Sidebar 1: Gojira (Almost) Goes to the Air Show

During the time when I had Gojira the pickup, Zoner's parents had moved to Florida and were getting ready to sell the house in upstate New York where he grew up. One day he suggested that, since they still had the house, we should go to his old hometown after work on a particular Friday, crash at the empty house, go to an air show being held at the airport in his hometown on Saturday, and then head back to Worcester. Since I had the truck and, if memory serves, he still had the Daytona at the time, we could take it and bring back some of his things from the house while we were at it.

That sounded like a plan to me, so we headed out after work and got there in the evening. I don't remember exactly why—probably we just sat up all night bullshitting like usual, plus loading some furniture into the truck and stuff—but I didn't get much sleep and was in Zombie Mode in the morning. Zoner was going to drive anyway, because he knew how to get to the airport and I didn't, but he wasn't well-versed in Gojira's ancient eccentricities and couldn't get it to start.

I tried to explain the procedure, but you know how it is with these things—you just know how to do it, having figured it out over however many months, and it's not really something you can explain, especially if it's eight-thirty in the morning and you're Zombie Boy. So I'm over there trying to tell him this weird thing you have to do with the gas pedal—not pump it, but hold it about halfway down until it starts to catch, and then floor it until it's going—and he's getting confused by my crappy explanation and does pump it until I yell at him to stop, at which point he floors it at the wrong point in the cycle—

—you know how '80s hair metal bands liked to do that thing where big sheets of fire would shoot up all along the front of the stage? Picture something like a scale model of that, except instead of the front of a stage, it's happening all around the edges of the hood of an old Chevy pickup. It made this incredible sort of BLAM noise and shot a perfect rectangle of orange flame about a foot high all the way around.

Following this, Gojira would respond to no provocation. After fooling around with it for a few minutes with no success, we gave up and walked to the air show, figuring that there was no point in worrying about it now and we'd deal with the problem of getting back to Worcester later.

It was a hot day in the middle of summer, and although Zoner's old house was literally abutting the airport perimeter fence, it was at pretty much exactly the point farthest from the actual gate. We had to walk all the way around the airport (or, well, halfway around—you know what I mean), which, once we left the leafy suburban street where the house was, mostly involved trudging along the kind of roads that are lined with muffler shops and chain restaurants, with no shade or welcoming street furniture of any kind. Some stretches didn't even have sidewalks.

But we made it to the air show, and had a nice time, and ate a lot of lemon-flavored Italian ice. Afterward, we were about halfway back to the house, deep in the blazing sun-baked concrete heart heart of the muffler shops district, when the same thing dawned on both of us at about the same moment.

"I've stopped sweating," Zoner observed matter-of-factly. "That's probably bad."

We ducked into the nearest restaurant, a Friendly's (remember those, Northeasterners? I think they're gone now, I haven't seen one in many years), ordered a pitcher of Coke apiece, and had drunk them before the waitress came back to find out if we wanted anything else. In my memory, we didn't even use the glasses, although I assume we really did. I generally prefer Pepsi, but I'm not militant about it, and I have to say that particular pitcher of Coca-Cola was the finest-tasting soft drink I have ever consumed.

When we did finally trudge back into the driveway, another pitcher of Coke and a couple of burgers later, we opened the pickup's hood to survey the damage. The grey pad on the inside of the hood had a lovely sunburst pattern of soot on it, radiating out from a circle that described the edges of the air cleaner on top of the engine. The filter inside that air cleaner was protruding from the mesh sides in shreds (how it didn't catch fire I couldn't tell you). When I unscrewed the wing nut on the cover and took the breather assembly off, I found that the carburetor underneath was sparkling clean, as if someone had come along while we were away and installed a brand new one. Nothing seemed to be broken, so I put the breather back together (sans the blown-up filter ring), then tried to start the truck, not thinking much of my chances.

It started right up, better than it had since I'd owned it, and ran perfectly. We swung by an auto parts place and picked up a new air filter, then headed home, a couple hundred completely uneventful miles. I never had any trouble starting that truck again.

Sidebar 2: Mind the Gap

Unusually for one of these incidents, if I felt like it, I could do a little research and tell you the exact date of the other thing I remembered. It was the Monday after Anime Expo '97. I know this because that was the year Zoner and I drove down to LA from the Bay Area, where we both lived at the time, rather than flying like we'd done the year before. We took the Neon, because we figured the gas required to make the trip in Zoner's Jeep Cherokee would bankrupt a sultan, and if memory serves, the deal was that I'd drive down and he'd drive back.

AX97 was held at the LAX Hilton, a hotel whose only distinctive feature as a convention location was that it was right next door to a strip club, to which the Japanese guests of honor had a habit of disappearing, and a Carl's Jr., which was basically the only place to eat within walking distance. Still, a fun time was had by all, and on Monday morning we packed up our things and climbed aboard. This was when I made the amusing discover that it is actually, physically possible for a man who stands 6'6" to drive a first-generation Dodge Neon, something that I think had not been scientifically proven before that point.

We were still within sight of the hotel, making our way down whatever that street it's on is called toward the freeway, when Zoner noticed a restaurant other than Carl's Jr. off on the left and suggested we get an early lunch there before hitting the road. I said sure, that sounded fine—and he hung an immediate left, missing the actual curb cut for the restaurant's driveway entirely, and mounted the curb at something approaching full surface-street speed. The sidewall of the driver's side front tire immediately blew out, opening a fist-sized hole that let out all the air instantly and allowed for no possibility of repair.

Exactly why he did that is still a point of contention between us. I believe that he had forgotten he wasn't driving his Jeep and tried to drive over the curb on purpose, because he was always taking shortcuts of that kind with the Jeep. He insists he just didn't see that he'd missed the driveway until it was too late.

Either way, we were now stranded at... I don't even remember what kind of restaurant it was. A Jack in the Box or something equally uninspiring, most likely, given that we were within a mile of LAX. Luckily, there happened to be a service station right next door to said restaurant, so we took off the wheel and Zoner rolled it over there to see what could be done. I wasn't expecting much, since I knew what an odd tire size the car had by then and it was quite a small shop, but to my surprise, he came back within half an hour with a decent-looking tire of the correct size on the wheel. It didn't match the others, but it was enough to get us home. Why they happened to have one of those just lying around at a little gas station garage in the sprawl around LAX, I have no idea.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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