When I tell people that I run a junkyard, it’s like this invisible wall goes up between us. I’m a person who deals with the stuff that other people don’t want, a permanent untouchable. It’s fine with me, I tell my court-ordered psychiatrist. After years of this career I learned to comfort myself by making immense, fat profits off of the regular person’s inability to change a spark plug or check a dipstick.
But it wasn’t always cherries and roses and stripped-down turbo K-cars that made surprisingly good parts runners. No sir: setting up a new junkyard is hard, backbreaking work. Not only is there the work of convincing the EPA that your name isn’t going to end up on a Superfund list, but you also need to get the word out that you’ll buy junk cars.
I looked around at the graffiti-esque guerilla advertising that other junkyards used, begging for your slightly-dented hand-me-down Tercel that they could turn into delicious 224 scrap destined for Shenzhen, or a few feet of authentic druid, still caked in drywall, that they yanked out of a foreclosed McMansion the previous weekend for meth cash. And don’t get me started on the disguised pleas for catalytic converters, money under the table for anyone who knew how to work a hacksaw. I was starting to come around to the common man’s opinion. These guys were a net negative on society. If I was going to run a yard, it was going to provide a valuable public service.
Just days after my ads ran, I started to see results. I fed vehicle after vehicle into the crusher, relishing the sound of their glass shattering as it was compressed into the ISRI-standard auto slab size. De-lifting brotrucks was sort of my thing, you see, and an army of guys who were pretty good with a screwdriver helped me do it for only fifty bucks a shot.
Eventually the police would come for me, notice the last sad wails of a through-the-bed stack shooting out smoke tune as it passed, still running, into the hydraulic jaws of oblivion. They wanted documentation. Paperwork. Legitimacy.
My honeyed words and some tactically issued bribes helped out, as well as showing one of the officers that I was merely crushing non-compliant vehicles at the behest of the federal government. Look at these illegal mudflaps, I said, they could take out a toddler, and mimed the arc of a thrown rock embedding itself into my temple. His suspicion towards me softened as he imagined perhaps his own toddler being beheaded after walking too closely by a suburban Hooters blaring cowboy rap. Before long, he was no longer replying to the angry phonecalls of owners who claimed to have received panicky GPS beacons from a two-by-two-by-two steel cube at the bottom of a cargo barge.
It was good to be the king, but there was always a better business to be in. I sat at my desk, clicking through wire transfers from my investors. My phone rang, and I picked it up. The local Ford dealership’s number-one salesman was on the other end, and he bragged about making a mint off of insurance payouts and dealership-installed smoke tunes. He wanted to thank me, he said.
I told him it would be best if he came down here and showed me his appreciation in person. Maybe he could take a tour of the crusher while he was here.
