The dude who sold me his truck was a distracted and mournful fellow who seemed to be living under diminished circumstances. For one thing he was living on the sofa of a friend, an art teacher who had five cats that were draped all over the small apartment like sea creatures. He owned a sixth, a gigantic gray cat that he said was going to show us a great trick, a wonderful trick and he went into the bathroom and ran the water in his tub, all the while calling for his cat who wandered around the apartment listlessly. Did I mention that it was a very large cat? After a while he gave up which was quite disappointing: what was the cat supposed to do? But we had business at hand, the transfer of ownership of an 20-year-old pickup truck, a Mazda B2000 that the dude said he loved but had given him a lot of heartache. Later on we speculated that he had suffered a romantic setback and was projecting certain emotions onto his vehicle. He had bought the truck from a Russian guy who like all Russians had jury-rigged the electrical system with all sorts of weird half-assed knucklefucks. Such as, instead of fixing the dashboard light he had illuminated the instrument panel with a flashlight mounted on a stick. The dude said he had spent a lot of time working on the electrical system but by “working on” he meant systematically removing and throwing away every nonessential electrical device including the blower motor, dome light, hazard switch, radio, reverse lights cigarette lighter and horn. We went back into the apartment and I noticed that every painting on the walls was of a cat, and I gave him my driver’s license to fill out a bill of sale. He studied it for a long time and said, “Hmm, Aquarius…” and then told us a complicated story about how he had bought the truck with hopes of picking up all his possessions which for some reason were in storage in Arizona but the truck had overheated in the Mojave desert and he had towed it back to Los Angeles and it had nearly broken his heart. Before I drove off he stroked the hood and told the truck, “I had such high hopes for you…. Such high hopes.” |