Never the Same #78 Illogical Nostalgic

Kirk had only racing to look forward to and plenty to look back to.

 

 

Cue: “What else is There?” https://youtu.be/DEhbR4JqfPw?si=e4vVfspPJ4UsAUnv

 

            As always for young guy Kirk, his situation had changed once again, so he wasn’t the same as a week prior. Perhaps that’s why this episodic chronicle is named Never the Same. He pressed on not even looking back to the days, the months, the over a year he worked at the Georgia-Pacific drywall factory. The four different positions Kirk held, the people he worked with just as well forgotten�"gone from his life. This was not unlike after working at the dealership where the circumstances persuasively hit him in which he announced that he quit, then gathered his tools, and he was gone, forgetting it all in days. Or in college, where he forgot about it, school mates, and what he learned by the time he got home.  High school, well, doesn’t everyone want to forget high school? Rhetorical question because Kirk left it behind, but I assume many people gaze back to their school days with poignant longing.  Sometimes, we might say that you shouldn’t dwell on the past and Kirk sure didn’t�"much.  

            You might also say that because of things Kirk had endured over several changes in his life, it seemed like he could just motor on to his next set of circumstances, right? Well, without him realizing it, his departure from the drywall plant affected him in a way you might not consider. It wasn’t the fellow workers he missed or the social interactions, and he wasn’t going to miss the money too much because he would still get some for a while. No, those things he didn’t miss and even though he didn’t know it at first, Kirk missed the routine, the structure, the forced following of the eight to five work hours of work, and the positions where he was responsible for some trivial daily simple and tedious tasks as they might have been described. It seemed, perhaps, that he had some luck back there in bidding for and getting into those solo positions which suited him just fine or did his supervisors see something in him that he didn’t see in himself or know he had? Naw, he was just small town/farm boy Kirk with no skills or characteristics that were anything special to offer and what he had learned in these places just seemed to drift away in the breezes of time. Enough of Kirk’s nostalgia or lack there of in his life.

            Anyway, as expected, the weather changed for the worse after the abnormal warmup, that Indian Summer that seemed so long-ago last week. It turned cooler and damp with rain and drizzle�"it smelled like snow. With a gusty northern breeze Kirk would say it felt raw outside, but he had that project to work on, as he gazed outside looking for bits of snow whipping through the air.  

            Kirk had always been fascinated with the early seasonal start of snow falling and as winter progressed the accumulations inch by inch. Riding home with his father from the grandparents’ farm as a young preteen, Kirk would be mesmerized watching the snowflakes in the car’s headlights as they zoom up over the car seemingly and purposely avoiding the onrushing car. At the homestead around the same time of the year, every night he’d check and recheck the backyard with the bright yard lights to see if the snow had started as forecast. Considering it while riding in the car he couldn’t believe it possible that rain could change to snow during a voyage or actually be both types of precipitation at the same time. A bit difficult for a young brain to twig out but fascinating just the same.  Back to the business at hand.

            On a weekly basis, Kirk worked on filling the strict requirement of applying for jobs which no one, including him, really expected to fill. The unemployment rate remained extremely high, so no one, I mean not a single one business, was hiring. For many people the situation remained dire. Kirk should have felt lucky, but did he? Like the over-used cliche states concerning the practice of “picking the low-hanging fruit,” Kirk began leaving applications (because no one where he applied even bothered to talk to him about a job) close to home.  Starting with the hometown parts store, the counter men who knew Kirk by name, happily took his application, but told him things were slow at the parts store despite a lot of guys fixing their cars who never did before because no could afford to buy replacement cars.

            Kirk, of course, thought about applying at the old John Deere dealer who had a long profitable history with Kirk’s father, but the owner/operator had rubbed Kirk the wrong way on two different occasions. Once was when he applied for a job straight out of diesel school where Warren treated him like a lowlife dummy and later when he asked Warren if they’d sponsor his stock car after getting Rookie of the Year and he treated Kirk like, well, a lowlife dummy. After those visits, Kirk refused to go back there for any reason, but wondered if they treated him like a lowlife dummy because of the way his father acted or came across with people. Kirk could definitely understand that!

            On a heavy, cool and dreary day, Kirk thought he’d go to his favorite speed shop Gen-Sen where he got his racing engine built. He knew there was no way in hell they’d hire him, seeing all those guys working there were machinists by trade not wannabe racer/grease monkeys like Kirk, but what the heck, the visit would count just the same. It was a pretty good drive to the speed shop on a now sprinkling day and starting out he wished he were bringing his engine along to drop off for the highly skilled machinists to do their high-performance magic on it. He wasn’t ready for that yet not to mention the money situation which he needed to mind right then. There was no spending like there’s no tomorrow anymore!

            On the way, the sprinkles turned to heavier showers actually making it hard to see to drive even though the pink van’s windshield wipers loudly slapped double time.  Traffic had slowed somewhat and as he ventured on the raindrops got bigger and soon, he heard hammering on the van’s roof and on the windshield, sleet mixed with the rain. Kirk noticed it but only in an irritated manner, only a bothersome observation not like how he was fascinated as a youngster. Such was life marching onward for old young Kirk.

            Pulling into the Gen-Sen parking lot, Kirk noticed there were no customers’ vehicles parked there. He thought that he had recalled the place always hopping with gear heads of every sort showing up at the shop to get their high-performance work done. Kirk assumed the economy had put the damper on that kind of expensive hobby for a lot of normally hardcore gear heads.  Nevertheless, this place remained a grownup guy’s candy store for guys like Kirk.

            Stepping inside the speed shop, he took a deep breath drawing in the fast smells of rubber, HiPo fuel, and machinists’ oil. The place appeared as always with all kinds of pretty chrome or plastic go-fast items like chrome wheels, valve covers, and air cleaners or fiberglass spoilers and air dams. Kirk always had to make a 360 perusal to take it all in with big eyes and a hungry expression.

            “Can I help you?” Asked the counter guy, Jake.

            “Well, ah, not really,” Kirk stammered caught off guard for some unknown reason, wondering what to say. “Ah not now, I mean not buying or ordering something,” Kirk stammered on, snapped out of his daydream racing imagination. “Mmmm, I’d like to fill out an application�"for work.”

            “Say. You look familiar. You’ve been here before, right?”

            “Yep, you did, ah, built an engine for me last winter.”

            “Oh, that’s right, I remember, but there’s always a lot of guys rolling through…” 

            “Stock car engine for the NASCAR tracks,” Kirk announced with a proud smile.

            The counter guy Jake’s face fell into a seemingly crestfallen, guarded expression. He said nothing for a few weighty pregnant moments before dropping his head down behind the counter. He drew out an application. Kirk wondered what he had said or what he had reminded Jake for him to suddenly change his countenance and attitude towards Kirk.

            “Unemployed, I assume,” Jake drew in a long deep breath. “We’ve taken a lot of applications, but like I’ve told everyone, not only you mind you, that we’re not hiring for any position. We’ve laid off two men, machinists even. The call for work just isn’t here like it was, you know?” With a pause eyeing Kirk, he added, “I suppose you do.”

            “Sure,” Kirk said succinctly still processing the counter man’s manner. He then noticed that the shop seemed unusually quiet when there was always whirring, grinding, and pounding in the background during his past visits.  He filled out the application as thoroughly as he could and handed it over.  “Thanks.”

            “Good luck, take care.”

            Kirk strolled out to the pink van despite getting pelted with rain and whatever else fell because he didn’t notice. He sat in the van and wondered the counterman’s sudden change in expression. Was it him? Was it some bad words said about him? These were the sort of things that always bothered Kirk in the schools he attended always causing him to wonder what people thought about him or said behind his back. Fulfilling his mission for the day, he headed home with a stop for fast food at Burger King. Sitting alone in a yellow, hard plastic booth he still pondered what was up with the speed shop guy or was it just his imagination? Kirk did this sort of pondering way too often especially now without a steady job or races to attend and occupy his concentration. In other words, he had too much time to think and ponder.  

***

            Back at the homestead, Kirk strode to his garage in the barn and opened his homemade makeshift plywood doors. The garage felt colder than it did outside and the amount of work, specifically, welding that needed to be done before he got to the fun part building components that he especially looked forward to. It seemed overwhelming to which he added introspectively, fun remained a long way off. Despite being slightly befuddled and a bit depressed, Kirk got to work, the first task being was to light off that dangerous ancient gas stove. As it heated up, Kirk eyed up the roll cage project with the right side looking like it was coming along, though looks can be deceiving. The four horizontal door bars were spot welded in along with the short vertical bars in between the bars, but being spot welded in place only meant a whole lot of welding to make them solid not to mention those many gussets to finish and weld in just that one smallish area. He decided to work on the gussets. In the big shops, they use huge power hacksaws which makes fast work of cutting out gussets, but Kirk could never make them with a hand-powered hacksaw, leaving him with only the oxy-acetylene cutting torch.

            Kirk had some handy cardboard to make patterns. Using his signature hit-or-miss method, he cut the triangle gusset in the cardboard by eye and then checked how it fits in one of the cage’s 90-degree junctions. Of course, it’s not exactly 90 degrees so at the first try it doesn’t quite fit, so he trims a little off at a time on the flat and the triangle point. Finally, it fits. He checked the other junctions and the same pattern fit in four other places. Consider for a second that one roll cage door panel required sixteen gussets. Marking around the cardboard with chalk onto the quarter inch steel and arranging them next to one another to conserve metal and eliminate unnecessary cuts. Donning his goggles and leather gloves, he fired off the torch with a POP! At first lighting the torch with it burning just pure acetylene the smoke is thick, sooty black in stringy strands that float in the air like black spider webs. That’s why torch operators like to get the oxygen turned on quickly to eliminate that messy smoke like Kirk usually produces. With a twist of the oxygen knob, he adjusts the flame down to a hot blue flame with a white-hot cone; he gets to work. With sparks flying and his feet pulled away from the plopping red hot slag, Kirk makes short work of the four gussets.

            Of course, cutting them with a torch produces cuts that are not the cleanest with jagged edges with slag stuck to them. One by one he clamped them in the bench vise and cleaned the edges with the grinder. This definitely was not the way professional or even small-time racers would do it, but Kirk? He had to be called a smaller than a small-time racer, but with Rookie of the Year under his belt, he had the fire to build a car with what tools, material, knowledge and skills he had. Besides that, with only unemployment and a small savings account, he had to make do and save money where ever and however he could. After grinding and trying each one, he got the gussets sized up.

            Carefully clamping the metal triangle gusset into place at the pipes’ corners, he spot welded them into place. Kirk, as said before, wasn’t a great welder. Case in point: as he tried to weld the gussets in place more often than not the arc welding rod got stuck to the gusset or the pipe and either pulled the gusset out of place or simply fell to the floor.  Eventually, with quite a few tries he got them spot welded in.

            So Kirk pretty much self-taught himself welding just by trial and error and patience. He did have an introduction to welding in Mister Kinkle’s Automotive Body Repair class part of the Kirk’s high school automotive vocational school he attended. He learned the brief theory and basics of gas and arc welding but with twenty-some guys attending with limited time, Kirk didn’t get much practice or instructor/student interaction and guidance. Logically, the school was basically meant to be an introduction to those things related to automotive repair, so there you are.    

            Flashback to Kirk’s high school situations and shenanigans:  Kirk thought about his last year in school with a faraway gaze with glazed eyes as he stared into the flickering blue and yellow gas flames. It’s been told more than once in this chronicle that he stuck with his after school athletic endeavors which he never excelled at with his abilities providing him last place in every event he ever competed in, but he carried on nonetheless. For some odd reason, his girl Dee had decided to stick with him for the time, short as it turned out, being. Looking back to those days with her that still gave him a thrill, he still couldn’t understand her at all.

            Back then, Kirk wasn’t a bad looking guy with good hair, but he wasn’t a jock and not a nerd, he was a down and out gear head. He had wheels in the 1954 Ford convertible that he used to make echoic howls on the steep downhill in the village canyon. The car wasn’t a Hot Rod per se, but it had a V-8 which is saying something. His pals who didn’t have cars liked to ride with him seeing it was loud, classic transportation. The guys used to head to another town’s park to drink a few brewskis usually while skipping classes.

            One friend, not a gear head, got nicknamed “June” after the actress, liked how the car would easily burn the mud off the tires in the park. Richard, a compact black guy who was on the wrestling team in the lightweight class with Kirk, liked Kirk’s wiring modification that allowed him to switch off the rear taillights to evade chasing police if they were on his tail. Ah! The good old days, but all those short-time, so-called friends were gone like dust in the wind so it seemed. Kirk, always desperately realistic and ultra-aware of how he stood and acted among others, knew that it wasn’t 100 percent their fault because he didn’t try to cultivate friendships either. Trying to forget all that illogically deep nostalgic contemplation, Kirk got back to work.

            With his hackneyed welding work, Kirk did consider attending the winter semester night school classes for welding. It wasn’t too expensive and Kirk thought he might pick up a few tips beyond his limited knowledge by revealing tricks and skills that could make him a better welder. Possibly. Maybe that would happen.

            He recalled that perfect bead of weld that Jon laid down after Kirk’s first year/first/day/practice crash. That stainless steel weld resembled a perfect row of miniature gleaming dimes. Anyway, with the triangular gussets in place, Kirk went to welding them in permanently. He finagled the rod holder/handle in a tight spiral motion as the red-hot electric arc melted rod into the pieces he welded. He did this on all four gussets in a position that was flat, horizontal with Kirk looking down on his work as he welded.  After chipping off the slag that forms during the welding process, Kirk observed his handy work. Not terrible, but not perfect like Jon’s. To explain a bit about Kirk’s ability, these just done were just easy flat horizontal joints welded. If he were a professional welder, he could weld right up the vertical joint as well. From past attempts, Kirk knew he’d make a mess of the vertical weld. No messes on his new car! Maybe he could learn that trick at the school. To solve his problem, Kirk hooked the chain hoist to the frame and rolled the entire frame and roll cage on its side so the other vertical joint became a horizontal weld as well. By standing on his trusty five-gallon bucket, he pressed on with his welding with these gussets which were just a small part when considering how much welding that had to be done.

            Kirk took a deep breath and contemplated life as it stood for him at the present juncture.