His heart runs on 4 cylinders
The windshield wipers are slapping towards the ends of their arc as Paul furiously turns the window crank like he’s jump starting a seized model T.
“As long as I have a hole in my ass I’ll never buy a Chevy. Designed all wrong…. Controls are in awkward places and if there’s any water on the windshield at all it blows in the window.”
It was another California winter rain blowing over San Francisco. They had already turned Mount Tamalpias from burnt yellow to green. For the moment turkey buzzards that circle the highway for roadkill were holed up somewhere keeping dry.
The white Chevy Express he was driving had just over 900 miles on it. It was a rental from Enterprise, full of flatware, champagne flutes and hemstitch napkins that matched the patterns on the service for eight. He was headed for Larkspur, a small town in Marin county, just over the Golden Gate bridge, for a photo shoot. In the world of catalogues, winter is the time to shoot summer.
“Pedal on the right sweetheart…” Paul tells the woman driving cautiously in the rain just ahead of us. He passes her mumbling, “fucking twat…” The word twat ryhmes with hat in his South End of London accent. “Sowfend” he calls it.
“England could explod and sink into the North Sea and I wouldn’t care… except for my family and my favorite chip shop’s there.”
It is seditious talk, but only the start. “I don’t care one bit for the Royal Fucking Family. It’s not just the obscene amount of money they have and how people run around powdering their asses…what really pisses me off? They live off you. Off the working classes. Does it make sense, having a parasite you worship?”
The Golden Gate has no toll Northbound. One is always half consciously watching the people walking across, looking for a jumper. What a pretty bridge, the rust colored red art deco spires with strings of suspension wires looping in natural apogees between them. Ocean bound tankers leaving the port of Oakland swing wide around Alcatraz, leaving rips in the water behind them.
There’s a lot out here that can kill you, things much larger than us, bad weather, strangers, hard work and parasites. A guy like Paul talks like he has chopped pipes and there’s a rumble that’s unsettling, but his heart is running on all four and it makes me glad to be alive.