My lucky Weasel Pelt was purchased by my father off an Indian Reservation in 1969… It disintegrated about 10 years later.
Bad Breaks and Misunderstandings
My life isn’t really unmanageable it just takes a long time to explain… I mean, logically it is very linear but the finer points are parallel rather than in series so the reader (or listener) is left with the feeling I’m going in circles and quite often ends up nauseated and dizzy… Like the path from Juvenile hall for stealing cars in 1979 to the Coconut Head 5150 Rescue via the LA Toyota Prius Grand Priz of 2012 is a straight one however nobody could see if they were not looking to the sides while walking that path…. I know I wasn’t… If you are confused don’t worry… I haven’t even explained the Coconut Head Rescue yet and probably won’t for weeks to come.
This is a true story… But nobody is going to believe it.
You see… At the age of 14 I had a transportation problem I lived in the sticks of Ojai, California and everything that was important to me was about 20 miles down the hill in Ventura… So I stole a car… Now If you are going to be stealing cars I strongly recommend you steal cars that run well because stealing the particular car I did was an ordeal…
The old guy that lived down the road a piece from my parents house had this little Datsun pick up truck that just sat in his driveway with the keys in it… He only used it to drive to the mailbox at the end of the road. It seemed to me that that was a waste and that I could put it to good use in order to visit the girlfriend I don’t think I’m going to talk about at all here during the evenings.
The first thing I encountered was that the headlights didn’t work. I spent that evening at the end of the road repairing the wiring to the headlamp switch and fuse box then put the little truck back before it was missed in the morning. A few nights later in my second attempt to escape the upper Ojai Valley I discovered that it leaked an incredible amount of oil, so I fixed the old canister type oil filter housing and fittings… That took two nights and I did it all in his driveway (The driveway was pretty far from the house).
Finally one night I got it all the way down to Ojai Proper before it started to overheat it took all the rest of that night till almost dawn in order to nurse it back where I spent the next few nights removing, repairing and re installing the radiator… I had even brought home some new hoses, Oil filter with the proper gaskets for the housing, oil, a set of spark plugs and points I’d obtained from the small parts store in town during the time I was supposed to be in school.
The little truck ran like a dream… And a couple of nights later I was pulled over felony style in Ventura and arrested for GTA (Grand Theft Auto).
The Juvenile Court Judge thought I might be retarded…
I wasn’t any good at stealing cars but it seems I have a natural knack for fixing them…
30+ years later… I’m still a mechanic.
Psychotherapy May be the Root Cause of My Insanity.
So… After serving my time I was ordered to therapy and fortunately or unfortunately Ojai was a pretty small place so I knew the therapist that was assigned my case… I’d been sleeping with his daughter on an off all through the prior school year so my visits consisted of me trying my damnedest not to let that fact slip out.
He and I talked a lot once a week for a number of months…
He asked me If I smoked pot, I lied…
He asked my if I had thoughts of Suicide, I lied.
He asked me if I thought I might be a homosexual, I told him the truth, but I don’t think he believed me.
He asked me if I knew his daughter… I said “I think, so… Yeah, we had a few classes together”.
So for all that time, every time I left a therapy appointment, I’d sit on the steps trying to control the hyperventilation… I actually began to see his daughter more often because she sought me out… During that time she told me how crazy her father was and how he had no business messing with peoples minds because he smoked so much hash he was a danger to society at large…
This made my visits to the good doctor even scarier… I just knew at any minute he was going to flip out.
I decided it would be a good idea to stop seeing his daughter…
She said no and that if I left her she would tell her father about us in a note then kill herself …
I think she was the first Psychopath / Borderline Personality I’d encountered…
She started making plans for our wedding….
I stole another car and went back to Juvenile hall where it was safe.
Epilogue: The Weasel Pelt
A weasel pelt…Really… I was thinking about this one evening and told my wife about it… What a crazy thing for a kid to have… I started laughing so hard I was in tears.
Somehow I think it was the nexus of what drove me to being just so damn weird in the first place.
There are so many crazy things and experiences that make up who I am today it’s beyond my capability to get it all out… Like this story of how I wound up a felon before I was 15… Just as unlikely but just as real as that damn weasel pelt.
later on I bought that crazy little pickup truck from the old dude and restored it to the glory it once had been in 1966 and drove it around for years… It was a sketchy little POS because it was so light with had such a short wheel base that driving it at freeway speeds was like drawing a straight line with an Etch-a-Sketch and the little J-13 forklift motor that powered it broke down all the time… I called that truck my Weasel Mobile.