Categories
Miscellany

The Christmas Truck

Editor’s note: This is an essay by Carrboro resident Mitch Virchick about the old truck he’s decorated for the holidays over the last dozen years.

Truck-2009-7

This being the final year of this truck, I’d forgotten how much it means to me, and it needed a fitting eulogy:

FOR SALE: 1965 FORD F-100 PICKUP. RUNS.

The late Dick Helmold, of Helmold Ford in Raleigh, told me that around 1965 the Ford Motor Company began to use inferior steel in their truck bodies. Weakened the stock, he said. I’m pretty sure he was correct.

More rust than paint, dry-rotten tires, one missing and three mismatched hubcaps, a gas pedal that sticks and brakes that fail (DOT-3 is my co-pilot), no radio, no interior lights, and no heat, but with a three-on-the-tree gearshift and an amusing horn, this heart-breaking truck is difficult to give up, or even to give away. The driver’s door opens only from the inside, so you must enter the vehicle through the passenger side door. Fortunately, the bench seat makes it a breeze to slide across. You may exit via the driver’s door, but please don’t slam the door shut, or the window will fall down the well and I’ll have to take the door panel off to pull it back up and re-engage it with the window knob linkage thingy.

I have owned this dysfunctional vehicle around 18 years. I promise it starts; you’ll just have to be patient. The application of jumper cables is a given, so you will need another vehicle for that, and a little cleaning solvent sprayed in the carburetor helps, as long as you don’t overdo it, because then flames will shoot out of the engine compartment when it kicks over. When it finally does start, the neighborhood children usually stop what they’re doing, because they know that as I crawl up the street in first gear, I’ll be laying heavy on the “ahh-OOOGG-ahh” horn and embarrassing their parents who should by now be inured to this spectacle.

This truck can only live in Carrboro. I can’t remember the last time it went to Chapel Hill. I mean, it is SO not Meadowmont. If it showed up in the Oaks, someone would call 911. If it tried to drive up and down the hills of Lake Forest, it would get sick and throw up.

When you see it on the street, this rattling deathtrap is a quite the head-turner, although it tends to slip out of first gear with a loud bang, as if the non-committal transmission is in active rebellion against any rules of engagement, and must be coaxed gently back in as soon as the gears stop whining and grinding, usually at noon, in the middle of a left turn at a traffic signal, downtown. I’m not proud of it, but I must confess to bearing some personal responsibility for a number of multiple-light-cycle delays in Carrboro since 1991. Overflowing with three cubic yards of mulch or groaning under the weight of the rocks of a dismantled farmhouse chimney, I can swear that the leaf spring suspension of the truck bed is literally cracking in two beneath my bench seat as I motor slowly along the two-lane road, drivers lining up behind me, waiting for their chance to pass. Some of them give me a happy thumbs-up gesture, or roll down their windows and shout “I love your truck”. The others, I assume, must silently wonder what kind of attention-starved person would over-compensate for his shortcomings by inflicting this travesty of a pickup truck upon the rest of the driving public. Maybe it’s just me. Am I all that different from the farmers who used to drive their tractors into town for a haircut at the Friendly Barber shop? Well, yes, I am. I grew up in New Jersey and have two college degrees from UNC and NC State. At any rate, nobody has actually yelled at me, “I hate your truck”.

I might have suspected something was strange twelve years ago, when the truck decided to literally sit outside in the yard for the entire month of December, dressed effeminately, draped in foliage and refusing to do any work whatsoever. This truck LOVED Christmas. It absolutely lived for the holiday. It would get all giddy around Thanksgiving. At first, I was a little embarrassed–what would the neighbors think, and all that nonsense. I must have thought it was just a phase, but in retrospect, I was in complete denial. My wife said, “Let him do what he wants to do. He’s not hurting anyone.” And in time, I realized that I still loved him, that being different was okay, and who was I to tell him it was wrong to follow his heart?

It’s never been easy. This motor vehicle is one hot mess.

For the past two years, I’ve kept my increasingly unstable vehicle in a kind of halfway house, sort of a “Club Chevy Nova”: parked on a lot I own, out back where I can’t see it when I walk out the front door, parked below the hill on South Greensboro St., where the only way out is a steep incline to the street. I won’t even try to move the truck without a spotter to halt traffic in both directions while I burn the clutch out climbing up the driveway. The last person to perform this duty was a wide-eyed impoverished sculptor (you know the Carrboreal archetype) who likely only agreed because he wanted to buy the truck, but I don’t think I dislike him enough to do inflict this punishment on him. Maybe if he wants to just plant it in his yard and water it…

So over the last 18 years, this truck has consistently passed, with a D-minus, every test I have devised for it. And now, as much as any under-performing teenager with a mohawk, eyeliner, and a bull ring in his nose, he needs to leave home and find his place in the world. I have turned his plates in, I’m no longer paying his insurance, and he is technically no longer my dependent. I will either donate him to Durham Tech or to the local high school, where I hope he will at least take some shop classes, maybe get his GED, or learn a useful skill. He says he wants to design sport roadsters in Italy. For all I know, maybe he’ll end up opening up a tattoo and piercing parlor on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh and hanging out at Sadlack’s. I’ll still love him. For now, I think he’s just spinning his wheels drinking coffee at the Open Eye, buying American Spirits at TJ’s, and hooping at the Weave on Thursdays. He just needs a little push, is all.