New Chances

Resurrection comes in many forms

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
11/12/06
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

I saw the 1972 AMC Pacer sitting in my driveway and wondered what the hell I had done to piss off Paulie Five Fingers this time. Something to do with his taste in cars, apparently. The 1972 Pacer was one butt-ugly car. It was gloomy, being mid November, but the silhouette of that particular model, a flying saucer right off a 1955 Amazing cover, was unmistakable.

The thing about Paulie is he’s got a bit of a passive-aggressive streak in him, and it manifests in an odd fashion. He’ll respond to a slight, real or imagined, with a series of lavish and ridiculous gifts that relate to the nature of the slight in some way. I once corrected his pronunciation of a word and two days later I opened my office to find a copy of the Standard Oxford English Language Dictionary sitting on my desk. Not the paperback you get at Thrifty’s for ten bucks – this was the big, 45 pound version, bound in the hides of virgin scholars and usually seen only in the English departments of major universities. I could open it to any page at random, point blindly, open my eyes and there would be a nine out of ten chance I had never seen that particular word before in my life, and wouldn’t again. I don’t want to guess what Paulie might have sent me had it turned out that his pronunciation wasn’t wrong, but merely an irregular regional dialect. Yes, I used the book to look it up. It seemed the safest course.

I often thought I should mention in passing to him that I thought the Lamborghini was a shit car because it was made by Italians. Having five or six of those in the driveway might cause my neighbors to rethink their opinion of my politics or the fact that my cat craps in their flowerbed. But Paulie’s no dummy, and if he saw through that, which he probably would, who knows what he would do. Send me a beat up old 1972 AMC Pacer, maybe?

I frowned, trying to force recollection. I was pretty sure Lamborghinis hadn’t come up in general conversation. Or even Bugattis. Had I mentioned Ferraris?

Proximity overcame gloom, and I could see that this particular Pacer was in mint condition. Green and yellow paint, bright chrome, new tires, spotless windows. I walked around the car, peering in, mouth agape in wonder. If all the parts were stock – and they looked to be so – I didn’t want to even begin to guess how much a collector would pay for this. Collectors sought scarcity and uniqueness, with little or no regard for taste.

The funny thing was that this wasn’t the first 1972 Pacer to haunt my driveway. Artie the Pearl bought one for about 500 times its actual value and managed to drive it about 25 miles before the engine, the last thing on that car that actually operated, finally blew. It might have been the ugliest, most useless car in the whole of North America, and of course Artie fell rapturously in love with it. He even gave it some silly name.

Priscilla. That was it. A mud-and-rust Pacer named Priscilla.

Of course, there was more to the story than that. Artie’s usual luck kicked in, and we found about eighty pounds of rare gold coins in the taillight area of Priscilla that led to each of us becoming fairly wealthy.

I essayed a yank on the door handle. It was unlocked. I peered in. You know that “new car smell”? They say it’s actually bad for you, volatiles sublimating off the new carpeting and seat fabric, and the glues used to hold them in place. But I savored it anyway, sharing a moment of glory this car hadn’t experienced in thirty four years. The car WAS new. New seats, new dashboard – I bet all the idiot lights worked – new steering wheel, gold and green paint with a blue-gray interior. It was, despite being an ugly model, a beautiful car. It was clean. Hell, it was immaculate. It was...

It was Priscilla.

I couldn’t be sure without comparing registration slips, of course, and I doubted that Artie ever had one when the car was his brief pride and joy two years ago. The guy who sold the car to him was a bit dodgy, to say the least of it.

“Good afternoon, Zepp.”

I was just figuring out that Artie the Pearl had to be around here someplace when he spoke from behind me. “Afternoon. Artie, is this Priscilla?”

“I’m pleased you remembered her name, Zepp. Yes, this is Priscilla. I’ve had some work done on her.”

“I see that. But why? This must have cost you a fortune.”

“I have a fortune. As forms of self-indulgence goes, it’s a harmless one. How many plasma televisions have you had?”

“Two, but I didn’t pay for the second one. Creeping Jimmy shot the first one, remember?”

“How could I forget. He was shooting at me at the time. But I always felt bad about leaving Priscilla abandoned the way I did.”

I suppressed a grin. The town police chief felt bad about it, too. Priscilla had been lurching along, farting great plumes of black smoke and dark orange flame out her tailpipe, and in her last mortal act on earth – or so I thought at the time – had sent an engine piston straight through the cowling. Artie had gotten out, looked at the hole, correctly surmised that sudden holes appearing in the engine area couldn’t be good news, and, being in a hurry to get to Tibet, had simply grabbed his backpack and thumbed a ride down to the Redding airport. Leaving the rusty corpse right where it died, at the main intersection of town. Fortunately, it was winter, so the police chief had a couple of weeks in which to figure out what to do with Priscilla, which is the amount of time he normally requires to make a minor decision. Rumor had it he had her towed down to Dunsmuir as a part of Dunsmuir’s urban renewal project, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

“That’s one expensive bit of anthropomorphizing, Artie. Did you really think that when you abandoned her, you hurt her feelings or something?”

Artie actually looked shifty. “Remember, Zepp, that it was this car that facilitated my book, and made us both wealthy.”

“And you wanted to, um, return the favor or something?”

“There needs to be a balance in all things.”

“Um.”

Artie gave me a look, and then apparently decided not to pursue it. “So. I visited to see how you liked last week’s election.”

“I feel like the country was rushing headlong toward the edge of a cliff, and while it’s too early to tell if we’re changing direction, we’ve at least slowed the rush to destruction.”

“That seems reasonable. What happens now? Will Congress impeach Bush? Will they pull the troops out of Iraq? Will they start undoing the damage?”

I gave Artie an openly bemused look. He usually doesn’t pay close attention to the process of politics. Perhaps the depredations of the Putsch junta had scared even him a bit.

“No, no, and yes. I don’t see impeachment as being a high priority. Remember, even if the House passes articles of impeachment, the Senate needs 60 votes to convict on each charge, and that’s just not going to happen. I would love to see the son of a bitch impeached and thrown in jail, but I’ll settle for him being a lame duck. Perhaps after he’s out of office we can bring war crimes charges against him. No, they won’t pull the troops right away. The Dems are split on Iraq, and the best I can hope for is a phased withdrawal over the next year. Really stupid move, since the lower the force strength, the greater the risk that some idiot will decide to strike a blow for Allah and get a lot of guys who just want to get the hell out of there killed.

“But yes, I do see them undoing a lot of the damage the Pubs have done. Pelosi has promised that in the first 100 hours of the next Congress’ session, there will be legislation introduced raising the minimum wage, fixing the huge holes in medicare, fixing the prescription drug problem, and investigating Iraq and the profiteering. Waxman is going to be in charge of investigating administration corruption, which ought to be hugely entertaining. Senate Majority Leader Reid has promised to bring Kyoto up before the Senate again.

“Speaking of Kyoto, Artie, are you aware that your shiny, clean new car is a gross polluter?”

“No it’s not. It has a hydrogen-burning fuel cell engine. Experimental. I get about 300 miles on a charge. It emits water vapor.”

I whistled. Artie put a lot more money into Priscilla than I thought. “Good man. I want to see that.

“Anyway, that’s what the Dems promise to do right off the bat. Get these up before Congress.”

“You don’t think that the Democrats are just corporate slaves selling us out the way the Republicans are?”

“Now is when we find that out, isn’t it? The Dems have been out of power since 1994, and back then, they were complacent and corrupt, although not nearly as bad as the Republicans got after just twelve years. Let’s watch ‘em like hawks, and report whenever they start screwing the pooch on us.”

“Well, if they aren’t just a different puppet attached to the same strings, how did they get in?”

“People are fed up, Artie. You have a system that is completely given over to money: big interests decide who the candidates will be simply by choosing who to fund in the primaries. They determine who will win through campaign donations. And then they have a system where the elected representatives spend most of their time begging for funds so they can be re-elected. They pushed through Diebold and other sleazy ways of miscounting votes, and they do what they can to dissuade people from voting. Did you know most democracies have a national holiday to facilitate voting, and that employers are required to give employees time off with pay so they can vote? Of course, they don’t let corporations control who gets to run, or how the votes get counted. Only America does.

“But despite all that, we saw a sea change. Even the teens, the dumbest and most apathetic voters in the country, turned out this time. The people wanted to get rid of the Republicans, with their fascistic, bullying, manipulative ways. They got tired of being called traitors for daring to question the most incompetent president in the country’s history, and they got tired of being told their freedom took second place to security. Above all, they got tired of watching their sons and daughters risk their lives so the Bushes and the Rockefellers and the Melon-Scaifes could get huge tax cuts and an extension of their power over the American people.

“Artie, I actually heard people talking about revolution. I didn’t hear anyone calling for a revolution; they were simply saying, ‘if this goes on, there’s going to be a revolution.’ That mood is still there, and the Democrats would be incredibly stupid to pretend that it will go away just because they control Congress.”

Artie pondered this for a few minutes. I knew he liked to take time to consider various facets of a given discourse, and leafed through my mail while he considered what I had said. Wind was gusting up, and it felt a bit warmer. Snow by nightfall, I figured.

“Zepp, I think that reflects my own thoughts fairly precisely. As you know, I believe that we are all headed for a higher dimension of consciousness, and I feel that this has been a crucial turning point towards the light. I would say that if the Democrats don’t turn things around, then the enlightened people of the united states will turn things themselves.” Artie grinned. “I can imagine how your friend Paulie Five Fingers might put it.”

That caught my attention. The idea of Artie trying to sound like Paulie, his polar opposite in so many ways, was an arresting one.

“Paulie would say, “Democrats, put up or shut up.”

I considered, and laughed. “Yeah, he would put it that way. Me, I would be a bit more forceful. I would say, ‘This is your last chance. Don’t blow it.”’