Junkyard Investigations

Vince's is a special place.

Oh, sure. Vince's is a junkyard. A place where the carcass is picked clean before the skeleton is discarded. A junkyard is definitely a man's world. Grease monkeys of every shape, size, language and caliber find sustenance amongst the discarded heaps, finding nuggets of inestimable or questionable value. The odors of motor oil, asphalt, cigarette smoke and dirt lift off the hot pavement and assail the visitor. Large metal bodies, propped up off the ground, lay splayed open like some macabre autopsy, in many cases their innards scattered on the ground. It is almost too horrifying to behold.

There are two junkyard that R frequents is his quest for the cheap and useful. There is Gary's, situated on the side of a hill. There are different tiers that the lots are perched upon, and it always seems that the one lot we need to get to is the one that is the furthest away, hence the longest, most difficult walk to get back. I usually vie for waiting in the car with my book, hoping R doesn't need me to "go fer." For years we went to Gary's, R dragging me along like an insolent teenager. Then he discovered Vince's.

I find Vince's much more pleasant--if pleasantness is what you look for in a junkyard. I have found it much more bearable. It is a lot less hilly and is surrounded by trees, so every so often you hear the call of a songbird.

Another thing they have at Vince's is wheelbarrows. Like grabbing a shopping cart upon entering a grocery store, except these don't have the safety child seat. Of course, I soon discovered a certain disadvantage to having these wheelbarrows. After a while, they can slow you down. So, like the husband who finds himself holding the purse and sitting outside the fitting room while his wife shops the store, I would find myself at the end of a row guarding wheelbarrow and bucket'o'tools while R would walk the lot, trying to decide on which car to bust his knuckles. So I would wait.

Have you ever been in the situation where you were alone, waiting for someone? Perhaps it is a strange place, and strange people that you don’t know surround you. Perhaps the person next to you looks a little funny, maybe smells funny, maybe dresses funny. Then you do an odd thing. You look at him and comment on the weather. Before you know it, you are having an enjoyable conversation. You are so glad that you looked past the funnyness of the person and made their acquaintance.

It so happened that one day, while guarding the said bucket, that I peered into the car next to me. I don't even remember what I found. Probably something insignificant like a receipt or a candy wrapper. All of a sudden it hit me. This car belonged to someone. Someone drove this car, drove to work in this car, ran their errands in this car, ate in this car, slept in this car? Like the stranger that smiled in response to the comment on the weather, I suddenly wanted to strike up a converstaion. I began to wonder what kind of person owned this car. Can I find out just by looking at what they left behind? It has become a kind of game for me now. Whenever we linger at a car, I peek in to assess the type of person who last drove it. It is really fascinating the type of things people leave behind: toys, receipts, change purses, t-shirts, shoes--most unusual was a single golf club.

We were at Vince's two weeks ago and got a door off of a Firebird. The exterior of the car was in remarkably good shape for a mid-80s vintage car, which told me that the owner took care of it. The interior was pretty bare, except for the home paint job on all the interior hard surfaces (excepting the glass, of course). It was done up to look like granite or stone. That just screamed to me late teens, early twenties young man. Maybe sees himself as creative, artsy. The follow through, however, is a little lacking.

The other car that I looked at was much more interesting. It was a late 90s Dodge Intrepid. In the car there were several discarded scratch-off lottery tickets, empty cigarette packs and animal prints. I found the cigarette packs of great interest--they were foreign. And there were what might have been dog prints all over the inside passenger side door. The prints I think could have been a red herring. Like I said, they could have belonged to a dog, but they might have belonged to a raccoon (they were much longer than a dogs). The cigarettes and lottery tickets made me think that this car was last driven by a recent immigrant, someone who is loyal to the home country, but still looking to make it big here in the States.

I usually don't take anything from the cars--I rarely touch or disturb anything when building the driver's profile. But I broke that rule this last weekend, when we made the trip back there. I hit the mother lode. In a late model Chrysler Lebaron rust bucket (with seriously bald tires), I found a High School assignment book. The car must have been put out of commission the first few weeks of school, since there were only a couple entries. I couldn't resist it, though. I left Vince's with that book nestled in the bucket. I guess it is my own nugget of inestimable or questionable value.