"Seat Safety Switch" (seat-safety-switch)
07/10/2015 at 11:40 • Filed to: move the needle on supervillain plans
10
5|
"Seat Safety Switch" (seat-safety-switch)
07/10/2015 at 11:40 • Filed to: move the needle on supervillain plans | 10
| 5 |
I was a different man when I had that old S-10.
The year was 1999, and I was full of hope. My trusty Chevy S-10 SS and I got into all kinds of scrapes and adventures with Johnny Law and Timmy TruantOfficer-LockerSearches. Eventually the frame rot and road salt caught up with it and I had to sell it for $900 to an out of town drifter that turned out to be my dad, but that’s a story for another time.
This story, you see, is about what it takes to be a man. The S-10 wasn’t enough on its own to guarantee entry into the hallowed halls of true manhood. I would light it up on my small town’s only major cosmopolitan boulevard, feel like a big hero, but there was always someone with a bigger truck. Someone with a louder exhaust, one of them Magnaflows. But the quest persisted, often in odd ways.
One of the oddest ways I encountered was that of my friend Shifty Mike, who was a convenience store thief. He hadn’t upgraded to purestrain armed robbery yet - that would come a few years later, when I would dimly recognize his older face in the daily newspaper - but he was definitely competent at pickpocketing the entire candy aisle and escaping, nudie mags flapping out of his back pocket as he jumped into his rotten ‘64 Chrysler Imperial Crown and laid thick black elevens on the chew-stained macadam of the 7-11. Either way, I figured he had a lot to teach me about being a man, and I hesitantly agreed when he offered to take me hunting one crisp April weekend.
It was deer season, I remember, and I had Shifty Mike’s sixteen gauge shotgun, loaded with what I assumed at the time to be birdshot, but in reality was probably something more on the order of home defense Hevi-Shot, designed to protect your pumpkins and a man’s dignity. I steeled myself to wait, to claim a life, to become a man as my ancestors had once done.
The thing nobody tells you about hunting is that it’s incredibly boring. A few hours of waiting in the tree stand, and I was singing my favorite Rush lyrics to myself, half-remembered, in a sort of haze of pure boredom, the kind of which would be unimaginable in today’s smartphones and tablets age.
I heard a rustle. Then a banging. Then an explosion. I leapt from the tree stand and ran in the general direction, panting. This is where the action would be, I imagined, this is where I would get my man badge.
I saw Shifty Mike lying on his back, jacket half on fire, next to an invisibly burning methanol distillery. Fucking asshole had been making moonshine this entire time while pretending to be out on a hunting trip, and he’d duped me into standing guard near it, expecting his rival moonshiners to be scared off by the sight of an orange vested teenager one-handing a poorly made Chinese shotgun out of a tree stand. The plan was brilliant for Shifty Mike, even if it didn’t exactly move the needle on supervillain plans.
That’s when I had my epiphany.
Manhood, you see, was about exploiting the fears of others.
It was with that knowledge that I returned to the S-10 sitting forlornly in the parking lot of a nearby trailhead. I would show them all. I would build more cars .
shop-teacher
> Seat Safety Switch
07/10/2015 at 11:56 |
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Great story!
RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> Seat Safety Switch
07/10/2015 at 13:06 |
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Not methanol. If there’s much methanol in ‘shine, there is a serious problem.
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Seat Safety Switch
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
07/10/2015 at 13:07 |
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I never said he was smart. Or could see.
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RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> Seat Safety Switch
07/10/2015 at 13:09 |
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I was just being ethanol/methanol pedantic, mostly.
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Seat Safety Switch
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
07/10/2015 at 13:26 |
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I appreciate the fact-checking though, thanks for commenting!
Kids should learn how to make moonshine distilleries in the woods the
safe
way.