It was just an average day...
The temperature was hovering at a sweltering 95 degrees and you could smell the sweat and used oil in the garage as I stood wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and a pair of $400 shoes - a Yankee of the worst kind, standing there deep in the Tennessee foothills a couple of miles from the top-secret facilities of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory there in rural Tennessee.
I was the "Ford Man" - and some poor bastard had bought an F-150 for cash not knowing that the paint would begin peeling off the first time he hit 80 on the highway, and certainly not expecting that the brakes would be as dangerous as a tire fire next to a dynamite factory.
He showed up right on time.
Oh, he had university degrees and a fancy technical job enriching plutonium - the radiation sensor on his name badge proved that, but he was at the heart of it just a Tennessee boy with 300 years of bad whiskey and inbreeding bouncing around in his head like bowling balls in a daycare center.
He had one lazy eye, and some weird form of tourette's that made him occasionally twitch and mutter "FUCK" under his breath. In other words, a typical Ford customer from that neck of the woods.
He'd had the truck to the dealership sixteen times in seven months - four times for paint that wouldn't stick to that godawful chinese sheetmetal we bought as scrap and smuggled into the foundry at night. That cheap shit rusted like alka-seltzer tablets and had some kind of weird industrial waste melted into the steel and repelled paint like waxed paper. We saved $3.00 per truck using that shitty metal - and spent about $1500 per repainting them again and again until the warranty ran out or the customer simply committed suicide on a rainy night.
This truck though was something special. The brakes looked fine - hell, we'd replaced every component about six times. But about every 10th stop the thing would lock up the left front wheel, change lanes, and try to kill you.
Every damn time.
The dealership had run out of patience, the customer was nearing an epileptic state of fury, and naturally, they decided it was time to turn him loose on the latest "Damn Yankee" Ford had hired and sent down into redneck heaven to be the point man on the suicide mission that was Ford Customer Service in the late '80s.
I had plenty of experience and a thick skin. Seven years of a serious cocaine habit combined with cutting my early business teeth on burning Pinto cars and brand new Ford ambulances spewing gasoline onto the highway made me the perfect man for the job.
The guy who owned the truck was named Billy Lee Higgins. He showed up wearing nothing but a stained work shirt and what looked like a filthy athletic supporter. He was wearing a sandle and one blue shoe. He was obviously agitated - and you could smell the beer on his breath from ten feet away. I met the man, introduced myself, and assured him I was there to help. Time to go to work.
I jumped into Billy's truck with the Tony the Service Manager, and I turned the key. You could faintly hear the main bearings knocking - but hell, that was normal. The truck had less than 8000 miles on it and the driver's seat was already wearing out.
About six miles from the dealership after about five stops it happened... I tapped the pedal, the truck made a loud crunching noise and locked the front wheel... we swerved into the path of a cement mixer and I crashed into a cotton field just to save our lives.
The Service Manager handed me a flask of clear liquor and after a long pull I asked, "When did he buy this piece of shit?" Tony popped open the glove compartment and revealed about 1000 marijuana cigarette butts, a book of matches from a local gay bar and a loaded 357 magnum revolver. He finally found the warranty card wrapped in divorce papers - which appeared to have burned numerous times with a soldering iron.
"That's interesting..." I said, "Well, it looks like he's just out of warranty. Still - I think we should buy this one back. Do you agree?" Tony said "John, if you don't, we will - this son of a bitch is crazy as a bedbug and has access to nuclear materials - I'm surprised he hasn't killed somebody already."
So we pulled back into the dealership - and here is this big queer freak standing there staring at us bug-eyed in the service lane. I tapped the brakes and the truck lurched sideways... nearly wiping out the RC Cola machine and scattering bits of raw cotton and red dirt all over the driveway.
I walked up to him, handed him the keys and said "Yeah, that truck is fine. By the way, the warranty expired last Tuesday. Have a nice day."
And I got in my shiny new Lincoln Automobile, and drove away.
