Back to the Junkyard
When I told Andrew I had a suspicion that Moderate Bob might be a Hoo-Doo, he said, "that's just the tip of the iceberg."
Hoo-Doos are jinxes - people like Calamity Jane and Typhoid Mary who never have bad luck themselves but seem to bring bad luck upon everyone around them.
I had gone to the high desert of Arizona to visit Andrew, who you may remember from the Volkswagen Clinic in the University Circle district of Cleveland. Years ago Andrew moved to Arizona and I finally scraped enough money together to take the train down to see him.
When Ker Ann heard that I was going to Arizona, she begged me to bring her some Titanium earrings, so one of the first things that I mentioned to Andrew when I arrived was those very earrings, and so we went down to the Copper Shop to see Moderate Bob, because he knows all about minerals.
Up in town the main street consists of authentic Wild West buildings. The Copper Shop used to be the House of Ill Repute, and down in the back, underneath Jenny's kitchen in the first of several basements, Bob was excavating the old junk pit, finding all sorts of antique stuff. Just as we arrived he found a 1910 silver dime, which I thought was pretty lucky, so I jumped down into the pit with a shovel but all I did was somehow lose my Swiss army knife. Bob took time out long enough to meet me and hear about the Titanium earrings. Ker Ann, he concluded, was talking about Namibium rather than Titanium, but that was okay because he could set me up anyhow.
So that's how Andrew and I and Andrew's friend TooLoose the Wreck (I just report 'em, folks) came to be driving Andrew's 1964 single cab (still with original engine) back into the Chino valley to the Titanium mine when we got the blowout in the front tire. TooLoose was driving and things were a little dicey for a few moments, but he pulled over okay, and we changed the tire and were on our way.
TooLoose and Andrew were a bit concerned about driving 50 miles without a spare into the back country where you might see another person every two weeks, but I said, "how often do you get two flats in one day?" and they agreed, and that was that.
The Titanium mine isn't really a Titanium mine. It's a mountain peak where somebody crashed an Air Force plane several years ago, scattering pieces of Titanium hull all over everywhere. And Titanium mining isn't done with a shovel there, it's done by wandering around looking at the ground. This was so similar to mushroom hunting that I proved immediately successful and we had a big pile of Titanium fragments in no time.
We made our way back to town without incident and went to see Moderate Bob. He had just loaned his truck out to someone to haul some rocks, and in cleaning it out after it was returned, Bob had found a piece of Malachite as big as a box turtle.Pretty lucky fellow, huh? Meaning Bob, not the fellow who had overlooked the Malachite.
Bob was delighted with the Titanium haul and promised to fabricate some nice earrings for Ker Ann and cough up some money and loan Andrew a tire to boot - which we immediately mounted on the vehicle. So we were happy campers heading back to Andrew's place down by the Verde river.
And guess what? The next morning when we came out, the truck not only had THREE flat tires, but the battery was dead as well. The only tire not flat was the one Moderate Bob had given us. This was when I got my first inkling that maybe Bob was a jinx. My next inkling occurred the same day when, tires pumped up and battery charged, we were on our way to town and encountered Moderate Bob coming the other way, in fact, on his way to Andrew's for a visit. We stopped and talked in the road, and since Bob had brought beer, we decided to follow him back to Andrew's.
But such was not to be and in making the one point turn to go the other way, the truck bogged down in the berm and we spend two hours jacking it up and carrying stones from the desert to throw under the wheels. About the time we finished, Moderate Bob appeared on his way back to town. My suspicions were piqued.
When we finally made it back to Andrew's place, we discovered that Bob had put the extra beer in the refrigerator AND THE REFRIGERATOR NO LONGER WORKED. When I expressed my feeling about Bob and jinxdom, both Andrew and TooLoose jumped on the bandwagon, reciting horrifying stories that fit right into the pattern, like the time that TooLoose borrowed Bob's motorcycle and the front wheel fell off. Or the time that Andrew was testing the generator on Moderate Bob's truck and the voltmeter caught fire. There were so many incidents that we all became convinced.
This was a Hoo-Doo. It is different from a curse.
When the Cleveland Indians moved into their brand-new major-league stadium a few years ago, they had the option of changing the name of the team or at least the Chief Wazoo logo to something that was less offensive to Native Americans. However, they didn't do this - claiming instead that most American Indians LIKED the logo. Big mistake. Evidently they offended a Shaman somewhere, who gave them the curse. Almost immediately they were plagued by a run of bad luck, including the hurricane that wrecked Spring Training Camp along with most of the rest of Homestead, Florida, and the outright SCALPING of the pitching staff in a bizarre and fatal motor boat accident.
The team - however - held onto the name and the logo right up through the crushing loss of the World Series in 1995. It was almost as though they were laboring under the curse "always the bridesmaid, never the bride", one which repeated itself in 1997 in the eleventh inning with 2 outs to win, when they were again sent home the losers.
The difference between bad luck and a curse is the ability to change the latter by lifting the curse. But if the cursed, like the Cleveland Indians, head-strongly continue on their path, filled with the hubris pride that presages disaster in the old Greek tragedies, then a curse and bad luck look very much the same. But a curse and a Hoo-Doo are completely different.
So how would our ancient ancesters have handled Moderate Bob? Would they make him emperor and worship him? Or would they exile him from every community?
Many years ago, Schmidt the Chemist bought a VW bus for a low, low price, and everyone said he was lucky to find such a deal. Schmidt said, "maybe."
And when he and his buddies were travelling out to Mr Appleby's for Memorial Day, and the engine started running on 3 cylinders, his buddies all said what rotten luck and left him, and Schmidt said "maybe."
But when the man at the garage said the only problem was a loose rocker arm, he also said that Schmidt was pretty lucky. and Schmidt said, "maybe."
And when the state cop stopped him for speeding just down the road and he didn't have his drivers' license or registration and had to spend about 10 hours in jail, everyone in the slammer said, "bad luck", and Schmidt said "maybe."
But that was the year they had the big forest fire at the Forbes State Park ("camping with pyros") and one of Schmidt's buddies died in the blaze, and Schmidt might have too, so generally everyone now agrees that Schmidt was pretty lucky, but you know what Schmidt still says, "...maybe."
When Moderate Bob gave me the earrings, I had to admit that they were outstanding. He had inlaid a pattern in the Titanium with Osmium, a salt of platinum that costs about $1,000 a gram, and there was a polished chunk of Dyerite on each earring. But there was no way in the world I was going to take ANYTHING of Moderate Bob's on the train with me, know what I mean? So I asked Bob what was the best way to ship the earrings back to Ker Ann, and he said that what he always does is just affix the jewelry to the face of a post card and send it with post card postage through the US mail. And since he had never had any trouble doing it, I decided to give it a try.
Needless to say, the post card arrived at Ker Ann's without the earrings, and her theory was that the earrings had gotten caught in one of the mail sorting machines and were lost forever. But that same week was the 60 car wreck outside Coalinga, California, and to this day I have a suspicion that those earrings were somehow involved, that someone happened upon Moderate Bob's creation and inherited the cloud of bad luck associated with it, spewing doom and destruction across the landscape.
...maybe.
c 1997 Air Cooled Volkswagen Junkyard of Richfield, Ohio http://www.acvwjyro.com "Where Advice Is Always Free"(216)659-3638 This story may be distributed only if it is not altered in any way and is distributed freely without charge.