Later on in the evening—this was after I had purchased a cheap hacksaw in that seedy Kmart discount store in downtown Great Falls, Montana—I walked out into its parking lot and crawled beneath our ailing van and began sawing off the crushed section of tailpipe. The atmospheric temperature was exceptionally hot that duskingtide, still hanging out at probably ninety or ninety five degrees Fahrenheit.
And yet the next thing I knew this kid wandered over to our maroon vehicle; he was evidently parked somewhere in the capacious discount store lot as well. A barefoot kid—young man, rather—and, you know, that callow rascal offered to help me with the sawing, which naturally entailed lying on filthy, oily asphalt in a parking lot with grainy particles of rusty shit falling into one’s face with each stroke of the hacksaw, and don’t forget to factor into my misery index the reality I was doing this pleasant chore when the air temperature was hovering right around ninety degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity couldn’t have been lagging too far behind that metric either. The barefoot kid said he hailed from somewhere in western Washington state—I forget the precise location right now—and I was extraordinarily impressed and appreciative that he would come over and offer to help purely out of the good of his heart while I was lying under the van sawing away like a champion lumberjack, all the time sweating profusely analogous to an eighty-year-old demi-fossil jacked up on Viagra struggling to come atop a nubile, voluptuous young sex kitten.
(Excerpted from the forthcoming travel saga “North By Northwest“)
Fred's Soapbox 