The Vanagon Detective Story! The Case of the Counterfeit Emblems. As I sat at my desk in this sleazy joint that calls itself The Uncle Willy Automotive Detective Agency, a blonde dame came through the door like an old air-cooled pancake on fire. If my gut feeling about dames like this was right, I was going to need a bracer. I pulled open the desk drawer with the 35mm socket in its holster and the Southern Comfort. The socket got to stay in the drawer--it was Comfort I was after. I had recently refilled the bottle with the recommended VW blue coolant. I took a long swig, taking my time and squinting at the dame as I swallowed. She looked as impatient as a Porsche backed up behind a cross-country Vanagon tour. I handed her the bottle. Without a word, she downed the rest of it and pitched the bottle through the open window, where it landed on a pile of CV joints with a crash. "Hey, that stuff ain't cheap," I growled. "Here, if you're going to drink like a wasserboxer radiator, pour this down the maw." I handed her an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels. "Never touch the stuff," she hiccupped. "Look, Willy. The name is Marsha, the game is a hot investigation of counterfeit VW emblems." My ears pricked up. They always do when someone calls me Willy. Frankly, it gives me the willies. But I was interested in the part about hot. "I'm interested in the part about hot," I sneered. "When it comes to blonde dames, hot is my favorite part." I smiled--if you can call it a smile--and showed her my muffler burns. "I'm an expert on hot." "So you're hot," she cooed. "Here, this'll cool you down," she said, pouring the Jack Daniels on my crotch. ----------to be continued------------- Story so far. Against my better judgment, Marsha the Blonde had talked me, President and Treasurer-pro-joko of the Uncle Willy Automotive Detective Agency, into helping her track down the source of the counterfeit Volkswagen emblems. She claimed to know where it was, an old dark three-story on the South Side. Right then I should have smelled something. Something like maybe twenty-year-old Bonded Tranny Oil. We got there and started up the narrow, darkly lit stairway. It was scary as hell. My teeth sounded like collapsed hydraulic lifters in all eight valves. It wasn't helping that the wet spot on my crotch was spreading. Marsha held on to my arm as we climbed. Hey, this was great. No dame had actually touched me since 1965. No dame had been within fifteen feet of me, if you want to know the truth. "You stink, Willy," she said. Cool dame. Great sense of humor. We reached the third floor landing. I was gasping. I was pretty sure I was going to die of asphyxiated arhythmia or whatever that crap is. Suddenly, with no warning, a door opened and a man came through the door with a gun in his hand. "Been waiting for ya, Willy," he growled. "Von Wokker!" I panted. "Jokker Von Wokker! I should have figured you'd be mixed up in a caper like this one." I paused to light a a fag. I needed time to think. Von Wokker was a shady character with a heart like the vast interior of an air-cooled bus in January. A well-known international dealer in Volkswagen emblems. The greatest collection of Volks paraphernalia in the world. He even had microfiches of ... but wait a minute. Maybe I'm slow, but I'm still alive. It didn't take an Einstein to figure out that there had to be some dark and insidious connection between Von Wokker and Marsha. Otherwise, I reasoned closely, how did V.W. know to be expecting me? "Okay, dame," I sneered. "What's the connection?" She leered at me. "Ever hear of GNATT?" I leered back. "German Nameplates Are Top Trophies," I replied. "It's an international cartel that deals in stolen Volkswagen emblems. So what?" She leered back. "So make the connection, fool." We fleered at each other. "Okay, dame," I sneered. "What's the connection?" "The connection, idiot," she said sweetly, "is that Von Wokker is the President and I'm the Treasurer, no joko." My heart fell like a rusted-out muffler and was dragging the floor between my legs as Von Wokker waved me through the door with his gun hand. ---------------------------to be continued------------------------------ Story so far: Jokker Von Wokker, the Stolen VW Emblem King, got the blonde dame to lure me to his apartment. Turns out he just wanted to talk. "Look, Wokker," I said, why not just be reasonable and come to my office and talk? Why all this cheap mystery-story fol-de-rol with the gat? The gat looked amazingly like a fuel pump from an 84 Vanagon. Wokker waved the pistol. "Willy, he intoned, "I know from sad experience that this is the only kind of reason you are going to listen to from me." He waved it again. "Remember?" "Put that damned thing away," I growled. He had his point. Jokker got up out of his chair. "What I've got to tell you can't leave this room," he said darkly. He started going all around the apartment, looking behind furniture, looking in the closet, frowning like a new bus owner searching for rust spots after an East Coast winter. "Are the paranoids out to get you?" I quipped. Count on Willy for a quip. "Look, Willy," Von Wokker croaked--his version of a whisper. "If this gets out we're done for." "Von Dub, you old thief," I sneered. "If you can't take the compression get out of the combustion chamber." "But Willy, that's just it. I am not a thief." "Yeah, you and Richard Nixon," I quipped. Clip and save these quips, hey? "And stop calling me Willy. I got enough the willies already." The blonde cut in. "What Jokk is trying to tell you in his own clumsy way," she crooned, "is that none of those stolen Vanagon emblems we've been selling were really stolen." "Not any?" I cried, bewildered. (No big deal on bewildered, you can bewilder me with high beams.) "Well, hardly any," she said. "We've been manufacturing them. But we've got to pretend they're stolen so that people will buy them. Folks want the real thing." My teeth clattered out of my mouth sounding like a blown engine in Bozeman, Montana. "Here's the scoop," Von explained. "I got the moxie and the dame's got the front desk but we ain't got nobody with the brains." "Ho hum, tell me something I don't already know," I yawned. "We gotta have somebody with brains to run the emblem machines. They keep breaking down. We gotta have you, Willy. You run the machines." "Are you suggesting," I rasped, "that I should give up my lucrative Automotive Detective business to play Knick Knack on your Mechanisms?" "We gotta have ya, Willy." Von Wokker was pleading. I'd never seen him like this before. As unexpected as the feeling you get when you give your old van a new engine and a paint job. "Well, I'm gonna have to think," I enunciated thoughtfully. "I can't make a big decision like this in a day." "Willy, this is the concluding episode! You gotta decide now!" Von Wokker was waving his arms, looking like a freshly blown-out tire on hot pavement. "No, I don't," I said firmly. "I'll give you my answer in a week." "A week!" Von Wokker was turning purple with dispoplopsia or what the hell that is. "Willy! THIS IS THE LAST INSTALLMENT!" "Next week," I said quietly. ---------------------To be post-concluded, or what?----------------------- EPILOG The story so far: Von Wokker and the dame Marsha wanted me to work for them. I took a week to decide. Hell, I didn't need a week, I just couldn't resist the opportunity to make the old fart sweat blood for a week. Also, the last episode and one thing and another had already taken up my share of the Friday bandwidth. All that remained was to haggle over the cut. I did pretty well, since neith r Von nor the blonde could figure out how to make a three-way cut total 100%. They had to rely on me for the arithmetic, and though I'm not a lawyer, n ither did I foolishly give away my proper share, which came out to be 60%. At that, not as much as the parts markup at a dealer. Also, I made them quit calling me Willy. "So what do we call you?" they both said in perfect unison, like dual carbs in an old 72 Bus I used to have. "Call me VEEDUB," I smiled, if you can call it a smile. Really it looks more like the bottom side of a flat tire. "Short for Very Esteemed Excellent Debonair Urbane Bwana." They both had the same look, unison appearance, you could say, like twins who have run out of gasoline two blocks from the station. "VEEDUB it shall be," they both said formally and in perfect unison, avoiding each other's eyes and mine too. I hate cute endings but I gotta tell it like it is. Turns out our counterfeit "stolen" emblems were so much better quality than the originals that VW is going to start using ours at the beginning of the year. Five year contract. We're all tooled up and in production. Dammit, we're even rich. I didn't think I could get rich other than opening a VW junkyard. Yeah, life is good. More like retirement than anything. Many's the evening Von Wokker and the blonde and I sit around till 3 A.M. playing skat and drinking the recommended blue coolant. The only fly in the oilpan is that I can't seem to make it to first gear with the dame. Maybe I oughtta take a bath like she keeps saying. 03/31/95, 04/28/95, 05/05/95 wself@viking.emcmt.edu (Will Self) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A Old Tale from the Deep South It was a dark and stormy night. The strobing flashes of lightning darkened the already deepening shadows inside the old Volkswagen camper. The flames of the small campfire flickered, like the tongue of a snake, as the soft moaning of the wind increased. The trees bent over the campsite, their limbs draped in Spanish Moss, like old scarecrows in the tattered remnants of clothing long gone out of style. The little camper rocked slightly in the wind. The old fellow at the gas station this afternoon hadn't mentioned any storm. He only spoke about how this campground was haunted by the spirit of Jean Pierre Bapaume, one of the original explorers of this area, who accompanied Iberville on his trek through the swamps of Louisiana, Mississippi, and lower Alabama. Somehow the story didn't seem quite so laughable out here in the dark. What was it he said? Bapaume had been hung by the others from one of these very trees, and swore vengenance on any who dared seek refuge here. The old fellow never did say exactly what it was Bapaume had done to deserve hanging. I looked at my watch. It was nearly midnight. I hadn't realized it was so late ... the sky seemed strangely light, almost like twilight. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an armadillo walk out of the bushes along the road and head straight for the fire and me. I threw a rock in its direction, but it kept coming. As it reached the light of the fire, its eyes glowed greenish-yellow, and their gaze seemed to be fixed on me. "Are you to be here when Jean comes?" The voice startled me, a high- pitched squeaking voice, with a terrible accent. I stood up from my lawn chair and looked around, wishing I had brought some sort of weapon. There was no one. Only the armadillo and myself. Then the armadillo stood on its hind legs, looked straight at me, and the voice again said, "Are you to be here when Jean comes?" It was the armadillo speaking. I stared at him for a few seconds, then decided the storm and the beer were playing tricks on my mind. I threw a beer can and hit the armadillo directly in the snout ... he vanished. No smoke. No noise. No nothing. He just wasn't there. The beer can went right though him ... or rather, when he had been ... and rattled down the dirt road. Now I was sweating. I got the flashlight and walked around the campfire, shining the light on the dirt, looking for tracks of some sort. There was nothing there. No sign that anything had walked over that ground in the last two hundred years. I did not like this turn of events. I looked at my watch. It was exactly midnight. The wind was now only a soft whisper in the trees. I turned off the flashlight and started to walk back to the camper, when I noticed a rather large possum, sprawled out in my lawnchair, like some bloated lifeguard at the beach. His eyes were glowing red in the firelight, but they flickered somehow, as if glowing from within instead of reflecting the light of the campfire. "Are you to be here when Jean comes?" The voice was deeper than before, but the accent was just as bad. It was definitely the possum speaking, I could see his mouth move as he struggled with the English words. And he shifted his weight in the chair as he gestured with one of his forelegs. He apparently took my shocked demeanor to be misunderstanding, so he repeated his sentence, pausing slowly at each word, and speaking louder than before. I swallowed, and replied, "What do you mean?" "I just want to know if you will still be here when Jean comes", he croaked. "Jean do not like people to camp here. Jean do not like people at all." As he said this, a twisted sneer of a smile played upon his features. If a possum can smile, that is. Geez, I thought, now I'm talking to possums in the swamps of Alabama! How old was that beer!?? I picked up a stick and walked around the campfire, intending to defend my lawnchair, when the possum just faded out of view. He hadn't run away, or even moved, he just faded out of sight. I carefully felt all over the chair, but there was no warmth, no smell, no hair, no nothing. Only me, the crackling of the fire, and the whispering of the wind. "Are you be here for Jean?" This voice was deep, very deep. My spine grew goosebumps the size of golfballs. The voice was behind me, on the other side of the fire. I looked at the windows of the camper, to see any reflection of what was speaking, but there was nothing there. I turned slowly and looked behind me. An alligator, about ten feet long, was lying on his side, picking his teeth with a claw. He looked at me with bright blue-green eyes that seemed to steal all your willpower to resist. I looked away quickly and stared at the fire. The gator raised up on his rear legs, and sort of sat there, using his tail as a prop. His pale white belly glistened in the firelight. "I mean," he said, "Do you stay here til Jean comes?" "Man, if you ain't Jean, I'm GONE!!!!" I shouted over my shoulder as the Land Speed Record was broken by a 1971 Volkwagen Campmobile. I don't drink much anymore. I don't camp at places without at least three other campers there ahead of me. And I NEVER stay up past ten o'clock. 07/21/95 Joel Walker ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Big Joe It was a dark and stormy night. The wind howled like a love-sick dog, as the rain beat a nervous staccato on the windshield. The tires on the road made an angry hissing sound, trying to keep my little bus securely on the asphalt. The wipers strained and moaned against the flood, pushing one way and then another. The road could barely be seen in the dim glow of my headlights. . I hadn't seen it this bad in many years. As I rounded a curve, my headlights reflected off the back of an 18-wheeler driving slowly ahead of me. I slowed down and kept back from his trailer, wishing to avoid the spray from his wheels. I could see the lights clearly and the large letters on one rear door, spelling "Big Joe" with a cartoon character underneath. The sight of this made me laugh. Driving behind the truck was much easier, as his big tires moved most of the water out of the way. And I soon learned to trust his instincts as he braked for curves or swung wide for large puddles or fallen rocks. We drove on for what seemed like several hours, until the rain began to slacken and the wind died to just a steady breeze. The truck began to pick up a little speed, so I tagged right along behind. We hadn't seen any other traffic in either direction since I met up with the truck. And pretty soon, I could see the lights of a truck stop up ahead. I decided a cup of coffee would be just about perfect right now, so I pulled into the parking lot. "Big Joe" hit a couple of blasts on his air horns and kept rolling down the road. I guess he had known I was back there, after all. It was still drizzling as I made my way into the coffee shop, so I got a little wet. The smell of the food brightened my spirits considerably. The folks sitting around inside looked at me a bit curiously, however, and I asked the waitress about it when she came over. "Oh," she said, as she poured my cup of coffee. "They're just surprised that you made it through in this weather. Highway 41 has been closed now since three o'clock." "Well," I smiled, "I'd have never made it if it hadn't been for that trucker, Big Joe." And with that, she dropped the coffee pot, smashing the glass on the floor, spraying hot coffee all over her legs and my feet. Her face was the color of the napkins, and her eyes were the size of half-dollars. "I'm sorry," I said, trying to wipe as much of the coffee off my shoes as I could. I looked around at the other folks in the coffee shop and they looked pretty much the same as she did. "I'm sorry," I repeated, "Did I say something wrong?" By this time, another waitress had recovered and brought a broom and a mop to clean up the mess. "No," she said, "It's just that we haven't heard anything about Big Joe in a long time. He's dead, you see. Years ago, he was leading some cars down the road, in a storm just about like this one, when a rock slide carried him and his truck over the edge and down to river at the bottom." This time, I was the one who dropped the coffee. 08/18/95 Joel Walker Oh yeah!!! (huff and puff!) I am totally offended and feel real insecure and will retaliate with some transference of aggression. (huff and puff!) I wouldn't *ever* over react to someone's opinion that doesn't exactly match mine or respond to obvious flame bait for the sake of shaking up the list members. My wife and I saved up real hard for OUR sponges!!! I mean we're not some rich pukes, we waited for Dollar Daze at K-mart an then went shoplifting. We never realized how diffy cult it was to hide sponges! I for one had to compromise an git the paint that all of the mistakes are blended together. We kinda like the Bahama Beige color though! I had to stand on top of the bus an just pour it over the top until it oozed down the sides. This method helped seal the dried out rubber, tighten up the door rattles, and seize the windshield wipers. Mebbe this winter the rain and snow won't end up in my lap. I used to hate it when the package tray would fill up with water over night and then sloosh all over my Oshkosh, Unionsuit, and Johnson unit at the first hard right turn of the morning. We topped the bus all off with fifteen year shingles. Boy, what a chore it was to get all of those nails throught the metal. Now my bus is as slow as the Vanagon! Cool! =) For the detail areas we had to take a mouthfuls of paint and spit it through a straw that we stole from McDonald's. You know those industrial strength thick mothers that you could chew on the whole length of I-5 and never break through it. We had to compromise for the wood palette roof rack. We also discovered that vice-grip pliers make a great shifting coupler. As it whirs around, it creates a cool banging noise that helps kamo-flawge the sound of the solid tranny mounts and the no squelch noise from the CB. We couldn't afford seat belts so we decided to make the kids stand up in the back and hang on to bungee cords like a cheap subway. We tell them to pretend that it is the 'BART.' Sometimes we play like were riding the 'El' or the Manhattan Midtown Express. Works great until we "stop short" with the baby sitter in the van. ;) It would be real easy to get defensive about YOUR opinion *BOB* but I prefer to be the ultimate friendly guy who never stands up for himself (Except this time if you promise not to be mean back). Otherwise I apologize and will quiver in the corner. But hey, you did bring up some good points. Thanks for the sermon! 08/25/95 jim@atcweb.atc.1dc.com (Rusty VanBondo)