind disrupting his relationships with all the girls that followed her… 

Cue: “Only You” https://youtu.be/D7OVZ-CgMwM

***

Work remained uninspiring and not engaging for Kirk. He didn’t see much future in continuing in that mechanic’s occupation, but there he was. He knew most of the master mechanics had bad knees and backs, scarred knuckles, and usually bad lungs from smoking. Kirk tried smoking because he thought that was what he needed to do as a mechanic. I guess breathing in exhaust and breathing in cigarette smoke went hand in hand. Propitiously for Kirk, he thought smoking little cigars might be cool so that’s what he smoked, though not for long because they smelled and tasted stinky, bitter awful. He smoked for two months and quit without another puff. Getting back to Kirk’s work, there were some interesting points at work that Kirk actually enjoyed.

Cop car chases in movies are cool to say the least. Take the movie “The Blues Brothers.” Jake and Elwood Blues had that old cop car that they more or less outran a multitude of movie cop cars. Chaos and insanity reigned in that epic car chase. As Elwood told his brother, their ex-cop car had “a cop motor, cop transmission, cop suspension, cop tires.” After jumping over the drawbridge Jake had to agree that the car had “pretty good pickup.” No doubt. Nonetheless, Kirk longed to hear that 383 Magnum four-barrel carburetor deep roar as it sucked gasoline with a foot to the floor in a new cop car.

Kirk liked prepping the new cars for cop service, but he disliked the fact that he couldn’t test drive them. Rules are rules about mechanics taking joy rides in cop cars. That didn’t mean Kirk couldn’t turn on all the flashing lights, blast the siren to scare everyone in the building out of their wits, and shouting for everyone to lean “up against the wall mo�"fo!” across the PA. Got to test those things out, you know? Big fun. Still, still and all, Kirk didn’t have much fun at work and flat out didn’t like his menial work that didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

After dreaming about cars his whole early life, driving and working on field cars, and so on, he decided in his adult life that being a mechanic wasn’t really for him. Lots of skinned knuckles, dirt in the eyes, bashed elbows, and his dislike of eternally greasy hands, Kirk thought better of working a mechanic, but there he was. The money was okay, more than he had made in his other so-called jobs to say the least.

Seeing Kirk’s job, besides new car prep, entailed warranty work on cars customers had complaints about. There were water leaks around doors and windows solved with shimming or replacing weather seals and engine leaks that were solved with a bit of bolt tightening or gasket replacement. Sometimes with some diagnosing he had to replace parts that were defective. There were gauges in dashboards and switches of all sorts that went bad. Mentioned before were the strange things that would roll into the shop for his perusal like a gallon of water inside a tire or a cup of water inside a taillight. Of course, there was that infamous water pond in the trunk that Kirk solved by bashing a hole right through the trunk floor and right into the gas tank. Ooops!

Well, luckily warranty paid for the damaged gas tank. So, in the matter of warranty parts that were replaced, they had to inspected by the factory rep that would swing by once in a while. Most of the time, he’d look at the part and spray some paint on it to mark it as defective. Then, they’d end up in the dumpster. After Kirk bought his van, the tire guy found a couple tires on a Challenger that wouldn’t hold air for anything. When doing the leak test, he found the wheels were defective, but being from a Challenger, they were the nice Rallye wheels. Upon inspection, the wheels just weren’t welded well between the two halves of wheel.

After a couple weeks, the inspector came and marked the wheels as “defective” with their destination a la dumpster. Kirk inquired about the wheels. The parts man shrugged and told him that after they hit the dumpster he didn’t care if someone dumpster dove. So of course, Kirk dove in the dumpster after work and retrieved the nearly pristine wheels. With a little welding and subsequent touch up with silver paint the wheels were perfect for Kirk’s van.

A few weeks later, surprising Kirk, he spotted an engine in a crate at the parts department. Certain the engine was destined for his stock car, he restrained himself from asking if it was for Chuck meaning the sponsorship engine for his car. After another week or so, one of the master mechanics pulled an engine out and wheeled the new engine to the other section of the shop for installation. Kirk’s heart fell. As the couple days passed, the engine that the new one replaced sat at the parts department because apparently it was a warranty replacement. Mike informed Kirk that the engine had less than a thousand miles on it and even though it had a coolant leak, Mike thought it wasn’t a big problem, maybe a head gasket. Perhaps, he added, it could become Kirk’s racing engine. Kirk’s heart beat a little harder again.

When the factory rep showed up, Kirk started theorizing on how he would get the heavy engine out of the dumpster because it sure wasn’t going to be the same as retrieving a couple of Rallye wheels out of the deep dumpster. So the factory rep did the usual paper work on the various warranty parts and marked them accordingly as “Defective.” He even had a larger stencil and spray painted “Defective” on the engine. Kirk rubbed his hands together in his mind.

Then the rep did something Kirk never saw him do before, he borrowed a sledgehammer, wailed back and slammed it into the side of the engine block. He hit it three more times before the head of the hammer went through the side of the block. Kirk’s hopes were as dashed completely as that engine block! Mike showed up soon afterward and looked as dismayed as Kirk over the smashed engine block. Kirk had to wonder a little later when the incident soaked in if there was perhaps some underhanded warranty fraud intended to get the engine for Chuck for free? Kirk would never know that for sure, but he painfully knew that he still needed an engine.

Kirk watched later as the parts department guys wheeled the nearly new engine out to the dumpster. Yeah, there were probably good parts on the engine, but without a good, new-ish block to build a complete engine from, what was the use?

 Kirk went back to work without thinking about racing around an oval track with his own race car. He sure wasn’t excited about the prospect, he just wasn’t enthused at all, so he went back to ignoring the race car sitting over at Mike’s. “Out of sight, out of mind,” so the saying goes. Kirk would have been juggling the many jobs that required his attention on the race car, but in typical Kirk manner, it was easier to ignore the deadlines and work on, or not work on what mattered to him most and that wasn’t the stock car. And so, for the time being, it was his project van.

Kirk had already stretched out the damage on the driver’s side front corner and replaced the bent door with the green junkyard acquired door. It seemed to operate well enough and luckily it came with intact glass and operating internal mechanism, so he was good to go there. However, the bottom fascia in front of the door where the impact had occurred was really crushed in along with a little additional damage incurred when Kirk stretched the van out with the chain. Normally, if a body man could, he’d hammer the damage out from the backside and underneath. In Kirk’s van, conversely, he couldn’t get behind the damage because of a frame crossmember that ran across the front of the van to which the bumper mounted.

In this case, using the knowledge from his vocational school body shop days, Kirk drilled a couple small holes in the center of the damage. Using a bit of Primitive Pete technique, because Kirk didn’t have many body tools, Kirk put in a screw in one hole and with a block of wood and a claw hammer, he pried. He pried carefully until the metal puckered out like a ripe pimple until the screw pulled out with a pop! Yeah, a gross allegory to say the least. Anyway, this wasn’t the most desired or fastest method, but Kirk had used it on his other borrowed/loaned cars that required body work and in the end the method more or less worked.

 By the time Kirk had about twenty holes in that small corner of the body, the sheet metal looked like a bumpy sieve. Kirk settled on it being good enough or at least as much as he could do using that method. Looking at the mess he made, he decided that he needed to cover that horrible handiwork up.

Quickly, he mixed up a big batch of Bondo Body Filler and slathered it all over those holes and bumps. It covered the holes and bumps up, but he realized that he was going to need a lot more Bondo to reach the original contour of the fascia. Waiting an hour or so between batches, Kirk put batch after batch on the fascia until he got close to the contour eyeballing the other corner for comparison. The one true body repair tool Kirk owned was a “Cheese grater.”

Like its name, the grater worked as its name implied except you moved the grater instead of the cheese, the cheese in this instance being the fresh Bondo. With vigorous strokes, the grated Bondo cheese squeezed through and out of the tool just like grated cheese for a pizza. This had to be done three more times after more Bondo was added to the low spots. Finally, Kirk reached an eyeballing “close enough for government work” level of completion. After that, came a tedious session of rough sanding with 50 grit sandpaper. I won’t bore you with the details, but to say the least lots of sandpaper in various grades and more layers of Bondo were required before the damage was repaired to Kirk’s satisfaction. Not a professional level job, but good enough for…well, primer and paint.      

Well, after a while Kirk started to feel guilty that he hadn’t been over to work on his stock car. He really didn’t feel like going over there because he knew that he would end up working on the car because it needed quite a bit work�"like an engine. After all, there was only three weeks to practice weekend where drivers could test their cars to iron out any bugs and perhaps get the cars’ handling figured out. Kirk had a minor adrenaline rush with the recollection.

One evening, being a bit bored and feeling really guilty, Kirk went to Mike’s garage. Something always was happening there and he found Mike busily welding on an old Dodge truck. It appeared it had a dump bed on it before Mike removed it. Now Mike had a pile of diamond plate and in the process of welding it up for a car hauling flatbed. Kirk experienced another shock when he realized that he had no way of hauling his car, that is if he’d ever get the car ready to race. What would he do about that?

He approached Mike shielding his eyes from the retinal burning flash of the welder and the fireworks of sparks.

“Hey Mike, so this is going to be your new car hauler?” Kirk said loudly over the buzzing, sizzling and popping of the welding.

Mike stopped and flipped his welding helmet up

“Hey Kirk! Oh yeah, she runs pretty good, but I got to finish up this bed, here.” Mike paused and took his helmet off and set it down. “Hey, we need to take a look in the garage.”

Kirk couldn’t see anything through the garage windows but at that moment he could smell fresh paint. Walking over to the people door, Mike opened it wide and flipped on the lights.

Kirk couldn’t believe his eyes!