Used cars for sale here; will accept any offer!

There are many rules associated with poker, some of them official and others not so much, and one of the oldest and most important of the not so much official rules is this: first, in every game there is a sucker, a not very good player with a lot of money and an undeservedly high opinion of his skill as a poker player. The point of this clod’s participation in the game, a participation that the other players encourage enthusiastically, is to lose and lose badly, thereby enriching all the other players.  Second, if you have been playing for more than fifteen minutes and you can’t figure out which of the other players is the sucker, then you’re it. This is a very simple rule, very simple indeed, and yet it is truly amazing just how often it is broken. You would think that people would catch on; after all, everyone knows the old saw about a fool and his money; but some people cannot admit, not even for a moment, that they are the fool in this situation.  We’ve all seen or heard of such people-the blustering bully who finally gets his comeuppance, the miser whose greed finally gets the better of his better judgement and invests in a scheme to factory farm the goose that laid the golden egg, and my favorite, the guy who never got over being the smartest kid in class who does something incredibly stupid and then can’t bring himself to admit that he just did something incredibly stupid.  Like a pretty girl caught in flagrante delicto with only a small towel to cover her delicto, the smartest kid in class has to keep changing his story to cover the glaring evidence of his dumbness.

Take, for example, a couple named Harry and Mickey, who are new arrivals here in our happy little burg.  They’re a nice couple—I see them every so often at work—he has some kind of government job and she is a nutritionist down at the middle school. Well, they moved up here to our happy little burg from the great metropolis to the south and if you know anything about the metropolis then you know that the one thing you really don’t need down there is an automobile. Why would you need one? There are buses and subways and taxis, and now there is the Uber car service for those people who don’t like any of their other transportation options.  And all of these options would be more than enough, if they still lived in the metropolis, but they don’t; they live here now, and I believe that I have mentioned here that in this neck of the woods mass transit is the car that brings a Roman Catholic family to St. Thomas the Apostle’s Church on Sunday. There are no other transportation options in this area.  Given the circumstances, therefore, Barry and Mickey needed a car. They wanted a new car, but due to the poor economy these days, they had to settle for a used one instead.  So, Harry went down to Ali Hakim’s Hook’em & Rook’em Used Car and Auto Carpet Shop down at the junction of County Road 93 and the interstate to get himself a brand new used car.  And here Harry ran into some trouble.

It’s not as if a lot of people didn’t try to warn him about Ali Hakim. The last man to get the better of Ali Hakim in a business deal was Mr. Cummings, who suspected that Ali was trifling with his daughter Gertie and so suggested that Ali could enhance his chances of living a long and productive life by marrying Gertie. People have told me that Ali was not entirely enthusiastic about the idea of matrimony, but that Mr. Cummings’ good friend, the Reverend Oscar F. Mossberg, a most learned and pious man of God much given to ending his sermons with the exhortation, Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition[i], convinced Ali that he had nothing to lose by marrying Gertie and maybe there’d be something in it for him. I suspect that Ali Hakim got over his initial reluctance to the idea of matrimony, if his six kids are anything to go by, but no one’s gotten the better of him since then and so most people don’t even try.  Most people, however, didn’t include Harry, which is something he liked to tell people every time the opportunity arose. 

Harry was not the smartest kid in his class—he just looked like he was—and for most of his life that was enough.  He was a tall, good-looking fellow who smiled easily and had a good line of gab, and I’ve heard more than one person say that Harry should try being a salesman or go into politics, that he’d be great at it.  I suspect that they’re right; Harry would be great at both jobs. Talking came naturally to him and he could talk people into seeing things his way by convincing them that what he was saying made a great deal of sense, even if, after you’d thought about what he’d said for a little while, it didn’t.  I suspect that’s why I never really got used to Harry—there was just something a little bit slippery about him that I never liked. Harry was one of those guys who had glided through life on luck and charm for so long that he couldn’t imagine a situation where he wouldn’t be successful, and to me, there’s something more than a little off-putting about a man who thinks he can walk in front of a fan just as the cow flop hits the blades and come out of the encounter with clean, freshly creased trousers.  Maybe it’s just me.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I did not witness the following myself. I was not there and therefore I must rely on the testimony of Ali Hakim’s secretary, Rachel Jackson, whom, in the further interests of full disclosure, I have known since we were both kids in St. Thomas the Apostle School, and yes, that was quite a while ago, and no, the further interests of full disclosure do not require me to tell you how long quite a while ago was.  I trust Rachel and I hope you will trust her as well. The day at Ali’s Used Cars started quietly enough: Rachel answered the phone, the mechanics in the service department prepared to separate the arms and legs of customers unwary enough to come in without a valid warranty, and Mr. Hakim read the newspaper and drank a cup of an incredibly thick black sludge that he called coffee and his staff suspected was motor oil.  Harry came in at around ten o’clock in the morning and asked to see Mr. Hakim right away.  He was busy, he explained to Rachel, and he knew what he wanted and he wanted to get on with it right away.  With that, Harry did his best impression of a busy man of affairs who has better things to do with his time than stand around all day dickering with some greasy foreigner over the price of a used car. So, Rachel Jackson called Mr. Ali Hakim out of his office and away from his cup of ungodly thick coffee to meet with Harry, the cleverest fellow in all the world.

The meeting did not go well. Long story short, Harry went into his smartest in the class aren’t I the cleverest fellow you’ve ever met mode that had served him so well his entire life, and Mr. Ali Hakim went into his Persian bazaari mode, which really isn’t a mode at all—it’s who he is.  Ali Hakim would sell ice cream makers to Eskimos if he thought he could turn a profit at it. He asked Harry to come into his office so they could discuss what Harry wanted in a fine pre-owned automobile. Harry tried to beg off, citing time concerns and that he already knew what he wanted, he just wanted to know if Mr. Hakim could give him a good deal on the car he had in mind, but Mr. Hakim would not dream of doing business without offering his customers a nice cup of coffee, a few minutes of polite conversation, and a hot cinnamon roll—Mr. Hakim is partial to hot cinnamon rolls in particular and carbohydrates in general, especially carbohydrates topped with sugar.  So, Harry went into Mr. Hakim’s office, still convinced of his innate superiority to this immigrant carmonger, if that’s even a word, and ninety minutes later, still convinced of his innate superiority to this immigrant carmonger, which I suspect isn’t really a word at all, Harry left Mr. Hakim’s office, the proud owner of a yellow 1972 Plymouth Barracuda with black stripes.  I damn near busted a gut when I heard about it.

I am deeply acquainted with this particular yellow 1972 Plymouth Barracuda with black racing stripes; my brother owned it thirty years ago. Before he enlisted in the Navy, my brother sold it to Tommy Zaleski, who sold it to someone else a few years after that. That car has bounced from one end of our happy little burg to the other and the idea that anyone in their right mind would actually want to buy that pile of movable junk is too fantastic to believe, or it would be, if Harry hadn’t actually bought the thing.  In his defense, I should point out that the car looks pretty good for a 1972 Plymouth Barracuda sold in the second decade of the 21^st century—Mr. Hakim clearly put some money into bodywork.  Whether he put even more money into fixing the engine, I don’t know. I do know that when my brother owned the car, the engine had a nice coating of rust in a couple of spots.  I am sure that Mr. Hakim has addressed the matter. 

In any case, no sooner had Harry bought the car than people began telling him that he had made a mistake.  Everyone who’d ever dealt with Ali Hakim told Harry that the man could not be trusted at all; my brother and Tommy Zaleski told him that the car was old as the beard of Moses and not worth the two thousand dollars Harry had paid for it. Given the number of people who tried to help him, you might think that Harry would check with the Better Business Bureau to see if Mr. Hakim had any complaints (he does, veritable squadrons of complaints) or that he might have another mechanic check the car to make sure someone—I’m not going to name any names here—hadn’t been fooling around with the odometer.  You might think that, but you would be wrong.  The Barracuda was a great car and he had gotten a great deal on it. I know that, because Harry told me so himself.

I have to admit that it took a great deal of strength not to laugh in the man’s face. I really didn’t want to hurt his feelings; Harry is a nice guy, all in all, but for the smartest guy in the room, he’s remarkably thin-skinned.  He doesn’t like people contradicting him and when someone does, he tries to talk over them. It must work for him, I suppose—he’s gotten this far in life without anyone punching him in the nose—but it’s left him sort of brittle, if you know what I mean.  He’s talked such a good game all his life that he can’t process the idea that someone could get the better of him and when someone does, he just denies it.  Professional poker players love guys like Harry: a not very experienced player whose ego won’t let them admit that they are playing at a level way over their head.  Guys like Harry will stay in the game until they’ve lost every penny in their stake. It’s horribly unfair to take advantage of the suckers like that, but I guess professional poker players have to eat too, you know.

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[i] The Reverend Mossberg was a veteran of both Korea and Vietnam, and therefore convinced that church services were something he had to get through as quickly as possible in order to avoid incoming enemy mortar fire. Some experiences are more profound than others, as I am sure you will agree, and so Reverend Mossberg was still praising the Lord and passing the ammunition long after the congregation’s need for ammunition had passed. 

MILL STREET AND THE LETTER OF THE LAW: I am a great believer in the black letter approach to law. I think the law is what it says it is and that judges must base their interpretations of the law on what is actually in the law and not what they want to see in the law. I believe that the Constitution gives Congress certain enumerated powers and that if Congress want to make the case for an implied power then Congress must clearly show from what enumerated power that implied power flows, and that such a flow from one to the other had better resemble the water coming out of my faucet and landing in my bathroom sink and not the Mississippi River after it breaks a levee. What I do not believe is that respect for black letter law means that you can drive two miles below the speed limit when I am trying to get to work in the morning. And yes, if you’re reading this, I mean you, lady, the one in the blue Ford Taurus who insists on driving 28 in a 30mph zone.

Let me be brutally honest here: I hate getting up in the morning. Getting up in the morning is a royal pain in the gluteus maximus, which, if I haven’t told you already, and if I haven’t then I don’t know how I missed you, is something I can live without these days, given that I have pulled all sorts of muscles in my gluteus maximus and in my thighs and I would just as soon do without any more pain in that portion of my body if I can avoid it. So the psychic crunch of getting myself out the door and on my way to the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread is already bad enough without having a slowpoke, or worse, a gaggle of slowpokes—slowpokes never seem to travel alone; there’s always two or more of them on the highway at the same time—trying to figure out just how late for work they can make me be while raising my blood pressure to dangerously high levels. Apparently, there is a door prize for whoever can combine maximum lateness with my turning purple with rage. I don’t know what the prize might be, but if it’s a good one, I might try to win myself, unless I can’t enter the contest for legal reasons; that’s always a possibility, you know.

Today’s winner, the blue Ford Taurus lady, slowed to fifteen miles an hour as she passed the old high school and continued to do fifteen miles an hour until she was well past the end of the school zone. The more alert among you, and you know who you are, have no doubt noticed the adjective in front of the words high school. That word is old, the use of said word implying that somewhere in our happy little burg there is a new high school where tomorrow’s future leaders of this our Great Republic can take drugs and engage in gratuitous sex and violence while marinating in the usual bath of meaningless political correctness that passes for American education in our times.

Let me remove any doubt: there is, in fact, a new high school here in our happy little burg. This worthy and very expensive institution is located on Grand Street, which is not very grand, to be truthful, but does have a lovely view of the two prisons, one a medium and the other a maximum security prison, which the Vampire State operates here. The prisons are about a half a mile down the road from the new high school, which saves time when it comes to removing the more flagrant malefactors in the high school, as the state can simply ship the horrid little punks from seventh period gym class to the slammer without annoying everyone else in town.

By contrast, the old high school is on Mill Street, which runs right into Main Street, wherein lies my place of employment. Between Mill Street and Grand Street lies most of our happy little burg; the two streets are nowhere near each other, they do not intersect, and the old high school now contains nothing but the Ghost of Adolescent Angst Past and some fairly large roaches, whose civil rights all but the most fanatical Buddhists and Jains agree are moot when they are not actually pointless, so you can run the cockroaches over in any conveyance you choose— all things from Keds to Cadillacs are all perfectly acceptable bug squashers here in our happy little burg. Other than the fact that our local gendarmerie enjoys using that bit of Mill Street in front of the old high school as a speed trap in the wee small hours of the morning—they have to do something to justify all the overtime they get—there is no reason for anyone to be driving fifteen miles an hour on Mill Street. First, it is no longer a real school speed zone because there are no schools in the zone. Second, I do not look like a cop—uniformed police officers, for example, do not have beards, nor will they be screaming obscenities at you for doing the speed limit while trying to consume the morning caffeine, nor will they be turning purple as they scream at you. Third, I do not drive a cop car or any other type of automobile that undercover police officers favor. Fourth, there is no chance of your hitting a student in this vicinity; in fact, you could argue that with the test scores the local student body gets on a regular basis there is no real chance of your hitting a real student over at the new high school either, but I will leave that argument for another time and place. In short, my fair lady in the blue Ford Taurus, MOVE IT! I AM LATE FOR WORK! GET A MOVE ON! GET THE LEAD OUT, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! I DON’T HAVE ALL DAY TO WAIT FOR YOU! COME ON, YOU LOUSY……I should probably stop drinking so much caffeine in the morning; it clearly isn’t improving my mood on my way to work. It’s probably bad for my health too; most things are nowadays.

POOR UNCLE MAX, RIP: Oh my God, that’s terrible news! Oh, I’m so sorry to hear of your troubles, Akaky, your Uncle Max, he was a good man, may he rest in peace. His troubles are over, poor man, and he’s in a better place. He didn’t suffer, I hope. Ah well, lad, it happens to us all, sooner or later. His time had come, that’s all, and [I really love this bit] things could have been much worse, you know [how? The guy died, for chrissakes, how does it get much worse than that?]

The above is just a portion of the sort of thing you hear these days at an Irish wake, which is not the drunken bacchanal of the fevered non-Celtic imagination—we have St. Patrick’s Day for that sort of thing—but rather a somewhat somber event where you remember the dearly departed’s good points, gloss over the dearly departed’s not so good points, comfort the widow in her hour of grief and tribulation, and stare sharply at those members of the clan who didn’t get the memo about the Irish wake not being the drunken bacchanal of the fevered non-Celtic imagination. In Uncle Max’s case, however, much of what I’ve mentioned did not occur and when it did occur, the occurrence became an exercise in trying to keep a straight face. Everyone found glossing over Uncle Max’s not so good points something of a trial, as the only things most people who ever dealt with Uncle Max really remembered about Uncle Max was his not so good points. In short, Uncle Max was a complete shit.

Saying such a thing about Uncle Max pains me deeply, a statement that falls somewhere between a campaign promise and a Spanish fly ad on the Albany, Chicago & Washington mendacity scale. I forget where Uncle Max stood in the birth order; I think he was the last or the next to last of my father’s siblings, not that it matters now, but anyone who ever met him agreed that Uncle Max was the handsomest, most charming bastard that they’d ever met in their lives. There is an Uncle Max in every family [I think]—the lovable rogue who gets away with stuff the other kids can only dream of getting away with. The problem with lovable roguery is that after a while, it gets tiresome and by the end of his life Uncle Max had gotten incredibly tiresome, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

My first childhood memories of Uncle Max are set in the bucolic splendor of our happy little burg, where my parents had just bought a small vacation home where my brothers and me could spend our summer vacations having good clean fun instead of roaming the hot and gritty streets of the great metropolis thinking of new and ingenious ways of getting into trouble. At first, our enforced sojourn amid the fresh air and the green, green grass of not home had a profound psycholaxative effect on my brothers and I—we were bored absolutely shitless. But kids will be kids, after all, and soon we found things to do that were just as exciting as the things we could have done in the city. A burning barn, for example, may not provide the high drama of an apartment house fire, but the lack of tragic potential is more than made up for in comic possibilities; watching the local volunteer fire department trying to get itself organized and put out an actual fire was, in those far off days, one of the better shows on Earth. I should mention here, before the onslaught of angry letters from volunteer firemen and the ladies’ auxiliaries from one end of this our Great Republic to the other arrive on my doorstep, that our local volunteer fire department has become much more proficient at their job since the days of which I speak, and that my brother wishes to apologize yet again for setting that barn ablaze. It was, as he has maintained for the past forty years, an accident.

Well, no sooner had our happy little family ensconced itself in our happy little burg than Uncle Max decided to pay us a visit. When he called my father, Uncle Max assured him that no, he wasn’t coming up to borrow money—he had plenty of money, thank you very much, and he didn’t need anymore, a claim my father doubted—fiscal responsibility, like almost any other form of responsibility you might care to mention, was not a virtue Uncle Max chose to cultivate with any degree of assiduity—but his brother being his brother, my father could not slam the door in Uncle Max’s face, even if that’s what my mother wanted him to do.

Uncle Max called on a Tuesday, if I remember this right, and he arrived the next Saturday in a very large car. I don’t remember what model it was; it might have been a Cadillac, but I can’t really be sure now. He’d borrowed the money to buy this particularly conspicuous bit of conspicuous consumption from a loan shark; banks in those halcyon days of yesteryear disliked lending money to someone who could not repay the loan, a prejudice many bankers seem to have overcome in the years since these events occurred; and, as he would have done with the bank, Uncle Max chose not to repay the loan shark, an insouciant attitude towards the financial verities that the loan shark no doubt found irritating in the extreme. In order to convince Uncle Max of the many benefits of the free market system in general and the installment plan in particular, the loan shark dispatched two of his minions to cajole Uncle Max into seeing economic reason. Something must have gone wrong with the interview, as the two minions woke up in the hospital the next day being treated by doctors convinced they’d stepped in front of a moving truck. [N.B.: Uncle Max had a bit of a temper, as you may have guessed, and he was a boxer in his teens. He was also one of the strongest men I’d ever seen. I saw him bend a Kennedy half-dollar between his thumb and his index and middle finger when he was sixty years old.]

As you might imagine, the loan shark was utterly aghast at this attack upon his employees and by his not getting the vig, although I suspect that latter aghasted him much more, if that’s even a word, than the former, and so our aggrieved Shylock sent forth squads of ill-intentioned men to find Uncle Max and show him the error of his ways, preferably in a very gory, painful, and public manner, lest Uncle Max’s example breed imitation amongst the rest of the loan shark’s clientele. Uncle Max, for his part, was also utterly aghast, possibly for the first time in his life, at the possibility that his actions might have adverse consequences, in this case very adverse consequences indeed, and so took this opportunity to vanish completely from the face of the earth.

Six months later, Uncle Max re-emerged as…Uncle Moshe. For reasons best known to himself, Uncle Max decided that being a Hasid, complete with blond beard and long dark coat, was the perfect disguise for a very erstwhile Irish-American altar boy on the run from an unhappy mob-connected loan shark (is there any other kind of loan shark, I wonder). To advance the verisimilitude of the disguise, Uncle Max had acquired a truly outstanding command of the Yiddish language, speaking with almost perfect accuracy a dialect of that language unknown to the vast majority of Yiddish speakers past and present. Uncle Max’s Yiddish was Yiddish in much the same way that pouring ketchup on your spaghetti and meatballs is Italian cuisine.

But the disguise must have worked; Uncle Max arrived on our doorstep one sunny Saturday afternoon in July all in one piece and without a scratch on him, his blond peyos fluttering in the wind, complete with the huge car that all the fuss was about and his Portuguese girl friend, Maria, and no, I have not counted the number of mitzvahs violated in either the letter or the spirit in the first part of this sentence. I don’t where Uncle Max met Maria and I am pretty sure I do not want to know. Maria could have been a gargoyle in another life and she could have been a gargoyle in this life as well, if she wanted the job. On the other hand, the two other things that really stood out about Maria really stood out, to the point that even I, at that tender age, wondered aloud if those things were real. My mother, ever the soul of etiquette, whacked me across the back of my head for my impertinence. To complete the inventory, it soon became self-evident that Maria’s English language skills were more than a little wanting; her contributions to the conversation were basically yes, no, please, thank you very much, and is that so, either singly or in some combination thereof. Whether she actually knew what these stock phrases meant is one of the great mysteries of modern times, but I suppose she meant well. She called Uncle Max “Moyshee” and she chain smoked cigarettes, often lighting a fresh cigarette with the still burning butt of her previous one, a once common habit here in this our Great Republic, and a fact I include here for its anthropological and historical interest to the younger readers. Maria and Uncle Max seemed very happy together, or as happy as a man who couldn’t speak Portuguese could be with a woman who couldn’t speak fake Yiddish.

As my parents settled down around the kitchen table with Uncle Max and Maria, my mother told my brothers and me to go out and play until she called us in for dinner. This happened much more then than it does now, when parents feel that they aren’t properly parenting unless they are constantly annoying their children every minute of the day. We trooped out the front door and spent the next several hours doing whatever it was we were doing—I forget the details now, but it probably had something to do with riding our bicycles down a very steep hill and seeing if we could stop before we ran into a very high stone wall, an amusement my father banned a few years later after a series of mistimed stops resulted in several expensive broken bones, three concussions, and one broken nose. After that, we played a lot of baseball, which, while interesting in its own way, did not have the same thrill quotient for us that potentially fatal blunt force trauma did. On this day, though, we did manage not to break anything by the time my mother started calling us in to eat, but it was not for want of trying.

I remember walking up the driveway when I heard something strange coming from the grass. I should point out here that at this time my home did not have a lawn in the conventionally understood meaning of that word, namely a largely pointless expanse of unnecessary foliage designed to give Mexicans of uncertain immigration status gainful employment. Instead of the trim, clipped green strip of your typical suburbanite’s darkest botanical fantasies, we had a wild, uncropped, uncut retro thatch of bush populated with ragweed stalks the size of dwarf sequoias towering over our heads and tall grass so impenetrable that a company of Viet Cong could hide out there for months on end without anyone realizing that Charlie had tunneled his way into the land of the free and the home of the brave.

My mother called again, this time for me, and told me to find Uncle Max and his guest—that’s the word she used, guest. I said okay and I started down the path through the front forest; it seems ridiculous to call such a broad swath of flora a lawn, now that I think of it; to find them. I got halfway down the path and called for Uncle Max, whereupon I heard an immediate “Jesus frigging Christ!” It was Uncle Max experiencing not a sudden Pauline road to Damascus conversion from faux Judaism to faux Christianity, but rather him proclaiming the usual male response to kid induced coitus interruptus. Maria screeched something in response in what I guess must have been Portuguese—I don’t speak that language so I can’t be sure. There was a momentary pink flash of this and that; apparently they were real; and then the sound of my father shouting angrily at Uncle Max from the porch. My mother appeared miraculously from nowhere and whisked me away into the house, where she scolded me for reasons I did not fathom at the time and that she would not explain, and the evening and the morning were the last day I would see Uncle Max for a long time.

And so Uncle Max is dead. I don’t know what happened to Maria; he may have married her; Uncle Max married several times, although I can’t say for certain that he ever divorced any of the wives. He died and his daughters wouldn’t pay for the funeral. They hadn’t seen or spoken to Uncle Max for thirty years or more and therefore saw no reason to shell out good money to bury a man who’d been little more than a sperm donor to them. After much hemming and hawwing, and a threat from the hospital that they’d send Uncle Max to potter’s field if someone didn’t pick up the body soon, my uncles paid for the cremation, complaining all the while that Max had managed to screw them over one more time. But the uncles got even with Uncle Max, though. Having Uncle Max’s name embossed on the urn would have cost another fifty dollars, so my uncles didn’t bother; they printed Uncle Max’s name and vital dates on a post-it note with a magic marker, taped the note to the urn, and then put the urn in my grandmother’s coffin. It’s not much, of course, but it’s a lot more than some people get.

GOVERNMENT CARS: I haven’t been keeping up with the news recently; some things are just too depressing for words and I’ve been trying to shift from my usual diet of negativity to something with fewer carbohydrates and more good cholesterol; so I’ve been missing things as they go zipping by, and one of the things that I’ve apparently missed is the United States government guaranteeing the warranties of the Big Three automakers. This was news to me, and apparently it was news to me about three weeks after it was news to everyone else here in this our Great Republic. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that my car is nine years old and that I finished making payments on it four or five years ago, so I am pretty sure that the warranty on my car ran out a while ago and that President Obama’s guarantee does not effect me in any way, which means that I am now officially easy meat for Lennie, my trusty and extremely expensive auto mechanic and a man whose kids my car has put through college at least twice. Having said that, I would think that people whose cars are still under warranty would start to worry right about now. At first glance, the idea that the full faith and credit of the United States government backs your car warranty should ease the fears of anyone with a warrantied car, but should reflection set in, and reflection almost always sets in like your brother in law from New Jersey parking his fat ass in your favorite chair after Thanksgiving dinner, troubles innumerable begin to spring up. I hesitate to point this out, a grammatical construction I’ve never really understood, since what usually follows after you say that you hesitate to point this out is the very thing you say you are hesitating to point out, but the same government that says it will guarantee your warranty is the same government that cannot successfully run a railroad, deliver your mail, or patrol its own borders. This, you’ll pardon me for saying so, does not inspire confidence in the long-term security of your warranty. So if you do have a government-backed auto warranty, you might want to start thinking about trading your car in for a Japanese or German car. If you are ecologically minded and concerned that getting a new foreign car may add to your carbon imprint, then now is a good time to think about buying a bicycle, or maybe a horse, although parking for the latter may be a bit hard to come by these days. And remember, if the government wants to guarantee the warranty on your horse, you might as well shoot it right now; five will get you ten the horse will be lame by the end of the year. And don’t forget to recycle the shoes.

FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BAMBI: You may find this hard to believe—I know I was stunned and amazed when I first heard it—but the vast majority of bald eagles do not know any of the words to The Star-Spangled Banner. That’s a solid gold fact. In addition to this, most bald eagles do not spend a lot of time thinking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unless happiness is a species of fish, have no clue what the Constitution is all about, and are reasonably certain that Lincoln’s Gettysburg address refers to someone’s summer home or maybe an automobile dealership; most bald eagles have never even heard of the American Civil War. This, however stunning you may find these revelations, is nothing less than the plain unvarnished truth of the matter. Your average bald eagle knows as much about American history and government as your average American teenager, and with less excuse as well, since, unlike American teenagers, they’ve not had to endure that prolonged exercise in legally compelled ignorance known as compulsory education. When you see a bald eagle sitting in a tall tree looking proud and majestic, the one thing you can be fairly certain of is that he’s not thinking about is how he’s proud to be an American; he’s either thinking about getting something to eat or how eagle babes really dig this whole proud and majestic look he’s got going on.

This goes on all the time, of course; one culture after another picks an animal and makes the poor critter the repository of all the alleged cultural virtues, whereas the animal itself is just trying to make a living and support the wife and kids on the crummy salary national symbols get paid. This happens to birds all the time; the French cockerel, for example, does not worry all that much about projecting pride, arrogance, and that certain je ne sais quoi that makes the French French. No, he’s just trying to avoid being the coq au vin when your family comes over for Sunday night dinner and sometimes he does not succeed. Recently, Americans had had to put up with penguins marching hither and yon, like maitre de’s on parade, and some animated nonsense about penguins dancing up a storm south of the border, down Antarctica way. Now, penguins may dress better than your average bird, who, with a few exceptions, tend to dress with all the style of your sixteen-year old son going to the junior prom (ruffled pink shirts and big bowties? What the hell were we thinking?), but penguins also tend to live together in huge colonies without bathrooms, like the completely stoned inhabitants of some very bad 1960’s hippie commune—ashram—Volkswagen minibus packed with Deadheads, and feed their kids by puking half-digested fish into their mouths on a regular basis. Try doing that with your kid and the tuna sandwich you had this morning and see how fast you wind up in the slammer. Clearly, while the penguin is, no doubt, a very snappy dresser, penguins are lousy dancers and it’s pretty clearly they lack the social graces to be successful in modern American society. So, eagles are noble, doves are peaceful, swans are romantic; this sort of thing is all codswallop and balderdash, when it isn’t busy being poppycock. Birds are none of the above; they are altogether filthy creatures with quite disgusting, if not actually nauseating, personal habits, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they wouldn’t mind crapping all over your brand new shoes just for the fun of it, if you gave them half a chance. All the patriotic chest thumping about the symbolic importance of the bald eagle can’t change that one damn bit.

Other species get the same sort of treatment as well, and I blame most of this on Walt Disney. During his career, Walt probably did more to protect animals that don’t deserve protecting than anyone else in human history. Mice, whether you call them Mickey or Minnie, are not cute little adorable balls of furry fun; they are vermin. Ducks really are as vile-tempered as Donald is, so there’s a little truth in advertising there, and deer are not sweet, lovable nature’s children who only want to play and frolic in the forest primeval with their cute little furry friends without having to worry about people and their nasty firearms; deer are oversized rats with hooves. Deer don’t want to frolic in the forest primeval; they want to eat my mother’s geraniums and her shrubbery and crap all over my front yard every chance they get. So when my co-workers accused me of trying to kill Bambi the other night, my answer is a) I didn’t kill the deer, b) I wasn’t trying to kill a deer at all, it was an accident, and c) the little bastard had it coming.

The fact is all I was doing was going to get my mother some milk and eggs. I was on a back road and a car had just passed me when I saw a deer bolt across the road like he’d just heard Bugs say deer season. I jammed on the brakes, as the one thing you learn quickly about deer around here is that where you see one, you will quickly see two. In my case, there were six or seven of the despicable beasts, all charging across the road at top speed without bothering to look to see if there was any traffic coming. There was; I was it. I managed to miss deer two through six with considerable ease; number seven, on the other hand, proved a little harder to miss, given its insistence on charging right in front of me and then hurling itself up onto the hood of my car. I slammed on the brakes; it seemed the right thing to do at the time; and the sudden de-acceleration caused my somewhat unconventional passenger to go flying through the air with the greatest of ease, and to land without the slightest scintilla of acrobatic grace. He landed with a pretty loud thump. As if that were not enough, the beast then gave me a dirty look that said if he had two legs instead of four, he’d be looking for a lawyer and suing my ass off right now. Then he went charging off into the woods after his friends, and without giving me his insurance card, either, which is the sort of silly irresponsible behavior that give many deer a bad name these days, if you ask me.

I suppose things could have been worse; hitting the deer only resulted in $327.56 worth of damage to the car. While he was busy being an unwilling hood ornament, the deer managed to kick my passenger’s side mirror off its mounting and to damage the electrical system on that side of the car, too. I wasn’t hurt at all, except in the wallet, and I think the deer suffered little more than bruised ribs and injured pride; he was up and running within seconds of my hitting him; so maybe this will alert him to the dangers of running around with a fast crowd after dark. If it doesn’t, then the next time he gets in my way, see if I cut Nature Boy anymore slack; no way, Bambi—next time, you’re venison.