The first week in Great Falls was quite
the marathon of working, fishing, and drinking. We found several
great streams and took the First Sergeant out twice, then Friday came
and we hopped in the Grand Am and went for another weekend jaunt.
I haven't adequately described the Grand Am for you. It was a rolling blue stereo. Harold waxed the car every week and he was always adding something, wiring new components in or changing configurations. The simple fact that he didn't become a car-stereo engineer is proof that destiny is a dead concept. This was 1986 and some of the components that I'm going to describe were cutting edge back then. Like I said earlier, the system was Alpine. He had mid-range speakers in both doors, in the ceiling in four places, at the driver's and passenger's feet and two on the rear deck. Directional tweeters were set in rows of three above each door, and he had double bass vents in the trunk. It was the first car stereo I'd seen that played CDs, but that wasn't enough for Harold. He had a six-disc changer in the trunk operated by remote control from the dash. He'd also wired an interrupt circuit into the system so that when the radar detector went off, it'd briefly mute the stereo. That was a good idea when traveling over a hundred miles an hour with 110 decibels of AC/DC blasting through the system.
The Grand Am's speedometer only went up to eighty-five, so in order to tell how fast we were going, we'd count it out by cruise control. Every bump of the control would increase the speed by one mile per hour. We'd count it and then make sure that the car felt like it'd accelerated before doing it again. The previous record had been 114, but we broke that running on a long downhill straightaway.
115 - I cracked open two Budweisers and handed one over to Harold. We sang along, “Shoot to thrill, play to kill, Too many women, with too many pills. I got my gun at the ready, gonna fire at will.”
116 - The night was clear and the Milky Way was like a light river above us. I wanted to open the sun roof but Harold said it'd increase drag. “Honey, what do you do for money. How do you get your kicks?”
117 - Car lights in the distance, then close up, then so far behind us they were a memory. I'm in the passenger seat and the adrenaline is high. “She's no Mona Lisa. She's no Playboy star. But she'll send you to heaven, then explode you to Mars.”
118 - Neither of us could believe it. Two spots and then the crash, the windshield explodes all over us, and we're airborne, landing so hard both door windows shattered.
Outside the car we take a quick inventory. We're both walking and talking. Nothing appears to be broken, so we look at the car. At one-hundred eighteen miles an hour we'd hit a deer, went off the road and taken at least a fifty foot aerial trip off of a field road incline. Harold just sits down and starts crying. “My car, my car.” I pulled out a flashlight and started inspecting the damage. It really wasn't that bad. The hood was crumpled, the front bumper and grill were gone, two of the tires were cut up but not badly and there was some creasing in a few places along the body. But the car seemed drivable, at least to get out of where we were, and the engine and stereo looked undamaged to me.
Well that just wouldn't do. Harold had overcome his grief and come up with a plan while I called out an inventory to him. He got up and pulled all the beer out. Then he used a towel to wipe down the spills and he dumped some cologne to mask the smell.
“Hey Harold. We're drunk, man,” I said.
“We won't be.”
He got back into the car and started it up, then drove it right into a nearby barbed wire fence and turned so that it would scratch the whole side. Turning the car around, he did it to the other side. “I'm getting a completely new paint job out of this,” he yelled.
I went up to the highway and found the deer. Then I dragged it off the road so no one else would hit it. Harold had something else in mind, so he came and took over. We hauled it over to the car and laid the deer over the hood like a macabre trophy.
We walked to the next town, throwing the beer cans into the distance, far from the car as we walked. He was right. By the time we got there, we were sober. We found a motel and got some sleep. Weird Harold was getting ready to show his true talents.
On a Saturday in rural Montana, Harold made calls and asked around and found out what the best body shop was in Great Falls. He had the car (and, incidentally the deer) towed there, called the Air Base and got someone to authorize a HumVee to come get us.
Monday after work, I went with him to the body shop and there, in a small greasy room, he and the body shop manager dealt it out like business men negotiating on a golf course. Here's what they settled on. They put down the tires, rims and stereo as complete losses. The body shop manager got the old tires, which weren't very old and about half of that stereo. In exchange, he agreed to give that Grand Am full body work and a 17-coat Pearlescent-Blue paint job. If you haven't heard the term, you've seen the result. It makes the car look like it's different colors of blue as you move around it. It gives a deepness and texture that's just beautiful and way overdone for a Grand Am. Further, he got stainless rims, new tires, and a complete ground effects package. All this covered under insurance and the body shop ate the deductible.
Two more weeks in Grand Rapids and the body shop promised the work would be done before we left. I'd never seen such a blatant scam, but then I'd never seen Weird Harold fighting to save the life of his baby.
- rick, the trouble years
First Episode - Weird Harold
Previous Episode - Road Trip
Next Episode - Tragedy
well at least you were listening to a good album! You need to space out the stories a little bit, or I'm going to start expecting one a day for a fe wmonths! I am sure you have more than one more story left about this guy!
Posted by: Mark | Tuesday, 13 February 2007 at 07:43 AM