Car Corner

with Ricky “Rotor” Weaver

This month’s

“car   we-wish  they  had

built

  but

it-didn’t-get-past the  junkyard”:

1998 Suite Setback 

Suite Setback is a sweet little rolling pin, a purring little thing,  it keeps on keeping on, so you can sleep peacefully through the night; sweeter than sweetbread and softer than a rock band playing woodblocks welded to oil barrels, the rock band covered in leather and oil, a wicked smile extending when “Green” Ben makes a blunder on the ax, a sharp look and a smile from our leader, the executioner shuffling back over to the scene. When we look up his skirt to check out his piece of ass, we miss the feet for the forest. His hairs, his oil slick, change colors; his pale face stays on strong. The docked pay is laundered through the head of a pin - “the angel’s share,” he says.

I opened the trunk and he popped out. His saliva was flying around in the breeze of traffic; his screams integrated with the horns and motors; his eyes left cartoon trails of panic; his genitalia was covered with oil rags glued on to his skin.

They came by to see how things were going. We were bashful and we felt untidy and unprepared for their unexpected visit. I heard them shaving down dry a dismantled machine in a sealed garage. Shaves of metal shot through the exhaust system. I breathed them in. My nerves twisted, adding red courses to my copper-stained skin.  

I wondered, then, how I could tell the difference between a person posing a real threat and a person blowing smoke up my ass. Sometimes, I perceived no real danger from a visitor, a stranger, my brothers-in-arms, only to find a loaded gun to my head, my shoes being scanned for gold lining, my copper fixtures gone, a bacterial infection growing at a rapid rate, forced to swallow my own discharge, my fear. Thrown off the balcony, so to speak.

I watched the video over and over, hoping to see a glint of madness, an exception to the rule, in the driver’s eyes. No luck. These days, it seemed impossible to tell the “bad guys” from the “good guys.”

I started to understand why the Squad had started a private lottery - picking phone numbers at random, tracking the phones by RIFD to the citizen’s exact location, and gunning the citizen down. Anyone could be perceived as a threat. They were peace officers, a monitoring group, sanctioned and subsidized, subordinate to the court in the same way as the Jester.

In New Brunswick, they waved their guns around like licorice sticks, telling everyone to get inside. We had seen what they had done last Fall, so we obeyed.