Junk Yard

Have you ever been to a junk yard? It's really a sight to behold. It's like a graveyard for old cars, it's just that nobody bothered to bury them. So they sit out thee, rotting in the desert heat, decomposing, part by part until all that's left is the chassis and a few teeth.

Before going to Johnny's (the other one) for my new radiator, I made a real Western-style attempt to get one from the salvage yard. It's not just the hippies that recycle. The junk yard is the fungus of the automobile industry. It is a niche in the ecosystem of econo-motors where the decomposers dwell and make life out of death in secret, Haephestian ways
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We went up to pull a radiator out of an old Jeep parked - forever - in lot 6. But there was no delicacy in the operation - no respect for the vehicle, its resale value perhaps, its dignity as an active motor being, useful to its master and wily in the ways of the road. No. This was hell, this was the flesh as grass of the Scriptures, this was the afterlife in all its guises, Purgatory, Valhalla, the River Styx, and there, off to the side was the '91 Jeep, radiator still in tact, ready to be hauled off for resurrection in my '95.

Looking at all these cars, parked and gutted, was a a really humbling experience. What could symbolize Phallic pride more than the automobile? And yet here, as if in a morgue, the libido-less vehicles lay, almost beyond shame, but more like the un-dead, uncertain of their futures on this earth. Eerie and sad, yet at the same time I felt like I was privy to something that the run of the mill bourgeoisie would never see. There are secrets the peasants know that they will never share with their masters. Religious rites, nature fairies, and ancient burial grounds that are too simple to be appreciated by the aristocrats, yet which carry immense power. Lot 6 wasn't on anybody's map. It was me, the stuttering guy, and a crowbar. Even the car we drove to Lot 6 was dead- it had been in an accident and was already half decomposed itself. There were all sorts of things missing out of the control panel, there was no key, so the stuttering guy used a screwdriver (which he kept jammed in the air conditioning vent) to start the thing. The windshield was completely smashed in, and the doors didn't work.
I know, I know, gentle reader, you're thinking - this doesn't sound too different from the car you're driving. But you'll have to believe me, this was in a whole different state. This was Charon, the boatman, himself crossing back and forth between Hades and the world of the living (sort of). This car was in no ways fit to be driven - but we weren't really driving - does a ghost ever really drive? No they just float, fearless of death or accident, across the firmament to their desired goal. And so floated we, up the hill at about 30 mph to lot 6 where my radiator awaited.