Model cars

This is a picture of where I used to make my car model kits in the basement of the house on Knollwood Street. It's an amazing fraud of a picture for a number of reasons:

1.) it looks clean and orderly
2.) there are several completed car models on display on the shelf
3.) there's no big box of parts visible beside these shelves

(Also, the two trophies I won in competitions are nowhere to be found, but it could be that the picture was taken before that.)

Ever since I was old enough to apply glue to plastic, I was a model car kit guy. Mainly AMT because Revell and Monogram kits had far too many little parts to lose. I rarely read the directions, which is probably gender-related. I filed the little extra nibs of plastic off after I took the part off the 'tree' it came attached to. I usually painted the cars with Testors' PLA, sometimes in groovy metalflake finishes. I tried to learn how to 'wire' engines, using thread to give the look of cables running from the magneto to the headers, but it was a little hit-or-miss. I applied the decals to the doors and trunk lid. I admired my work briefly.

Then I would deconstruct the car.

Tires, wheels, axles, engines would all go in the box beside my work space, atop the family's retired ping-pong table (I honestly do not recall ever playing ping-pong in my house). When Toy Story came out, I could relate to some of Sid's mutant creations as I'd done similar things to my cars. Parts didn't have to match up: with an X-ACTO blade and some glue (and maybe a little elbow grease), I could make Chevy engines fit into Ford compartments. Give me a hand drill and I'll make the tiny shift lever pop through the console of an otherwise undisturbed interior. Mom gave me bits of fabric sometimes, and I'd try to glue upholstery onto the seats and floors, with varying results. Despite the photographic evidence to the contrary, the table was inevitably a big mess of parts and paint and glue.

Nothing ever stayed assembled or reassembled for very long. My big parts box turned into two big parts boxes. God only knows how much money my parents and I spent on kits, which used to be $2.49 each.

I said earlier that I'd won trophies for contests I'd entered. One was for First Place at a competition at Roses' at Thruway Shopping Center. The model car was a blue metalflake VW bus, wired engine, doors removed, kinda awesome in a dune-buggy sort of way.

That car stayed assembled until my mother knocked it off its shelf while dusting. It flew into pieces, and somehow I never had much urge to make another model car again.

I can't blame it all on Mom, though, since the Beatles had begun occupying most of the front half of my brain by then.

Tow

There once was a mid-level Rock Musician who had suffered all kinds of indignities and humiliations at the hands of the Music Industry. He had achieved what anyone unfamiliar with the business would assume was a plausible strata of success, although the Rock Musician saw it as eking out a living.

The Rock Musician had been party to one successful song of his own (partial) composition, the remuneration for which was copious at the beginning and marginal presently. It was a song you could hear while shopping for plywood at a big box hardware store, which he did once. He told the cashier that that was his song playing and that was why he could afford to buy all the supplies and lumber he had on his cart. The cashier was interested until his credit card purchase didn't get approved, then she and the manager were more interested in following that up.

He complained to anyone who'd slow down long enough to listen, and his tiresome tune began to take on an unpleasant modulation upward. When he would pick up the guitar, he couldn't get anything out of it but other people's songs. He couldn't think lyrically, just random staccato bursts of anger and resentment.

So when he decided he'd had enough fighting the good fight, that the inspiration was gone and the business was rotten (and knowing full well of his stipend), no one was particularly surprised.

His friends gave him wide berth to decide how he was going to inflict himself on them, now that he wasn't a bad-ass in a rock band anymore. It was a couple of peaceful weeks before anyone heard from him.

The Rock Musician had purchased a late model carrier truck from a friend of his father's who turned around a lot of fleet vehicles in the area. It was a high mileage Chevy with a 19 foot rollback . It was light green, and he'd had "Rock and Roll Wrecker Service" professionally painted on the doors. There was a CB radio and a cassette deck in the dash. The a/c blew cold in the hot summer afternoon, and the Rock Musician showed up sweating profusely after his first job.

He seemed tired from having been useful longer than he was accustomed to. The man whose damaged Mercedes he had just borne to the garage was alternately grateful and sobbing. The Rock Musician had dragged the hulk onto the rollback, screeching and scraping all the way up. Rain began to fall, just as the car was loaded and the owner and the Rock Musician got soaked; after he unloaded the Mercedes, he drove to his neighborhood local bar, where his friends admired his new vehicle and career.

Work went on steadily for him for a month. Lots of people need their cars towed, he determined. The lady and her four kids, stuck on the side of the interstate. The drunk woman whose husband had already been hauled off in a cruiser after their car went into a park lagoon at midnight. The teenage boy with his parents' crumpled Buick. Every day brought new and different people into the Rock Musician's life, people he might have sneered at from his van window once. He found himself listening more and talking less, even to his bar buddies. Friends noticed a new hush to his tone of voice. He talked of his day's work mostly. It was fairly mind-boggling for many, and some even began to think he had become somewhat less interesting.

One day, the Rock Musician answered a call to a bloody four-car pileup right past an outlying interstate exit he'd taken since he started driving. His vehicle was the first tow on the scene, and the paramedics hadn't even gotten all the victims from their wrecks, some aflame. He waited until the ambulances had wailed into the distance with the dead and dying, and he waited out the police investigators. He attached a late-model import sedan, with deflated and bloodied airbags draped over the broken windsheid, doors bifolded and scorched and the omnipresent scent of burnt fabric and flesh.

The drive to the garage was the longest, slowest trip he'd ever taken. It was all he could do to complete the paperwork.

When he left his local, loosened slightly but still aching, the Rock Musician drove home and pulled out his acoustic guitar, a pen and some paper. In about thirty minutes, he had written a song, words and music nearly complete as it tumbled out. It wasn't about the crash or the dead people, but the accident dislodged something in him, and he felt a familiar old compulsion and clarity to finish it.

He played it for himself again and again that night.

The next morning, the Rock Musician placed an online ad for the car carrier, cancelled his business phone line and booked two days of recording time at a friend's studio.

He was his old insufferable self again in no time.

The $100 Guitar Wall, third in a series

This is the four year old's funky little Tiger Electronics Power Tour guitar and amp which he got for Christmas.

It has a Gibson headstock and it looks like a miniature SG. But there are no strings, only touch pads. There are knobs that control various things like tone (Punk, Metal, Rock and, amazingly Indie) and Jam, Band, Learn and Speaker. "Learn" is interesting as the young would-be rocker has to follow the lights on the "fretboard" as they flash in time to "Smoke on the Water" or the song's count-off will start again, followed by a hearty chorus of boo's rising out of the amp. The whole thing is touch-sensitive, and there's some wicked divebomb sounds accessible, too. High impact plastic, as is the tee-tiny amp with color organ speakers (four three-inch woofers, imagine the bass response). Both, of course, go to eleven.

The functionality of this kit is not terribly versatile, but the whole outfit was about $45, thanks to Smart Wife's intrepid shopping talents (the real retail is closer to one hundred bucks). I'd say we've gotten that much out of it already. The four year old still probably favors the acoustic guitar, although he gives out some great 'guitar face' when he plays this one.