Larry's Body Shop

Larry’s Body Shop


Hurricane Ivan’s rains drenched Mount Pleasant Garage inside out. Its cavernous interior was awash with water dripping from ancient beams, water flooding car bodies and water pooled around drains stopped up from years of greasy goop. The place smelled like a garage all right, oily mixtures with anti-freeze on the side. Now it exuded all-encompassing dampness.

The monsoons of late fall gave way to a wintry cold wave. I fought to suppress thoughts of ‘what the hell am I doing here’ as the chill made its way through my blue jeans, into layers of my skin and bulk muscle on its way to my bones.

We crowded around the car-for-the-day, a not too bad-looking maroon ’95 Ford Taurus. Larry wanted to know, “How many dents has this piece of shit got?”

Neophytes, we looked hard at the hood. The most we could find was seven. Larry swabbed it with a wet rag, hunched down to catch dim glints from the skylights and found nine dents. He was the man.

“Let’s get a move on, guys. You wanna make money, you gotta move yur ass. One hour and we ready to paint. Outta here today…on to the next car…this mutherfucker already been stolen last night. It’s back, though, thanks to the cops.” Larry’s broad smile revealed a row of missing front teeth.

Huddled around the car’s hood side-by-side with a group of guys all trying to keep from freezing, I felt a warm, wet tongue on my fingers. “Austin, baby, how’s my boy?” I reached down to pet Austin Powers, the resident pit bull. I knew he liked us all; he was your basic curious teenager and I knew all he wanted was attention, but, as I stroked his massive head, cheeks and jaws, it did not escape me that, with his grip, he could tear my hand off. Did it ever occur to Austin to…not a good playmate for my cat, I thought.

I looked around for the dent puller. That way, I went first - everything followed from pulling the dent. That way I did something to keep warm. The day would go quicker. I punched holes along the line of the dent, and then starting at one end I worked my way toward the other as I pulled metal back to its original form.

“That’s it. Line those molecules back up the way they were. Metal’s got memory. Get down, man,” Larry said like a proud papa.

“That man’s got skeee-ills,” one of the guys chimed in. All those brothers standing there watching a white boy do it good brought a smile of satisfaction to my face.

Storm, the occasional, when-he-shows-up welder, showed up. We gonna weld up some rusty metal today, I thought. (We never got to the welding.) While the guys mixed up body putty – most guys love to mix up that gooey, smelly crap – I followed Storm to the dankest, darkest recesses of the garage through rows of cars, each of them in their own neverland of suspended disrepair. We leaned on a ’52 Studebaker, its floorboards rotted out, as we looked over Storm’s project car, a Nissan 280Z. Rusty fenders looked back at us as if to say ‘weld us’.

“They got it right with the 280Z – lots of power.” I had remembered that much about this 1970’s relic.

“Yeah, 3 ½ liters, plenty of torque after the problems they had with the 240Z and the 260Z.”

As Storm talked, the tip of his tongue twirled metal balls pierced through its middle. He assumed an authoritative stance, and then began the Z story. He looked a curious mixture of Hitler SS with Woodstock punk as he pulled himself to six-foot two, blonde locks flowing down over his black Harley jacket.

I backed up a step or two, listening and acknowledging with an occasional ‘uh-huh’ and ‘yeah’.

“Watch it; you stepped in the dog shit,” Storm said.

I had. After scraping my shoes on a nearby tire, I moved back toward the car of the day thinking that I should have known Austin would pick a dark corner to do his dump when he roamed the place as night watchdog.

Back at the ’95 Ford Taurus, pink splotches of body putty glistened in the light that shone through the open garage door. “Hey, it’s warmer outside the garage than inside,” Larry stood his skinny frame straight up as he said it. It was warmer outside – there was no chance Mount Pleasant Garage, without a furnace, would warm up until next spring. A propane heater, which added a bit of artificial light, was all we had to hover around and keep warm. You didn’t want to brush up against its glowing mesh disk, but the radiated heat sure felt good.

Larry showed the guys how to file shavings of body putty, how to shape the fender’s contours and how to prep for paint. As the shavings fell to the garage floor, he said: “Keep ‘em clean. We gonna remix them in the next batch. We use everything around here. Plastic’s money.”

Keep ‘em clean. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, help us, I thought.

The way he looked at his watch, you would think Larry was late for an appointment. “We goin’ in the office and get warmed up. Time for a break,” he said.

I glanced over at a kid named Josh who had one of those you-better-believe-it’s-time looks on his face. It wasn’t noon yet, but Josh was already sucking on his first Bud of the day. I noticed the six-pack of Budweiser sitting propped on the hood of a rust bucket Triumph TR6, alongside the car’s dashboard, transmission and upholstery. Picking up a beer I headed with the group toward the warm office.

The “office”, an eight-by-eight cubbyhole near the front of the building, was crowded with six guys in there. Plus, people kept showing up – friends who just got their car whacked on the expressway, neighbors with nothing to do and women who did not explain why they were there looking for Larry. We just moved in tighter when someone new arrived.

I picked a spot near a heater, one of those 1930’s radiators like the kind at grandmother’s house, only this one was a standalone gadget. Warmth penetrated my leather gloves and was better with them off.

“Sit down,” Larry motioned to me as he shoved an old milk crate under my legs. I didn’t feel like it, but I sat. “I want to talk about tools, guys. When you git a job, buy a tool. If you find a tool, like those sockets piled over there, stick it in your pile.” Dozens of sockets lay on a roll top desk which contained another hundred or so items: clock radios with oversized flapping numbers that no longer flipped, an empty NeHi Grape bottle (circa 1947), framed sepia pictures and so on. “You never know when you gonna need your tool,” he said.

One of the guys noticed faded color prints of two people, a man and a woman, tacked up over the doorway. Everyone looked up at them and snickered in an unmistakable guy-snicker kind of way. I was so close to the prints that I couldn’t make them out until I put my glasses on. They turned out to be 1950s pictures of a guy doing a girl in a variety of positions. Larry said, laughing it off, “Don’t know about them. They be here a lonnnnnnnnng time - way before me.”

Looking closer at them, I pointed and said serious-like, “I know that gal. She’s a grandmother now.”

“No way. Damn, you really know her?” Josh said.

“Yep,” I tried to keep a straight face while the place erupted in laughter.

Changing the subject, Larry motioned toward the door with “Ok, guys. Let’s hit it and forget it.” Larry said that a lot.

Trudging back toward the beat-up Taurus, I slid my smooth-soled shoes over the slurpy slop much the way you walk on ice. We crowded around the car awaiting Larry’s next command. “We gonna wet sand this baby,” he said holding the real fine grit paper up in his right hand and pointing to a steamy bucket of water with the other. “Keep moving; keep your hands in that warm water. This baby’s about ready for priming. I’m painting it at 10 o-clock tonight. C’mon over and watch, if you want.” He meant it. Larry was finishing this car today and that was that.

Josh looked interested. I was interested, too. Josh said, “Ah, Larry, you got that there dog here at night?” Larry nodded in the affirmative. “Just wanna make sure the dog’s Ok with me if I come in here late tonight.” Larry nodded again.

I looked over at Josh, “Hey, Josh, I’ll be here at 10 tonight too. You go in first – the dog knows you. I’ll be right behind you.”

Josh grunted. Everyone else chuckled.



R & R - I will return the favor.