The Grubworm

I’ve written about my Aunt Kat on a few occasions over the years. She passed away a few years ago and I miss her terribly. My mom is the youngest of ten kids...my Aunt Kat was the next youngest and all my life, she lived no more than fifteen minutes away. She was a force to be reckoned with and was a jelly making, pie baking, gossiping her ass off vessel of love. She and my Uncle Jim only had one child, daughter Susie who’s about ten years older than me.

LFG has missed out on relationships with most of my mom's siblings...they've all gone on now except for one. But LFG and my Aunt Kat had a very nice rapport and I’m happy for that. The photo above is of LFG, my mom and Aunt Kat about to head out to pick strawberries in McBee, South Carolina.

My Aunt Kat’s first husband, Uncle Jim, died when I was ten years old but I loved the hell out of him for the short time that I knew him. It’s clear to me now but I was oblivious to their intent when my uncles and other dads would step in and take the place of my absent father.  And Uncle Jim was keen on high impact shenanigans. He was so damn full of love and mischief that he was just wired to be a dad and uncle and spoiler and prankster. And he loved me. That's Uncle Jim sitting beside my bow tied dad at my Aunt Inez' Sunday dinner table. My Aunt Kat, in the striped blouse is standing beside my mom. I was just a twinkle in the bow tied guy's eye when this picture was taken.

I learned many years after his death that he too was a member of the Greatest Generation. And like most veterans, he spoke nothing of it or at least very little. My Aunt Kat told me that he’d sometimes cry in the middle of the night after they were married.  She begged him to tell her what it was and he told her. Once.  He drove or was one of the crew members on those landing craft…Higgins boats…vessels that dropped Marines or Army troops off on the shores of Pacific islands during WWII. And he told my Aunt Kat that some of the boys were so scared that they didn’t want to exit the boat. He said he could see it in their eyes and he felt guilty having to help make them get off the boat.

But Uncle Jim said what haunted him and made him cry at night sometimes was the memory not of the dropping off but the picking up...Transporting the dead, including just partial bodies and the screaming wounded on the same vessel that dropped the young, scared but physically intact boys off to meet their fate. There’s so much PTSD today, my Marine nephew being one who’s challenged with it, but I’m thinking that my Uncle Jim and others like him had their own silent PTSD for decades. But I never knew it. All I knew was his love.

Uncle Jim owned a grocery store and when I was a toddler, I’d have the run of the place. But what excited me most about Uncle Jim was the Grubworm. He had a 1963-ish Econoline van that he drove on the weekends and for his grocery store tasks. And he said it looked to him like a grubworm. So he had someone paint “Grubworm” on the front and his name on the driver side door. And he’d take me to ride in it. Whenever I wanted. 

I can’t convey in words the excitement of riding in a truck whose engine is right up there in the cab with you. And when my three or four year old imagination was at work in tandem, hell, my Uncle Jim might as well have been Alan Shepard or John Glenn and the Grubworm, the Freedom 7. I mean really…how many kids get to ride in such a curious little vehicle and especially one that had a personality conveyed through its owner and painted on moniker?

So I wanted to honor my Uncle Jim by re-creating to the degree my imagination would let me, the Grubworm. And I’m dropping it off at my cousin Susie’s house tomorrow. It was a fun little project…kind of an ADG meets American Restoration…half-ass style. My first task was to find an old toy Econoline truck. I snagged one courtesy of eBay and then had to figure out how to make it less toy-ish and more faithful to the green color and blackwall tires of my Uncle Jim’s Grubworm.

Old advertisements from the 60’s helped fill the bill as well as discussions with my mom regarding what the Grubworm looked like and how the lettering was done. Of course my wild-ass imagination had an actual grubworm caricature worm on the front of it. Shut up.

And then I taped it off.

And painted it. The wrong color. Too light.

And painted it again. Too glossy and too green.

And again. Not perfect but close enough. I then had to get rid of the whitewalls.

Finally I went online and learned how to make decals. Voila…here’s the Grubworm.

I think it’s easier to further explain my story by just letting you read my letter that accompanies the Christmas wrapped box containing Uncle Jim’s Grubworm. Here it is… 

December 24^th, 2013

Dear Susie,

Sometimes I miss Aunt Kat so bad I can’t stand it. Mom and I say more than once a day that it just doesn’t seem right not having aunt Kat walk in the back door saying “heeeey…I brought y’all something!” I’ve loved all of the Cole sisters but it’s no secret that I was crazy about your mom. We all loved Aunt Inez to death and whether it’s true or not, I know that I was one of Inez’s favorites so I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of love from the sisters. But Aunt Inez was the matriarch and everybody had to love her! I’m especially mindful of how great it’s been to have so many loving aunts as my mom’s now amidst the last, fragile chapter of her journey.

I have five more years’ worth of jelly that your mom made and a lifetime of pictures to keep her present in my mind. And even though uncle Jim died so many years ago, I have vivid memories (or at least they are vivid in the way that my imagination can conjure the hell out of things!) of loving him too. I was only ten years old when Uncle Jim died.

I remember his tickly moustache and his pipes. Seems like there was a pipe stand with several of his pipes on it. Am I dreaming that up? And when I was a little fella and had to wear suspenders to keep my pants up, I’m told that he taught me to answer “Dusty Baggy Britches” when someone asked me my name.

And someone would give me a dollar bill to spend at Jim’s Corner and I’d get some candy or a little toy and Uncle Jim would take over the register and hit every damn button on the cash register ringing up my purchases like an orchestra conductor. He’d take the dollar from my little hand and make change…giving me more than a dollar back. And remember the little brown sacks of penny candy that he’d bring? Squirrel Nuts, Red Hots, bubble gum, Mary Janes.  And candy cigarettes and necklaces and those straws full of sugar. It’s a wonder any of us had a damn tooth left in our heads.  I might have had a shitty dad but I’ve been blessed to have aunts and uncles and grandparents who made my childhood pretty memorable.

People ask me all the time how I know so much of the early to mid-1960’s R&B and pop music. I tell them that my mom was the youngest of ten kids and that I had a zillion older cousins who, when I was just a little fella, would be playing 45s of all that great music. I remember as a teenager going through a stack of your 45s or albums that were still over at aunt Kat’s house. The Tams.

Am I dreaming this up too? Did Richard, when he was dating you and y’all were home from college, put on socks just to come in and pick you up and then take them off again once y’all got in the car? Was it Uncle Jim who would have a fit about Richard not wearing socks? And now you and Richard are going to be grandparents. Damn I’m getting old.

Oh shit, and how could I forget the “Santy Claus Trap”? Remember? Uncle Jim would take us back behind his store and point to one of those outbuildings/sheds and say that he had a “Santy Claus Trap” in there and that he was gonna catch him and not let him leave us presents. But he would let on just enough that it wasn’t true so that we wouldn’t get upset…we’d just stay curious and sceptical because I think in our little four year old minds we knew that Uncle Jim was too good a man to do something so terrible to us and to Santa Claus. But he got us wondering and worrying…just a little bit.

But my most exciting memory of Uncle Jim is of the Grubworm! Susie, I couldn’t have been more than three or four when he had that truck. “Wanna go ride in the Grubworm?” Of course I did. What little boy wouldn’t want to ride in a truck? Especially one named after a damn worm? And I remember being scared and curious that the engine was right up there with us in the cab.

My memories are vague since I was so young but I think about the Grubworm from time to time and kinda had an idea of what it looked like…at least in my mind’s eye.  And I’m sure that I haven’t gotten it just right but I loved creating my version of the Grubworm from an old metal Econoline toy truck that I got on eBay. I found some old advertisements on the internet to try and get the correct color of green, too.  It’s close but not perfect…after I painted it three different colors of green before I was satisfied! And I learned to make and print decals for the lettering.

So here’s the Grubworm for you, Susie!

Love,

Dust

Early Mid-Life Crisis: The Shelby Mustang GT500

Maybe—somehow—he had an internal mechanism that knew Jesus would call him home early. I figure as much since he was a bit young to be amidst a typical mid-life crisis. Who knows? All I knew as a third grader was that my dad approached our driveway in some kinda car that made our windows rattle. And I loved it.

I knew at that age what a Mustang was. But this wasn’t anything close to the classic little Mustang that Iacocca et al contrived to fit on a chassis with the same basic dimensions and construct as their Ford Falcon. 

Their little flurry of brilliance made the assembly line start-up processes and up-front production costs for the original Mustang considerably lower. I’m sure you didn’t know this and I’m pleased that due to my impertinence and pursuit of random bits of inane information, you now do. Shut up.

My dad’s new Mustang was sleek and…for some reason I want to use the word…turgid. Turgid in that it seemed like it was going to burst…just sitting there. The restrained energy that my wide eyed pediatric self sensed from this car while it was parked was palpable. My buddies and a few of their dads came over to look at it and they circled it…my buddies in awe and their dads in jealousy. And I was too young to define it the way I can now but there was incongruence between my dad and the car. In my third-grade noggin’ it came off more like … “my dad and this car don’t really go together.” By the time I was in the third grade, my dad was in a three button sack suit, longwings and a dress hat…every day. And this Mustang seemed like it needed a driver who was a bit more Steve McQueen or James Dean-ish.

My elementary school was within walking distance of my house and walk I did…almost every day from first grade till sixth. But I begged my dad to drive me to school in his Cobra. I wanted to be seen in it I think, more than my dad did.  I don’t remember wearing a seat-belt but if I had, perhaps I wouldn’t have risen from the seat when we were stopped at an intersection. My little fifty-pound ass would levitate…or at least I thought I was…just from the teeth clattering rumble emanating from our idling Cobra Mustang.

And then it was gone. Faster I think, than its sudden arrival in our driveway. I figure that the Shelby Cobra Mustang had about a six week run in my dad’s possession. I don’t remember any words exchanged, voices raised or any conflict between my parents over the Mustang. And trust me; I remember plenty of arguments over other things. I figure my mama played some kinda Sun Tzu secret weapon ninja card on my dad and poof, that car was gone without even a whimper. Somehow I knew not to ask about it.

My dad subsequently darkened the driveway in some kind of predictable four door, non-teeth rattling whatever and not a word was ever spoken about...my Mustang.

Onward. Levitatin’… Emanatin’… And always over ellipsis-ing my stories.

ADG II 

To Heck With Hitchens—I’ve Got a New Girlfriend!

Her name is LFG. And she’s a dancer.

And she’s growing up so fast I can hardly stand it.

In addition to that bit of breaking news…we have more superficial randomanalia.And I figured we needed it over here at my little corner of the world-after all the delightful pyrotechnics that the Hitchens mention created.  I would have been disappointed and all of you if the fireworks hadn't launched. This load of randomness includes the fact that my Mini Cooper S is quite impractical around Christmas time. But Mountain Dew always seems to mitigate the most perplexing of challenges. It remains to this day, the best antidote to cotton mouth.

What’s been your largest holiday parcel that you've had to deliver this year? See above regarding the impracticality of a Mini Cooper S.

It’s been warm up till now. And I’ve been wearing summer weight suits quite a bit this month. Including this one and only two button Flusser from my archives. All the rest are 3/2.

And this shirt? A twenty year old Ike Behar horizontal hairline stripe…contrasting collar and cuffs. A rather attenuated Gordon Gecko here. Shut up.

But then it got cold and I wore a heavier wool pinstripe Flusser rig another day. Bam. (Bam. Without an exclamation mark. Don’t be vulgar—we’re still in mourning over here)

And then it got really cold.

But not so cold that my girlfriend LFG and I couldn't put up the Christmas tree. Oh, and the Wii Fit? Yep, that’s for me. My arms are getting jiggly and my butt is sagging.

Saggy butts can be aided with the curved cut of a fishtailed English split back trouser. The good folks over at Bookster made the cords for me. Bookster ain't Huntsman but neither are they Huntsman prices. I've yet to try anything other than their trousers but the trews are well worth the price point. I wore these yesterday here in Stamford—the location of my final billable for the year and what a year it’s been. My best since 1996. I’m off the chart grateful. I now finally have the money for my hair transplant.

But if you really wanna draw attention away from your jiggly arms and saggy butt, just strap on a Grecian formulaic Houndstoothian ensemble like this. Jiggly-saggy will be the least of your issues. 

Ok, I’ll close this load of superficial drivel now. Peace. Out.

ADG II in Stamford. Stopping off in Gotham for a dose of NYC Christmas and maybe a little gift for myself. What might that be? Onward.

Prussian Update: My 560 SL Arrived!

Well sorta At least the little die cast doppelganger remains mine. I did feel that it was time for an update/story about my quest and a lot of what I’ve discovered didn’t surprise me. The rules for not getting burned when buying classic cars are essentially the same for a 1989 Mercedes as they are for a 1969 Camaro.

And of course the best advice I got was from Toad. Advice that I’d already taken to heart but it’s never a bad thing to hear it again. “Spend the few hundred bucks necessary to have a qualified, respected Mercedes expert check out these cars.”  Couple that advice with an incredibly thorough and thoughtful website tutorial and I’ve avoided heartache thus far. Heartache avoidance also means to-date, no Mercedes SL.

Only car nuts will want to spend much time at this Mercedes SL tutorial site but let me tell you, it’s sobering and instructive to go through every slide and learn about direct and collateral evidence to support the condition of any SL that might be on deck for purchase. Here are a few examples…

 "Very important body tag w/vehicle ID number affixed. This is the left fender (front) tag. New panels never had tags. No body number on 88/89 560SLs means a replacement fender and a tip to look for further evidence of collision repair. The tags should be on both fenders.” 

“Data tag on core support adjacent to hood latch provided paint code, in this case 568 (Signal Red) as well as vehicle type 107048(560SL) as well as 1 (export) and 2 (automatic transmission). Missing data tag a definite no-no. Philips head screws were always body color. This plate has not been disturbed.”

 “Check where the valve cover meets the aluminum cylinder head for oil residue, a very common situation on any V-8 Mercedes-Benz. Leaking valve covers run oil onto adjacent hot exhaust manifolds causing burning oil stink to be inhaled into driver’s compartment via the cowl vent!”

 “No AC flow through center dash vents signals potential extremely expensive vacuum motor repair/replacement. Contributing parts are buried in heater box.”

 And there are a couple of nuances involved in my SL selection criteria. I choose not to afford ownership of two cars. I live a pseudo-urban life and I don’t do any kind of absurd two-hour commute to work like many around here do. I can walk to my office…when I even decide to go there. My driving is mostly in-town jaunts with perhaps a hundred mile round trip weekend sortie here and there. I don’t pile excessive miles on a personal car when driving to client meetings. That’s what Avis and reimbursable expenses are for. So my SL will be a “modified daily driver” of sorts.

 The idea of having an SL and a frugal little Honda or something like that to perform LFG transport duties doesn’t make sense. I don’t want to buy an SL creampuff and rarely drive it while puttering down the GW Parkway in a Toyota that sports a bumper sticker announcing that “My other car is a 560SL”. I just don’t need two cars.

Besides, one of the things I’ve learned is that these cars need to be driven. You can find 1989 560’s all day long with “only thirty thousand miles on it…driven four months each year and only to the club.” And chances are, at thirty thousand miles, it’s had no service other than a few oil changes. Which means every seal; gasket or other perishable component has degraded. Add $7,500.00 to your budget because that’s what you are going to spend year-one on what I call “the perishables.” My first year surprise update/repair/replace budget is $5,000.00. I add that to the total deal regardless of how well vetted my 560SL candidate might be.

So as of July, I’ve not found the right car that makes it through my budget/condition matrix unscathed. And that’s ok because I don’t want to make a mistake amidst procuring my dream car. I realize that once I own an SL, there are gonna be costs—lots of them, involved in keeping it in shape. Old house-old car…there’s always something to be done to-for-about them.

My trusty little Saab remains in fairly good service and I’ll continue to enjoy it till it either dies thus forcing my car-buying hand or I find the right car. If I don’t find my 560SL dream before the weather gets cold, it might become a 2012 objective.

Onward. In a Saab.

ADG, II

First Car--First Girl

I know it’s not a great picture but it’s the only one I have. I wish that I had a better picture of both because they were beautiful…at least to me. My first car and my first girl…literally…in the same photo. I loved both. But maybe the car just a little bit more than the girl.

 MG Midgets weren’t exactly ubiquitous in Florence, South Carolina. If less than a dozen Mercedes prowled the mean streets of Florence, one can figure that the body count for British Midgets would be low. There might have been one other MG…maybe an MGB or an MGB-GT in town and there was nobody and I mean nobody who could work on these things. I learned out of necessity to work on mine. Amazing what images one can find via Google. The car above is almost identical to my mine.

There was a parts company in Charlotte, N.C. that handled British car stuff…Viking Imports. I just checked and they are still there—at the same address. Of course this was pre-internet so the process was by today’s standards, onerous. I would call them and tell them what I needed. They’d locate it and I’d send them a check. Most times what I needed wasn’t too esoteric so after my check (or my mama’s if I was a bit short on cash in the bank) cleared, they’d forward the goods. But even in the best scenario it usually took a week and a half. So if the needed part sidelined the car, and in my case it usually did, I either bummed rides or cajoled my sister into lending me her much less esoteric but slightly more reliable Pinto. The part shown above is an MG Midget Slave Cylinder…for the clutch. Yep, a hydraulic clutch…just one of the many examples of British motorcar persnicketalia.  It seemed that I  blew out the clutch slave cylinder every other month and surely one of the reasons had to be that I wasn’t rebuilding it properly. The guy at Viking, after selling me the rebuild kit a couple of times, suggested that I order “more than one if I was gonna go through ‘em so quickly.” Smartass.

South Carolina allowed you a restricted drivers license at fifteen so you could drive without a guardian in the car but only during daylight hours. I’d been fifteen for a few months when my dad pulled up one day in what was to be my little MG. But I thought it was his toy. He let it sit in the driveway for a week before he told me  it was mine. Three years old with about thirty thousand miles on it which today is nothing on a well maintained car. But these British babies were a bit dodgy from the get-go regardless of the mileage and mine, aesthetically pristine, soon became shall I say, a mechanical character builder.

 The Smiths gauges and the always interesting Lucas electronics were like the weather in England—a bit unpredictable and more often than not...cloudy. I learned to tolerate the electronic shenanigans out of love for the car. Who am I kidding? I learned to tolerate intermittently operable temp and fuel gauges because I had no choice. Shut up.

 What I couldn't repair or maintain was an issue with the tires. MG Midgets came with either wire wheels or ugly, utilitarian looking rims seen below. Mine was blessed with classic wire wheels replete with the single lug/spinner knockoffs. But the front rims weren't true. So I went through a pair of front tires every 3 months…crazy I know. Recaps…remember recaps? Fifteen bucks a throw.  

What a great first car though—even with all of its typical British car idiosyncrasies. But then they ultimately ruined the lines on MGs when they were forced to put those ugly black rubber bumpers on them—the beginning of the end. I can remember driving down Cherokee road with First Girl beside me. Top down, quarter tank of gas and ten bucks in my pocket. Everything at that moment, if the clutch didn’t blow, seemed right. I can even remember what song was playing on the radio…Rock the Boat by the Hues Corporation. Damn.

 So what happened to the car? My dad offered to swap me a Triumph GT-6 for the MG Midget if I’d give him my summer job savings to boot. My MG Midget, at least through my eyes, went from sugar to shitake in a nanosecond. The GT-6 was sleek to my Midget’s sudden boxiness. The GT-6 had problems too but it would run—fast. So fast that my dad took it from me within three months.

The Girl…my first real girlfriend. I’d never really kissed a girl…leastways not a real kiss kinda thing. I think I nervously gave S.B. a tentative peck on the lips during a sixth grade pool party and it took me a week to work up the nerve for that particularly bold move. But First Girl…she was worldly and learned by Florence South Carolina standards. She’d had an older boyfriend before me…a wise and skillful old sage of sixteen years. And she’d made it known to me that she’d already learned how to kiss. And I did not make it known how scared I was and how out-of-my-league I felt.

I remember pulling up for the first time in front of her house. I was so nervous I think I drove around the block ten times before turning on to her street. I had to meet her parents and her dad was the kind of dad I want to be the first time a guy calls on LFG. He was nice but he had that piercing look in his eyes…the kind of look that says “I’m being nice to you but don’t get comfortable with me son. I could kill you just as soon as look at you.” This would be me around that time. Boast or Fred Perry tennis shirt on and a pair of Bata Bullet tennis-court shoes. I shoulda stuck with this look.

I’ve already admitted somewhere in a previous story that the mid 1970’s was in my opinion, an absurd sartorial epoch. And I was impressionable. Impressionable at about a hundred pounds soaking ass wet. Impressionable with barely enough meat on my bones to skulk into the Men’s Department and hope that they had something small enough to fit me. I might have been driving a traditional British motorcar but that’s where any semblance of tradition ended. This was a synthetic moment and Nik-Nik shirts ruled the day.

God only knows the mélange of petroleum distillates that went into the creation of one of these babies. Five gets ten that the carbon footprint from one Nik-Nik shirt equals a month’s output from that gay little spaceship known as the Toyota Prius. Carbon footprint or not…I had to have a Nik-Nik.

And can you imagine what this slinky shirt looked like on a bony, bird chested boy who weighed a buck-ten? I’m glad there’s no photo evidence of it because surely, my spindly frame avec Nik-Nik probably made that pencil necked bird-esque Ira Magaziner throated Anthony Weiner look like the Incredible Mutha Futha Hulk. These are the Allman Brothers. I wanted to be an Allman Brother. The Allman Brothers wore Nik-Nik kinda shirts. Any questions?

And please, let’s not forget my shoes. I had Earth Shoes and Famolores. Ok, let’s just stop the story train for a minute. At least I’m confessing my sins. So if you’re sitting there howling at me, I’m good with it. But what was your worst sartorial moment? I didn’t ask to be born at a time that would assure my transition to the Men’s Department would find me amongst such absurdly synthetic swathing options. Thankfully my foray into things Nik-Nik and Famolore would be brief. I tried to be a hippie. I really, really tried but I was never a good one. But then again who was a really, really good hippie...in Florence South Carolina?  

So picture this. I’m all showered up. I've blown all the the curl out of my hair and its height has me standing, as opposed to my usual at that time, five feet maybe five inches…at about six feet tall. Cheap bell bottom jeans from Mangum’s Army-Navy Store on Dargan Street and my brown Earth Shoes. I’m wearing a size small Nik-Nik that’s still two sizes too big for me so it hangs on me like some deflated County Fair balloon. Half of the graphics are tucked down into my jeans. But in retrospect it was probably a good thing. The graphic stuff should remain in your britches.

I’m not making this up. By the time I pulled up at First Girl’s house, my back was soaking wet. The Nik-Nik against my black-vinyl bucket seat manifested a synthetic slow-burn. Kinda like the smouldering epicenter of a sawdust pile. The fellowship of these two vinyl comrades-in-arms is gonna make you sweat—regardless of the season. And it gets worse. I've never met her parents and I’m nervous. I'd never had a girlfriend...at least one where you drive to her house and meet mama and daddy and stuff.  I’d go on to develop a rather facile approach to charming parents and quite frankly, most people. But on this day I possessed no such facility. I had no game. All I wanted to do is not puke.

Half way up the lawn I step in a big pile of dog dookie. Not a little job left by a toy poodle but a huge pile…fresh and tenacious. And it ain’t gonna come off without some effort. I can feel my face flush with heat while the back of my Nik-Nik shirt feels kinda cool as the vinyl-vinyl fellowship moisture evaporates. I can only imagine what I looked like trying to get the dookie off of my Earth Shoe by dragging it on the grass. “What’s the skinny new boy doing walking in circles in the yard honey?” I remember leaving my shoes outside at the front door and proceeding with the meet-and-greet sans shodding. Surely it went ok but to this day, I get a hitch in my gut when I recall the dookie event.

I’d go over there as often as possible during the next year. The routine was always the same. We could sit in the living room but the door had to be open. And we’d kiss our faces off till I had to go home. I’d stay until I absolutely had to haul it home to make the curfew.

I declared to my mother that I’d found the girl who was going to have my kids…that I loved her and that we were going to have three babies and live in the mountains…you know, kinda John Denver Rocky Mountain High-style. My mother laughed at the notion and I became livid...really pissed at her. How could she doubt my undying unquenchable love lust for the first girl I’d ever kissed? Geez...stupid parents. Statistical likelihoods be damned. But mama was right….just like the MG Midget in the shadow of the Triumph GT-6…First Girl faded rapidly when I met Second Girl at the tennis courts the next summer.

First Girl, mother of two grown gals has been married to the same guy for years. I saw her on Facebook one time. She seems to have remained in a hippie-granola holding pattern and that’s ok I suppose. I’m not sure the status of Girls Two through Twenty Seven. Wonder where my British cars are?

Onward. Home from Anaheim. Thankfully in all cotton.

ADG, II