Old Yarn - The Brash Newb

Introduction

Here is the fourth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” and “The Enemy Coach”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Today’s yarn is a bit of a departure, though. Whereas those others are stories I’ve told a hundred times, thus keeping them alive and well in memory, what I’m about to relate isn’t a tale I’ve often told … perhaps never, in fact, because in this one I don’t come off so well. (Ah, now I’ve got your attention!) Since I haven’t told this a hundred times, some details are missing so I’m having to guess about certain things. But the core of the story is certain, as it’s left an indelible mark on my memory.

The Brash Newb – Fall/Winter, 1989-90

Eric Č— joined our UC Santa Barbara cycling team in the fall of 1989. We were a big team, something like 60 or 70 riders, with a well established pecking order. New riders typically started out as Ds unless they had racing experience, in which case they might start as a C or (less commonly) a B. But that was just for racing categories; of course there was also the social element. Who was popular, who was admired, who would be honored for “Grossest Chamois Award” at the post-season banquet, etc.

Eric presented a bit of a problem, because he was a) hella fast, and b) a former (I would say “recovering”) triathlete. If you are a cyclist, particularly a snobby one, much of the following preamble won’t be necessary; you already get it. For the rest of you, let me just say that, culturally, there has never been any love lost between cyclists and triathletes (or “triathlopes” as we often sneered). Bicycle road racing has its origins in Europe dating back to the 19th century and carries a lot of tradition and mystique, and an aesthetic, cultural code that—while often challenged—has always exerted its force on road cyclists. You can see this codified in The Rules, an over-the-top list of cycling dos and don’ts from a group calling itself the Velominati (that I lightly mock here). Triathlon culture, on the other hand, dates only to the late 1970s and started up in southern California (which, as a NorCal guy, I’m all but required to disdain). Triathlon culture seems much less staid, to say the least, and many of its practices rub us diehard roadies the wrong way.

Let me give you some examples. In the mid to late ‘80s, the restrictions around clothing for bike races were endless. Socks had to be worn, they had to be white, and I think they couldn’t come up higher than a few inches. (I had to loan an older friend my socks once, after having just raced in them, because he’d forgotten his.) Shoes were allowed only one logo, which was unfortunate because nobody, apparently, told the shoe companies. (This rule was actually enforced … I knew several guys who actually had to tape over logos on their shoes.) Sleeveless jerseys were forbidden in races. For juniors, even the top end of the bikes’ gearing was regulated, with assiduous enforcement. And these were just the written rules. The unwritten ones were, and are, endless … no visor on your helmet; no full-finger gloves unless it’s cold out; no big puffy jacket ever; proper cycling socks even on training rides where there’s no referee to hassle you; shaved legs always; shorts that are black and come down to a precise point of the mid-thigh; and on and on. I challenged the Velominati rules in these pages (well, at least 37 of them) because I don’t feel like they should apply to all cyclists and not even to all racers. But UCSB was a unified team, with a cohesive culture, which was decidedly old-school. In fact, two of our A riders didn’t even wear helmets on training rides.

Triathletes, in stark contrast, have all types of wacky departures from tradition. Especially back in the ‘80s, they were known to ride a bicycle while wearing only a Speedo; to write their race number on their arm with a Sharpie; to ride without socks; to wear garishly colored clothing; and to use aerodynamic handlebars, particularly the ridiculous Scott DH model. Here’s what those bars looked like:

It’s worth pointing out that his refusal to use aero bars cost Laurent Fignon the 1989 Tour de France. Only one team in that Tour used aero bars in time trials (the one American team, big surprise), plus Greg LeMond, even though these bars had proven beneficial in triathlons for years. (After LeMond stunned Fignon by taking 58 seconds out of him in the short final time trial, the rest of the peloton followed, but only then.) The fact is, roadies just hated those dorky bars. In fact, when I won a pair of Scott DH aero bars in a bike race (about a month before LeMond’s surprise victory), I was pissed. What would I do with them? I worked at a bike shop and tried to get the owner to let me trade them for shop credit, but he refused. Even though this was a full-service shop catering to cyclists of all kinds, he wouldn’t have them on his shelf. He finally offered to let me trade them for two inner tubes, at which point I balked and offered them up on the shop bulletin board instead. Astonishingly, I sold them immediately to some rando for $80. I just couldn’t believe anybody would want them, but then, they were standard issue for triathletes.

(Even at the collegiate National Championships as late as 1989, all the teams eschewed aero handlebars, this being a couple months before LeMond’s triumph. Here is our team time trial team, old-school to almost every detail except my sideways-turned helmet cover and T—’s cover-less, barbed-wire-stamped helmet.

Yes, we bent the sartorial rules, but within the roadie tradition, never in the direction of triathlon culture. In the photo at the top of this post our team time trial bikes have aero bars, only because LeMond and the rest of the pro peloton had recently made this okay.)

Getting back to Eric, the main thing we couldn’t stand was his attitude. He was proud of having been a triathlete, and far from apologizing and repenting (the least, we felt, he could do), he was totally up front about his glorious tri past, and continued to ride without socks and rock these goofy tri-shoes that were, like, pink and blue. (The adjective “tri” was always used scornfully by us, but proudly by traithletes—including Eric.)

Not only was Eric cocky, he seemed to feel that he could just expect to be accepted by our team—even the A team—right off the bat. It’s like he felt we owed him respect just because he was a phenomenal athlete with a solid work ethic. Looking back, I’m kind of surprised how unwelcoming we actually were, since we should have been thrilled to be gifted with really fast new teammate. I guess I felt like we were a pack of, say, coyotes, and this random hyena had started running around with us like that wasn’t anything unusual.

I suppose it was necessary for us to find some fault with Eric’s riding—something more solid to pin our scorn on—and so a few of us decided he didn’t have clean lines when descending, and thus was a threat to our safety. Somehow it fell to me to call him out on it. So, as we neared the summit of a climb during a group ride, I said to him (diplomatically, I felt), “Hey, how about on this next descent you go behind me, and watch my line, and try to match it as closely as possible.” He looked really offended and retorted, “Look, I’ve descended in triathlons in Nice!” I think I might have actually laughed in his face, or at least snorted. Reports of this exchange immediately swept through the whole team, and “I’ve descended in Nice!” was on everyone’s lips, almost like the slogan of the unofficial campaign that was being waged against this arrogant newb.

Making matters worse was the first practice race (for category selection). It was a time trial, in which riders go off at one-minute intervals to see how fast they can complete the course solo. We always did these out on Cathedral Oaks Road, a long, straight, mostly flat out-and-back course. Stopping the clock in under 16 minutes was considered hella fast, and almost nobody broke 15 minutes (perhaps only T—, our star rider, and not by much). I was stoked to have clocked a 15:02 in what was one of those all-the-planets-lined-up efforts. Eric showed up with—you guessed it—aero bars (though at least something less garish than the Scott DH) and rode a literally unbelievable 14:03. This was so astonishing, in fact, that the guy doing the timing figured he must’ve screwed up, and added a minute. A 15:03 was still a great ride and would guarantee Eric a spot on the A team.

Eric was furious. He knew what time he’d done, and was highly offended that we simply couldn’t believe he was really that fast. But we presented a wall of unified denial to his claim. There’s a tendency for people who agree to assume they’re therefore right, and we held firm. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll do it again. I’ll do it right now. You can all time me.” We were practically laughing at him, so sure were we that he was delusional. But by God, he went right out and clocked another 14:03, smashing the previous record for that course. We were astonished. (Some of Eric’s speed, of course, was the aero bars; in fact, T— proposed that going forward we would maintain separate records for standard vs. aero bars … a nice asterisk on Eric’s achievement.)

I was starting to get concerned about the A-team dynamic. This newbie was apparently even stronger than T—, who was not only our A-team leader and team president but was widely considered the fastest collegiate racer in the state. Team cohesion depends on a well-defined, universally respected pecking order, and when this is contested, the battle of egos is not pretty. (Think LeMond vs. Hinault in the 1986 Tour de France, or Wiggens vs. Froome in 2012.) For this reason, I told myself, something had to be done about Eric.

If you’re crying bullshit on that last paragraph, good for you. Deep down I suppose I always knew that my resolve to “do something about Eric” wasn’t about the team. The fact is, I was a snob, and I didn’t like his lack of socks, I didn’t like his shoes, I didn’t like his bike, and most of all I didn’t like his defiance. I wanted him to kiss the ring, like I had. I wanted him not just to adjust and fit in, but to want to fit in. In fact, I wanted him to need to fit in. His rebellious spirit, which I should have admired, offended me. I admit these things to my shame.

This next part of the story is where memory starts to fail me. I might have intentionally devised a scheme to bring Eric down a notch, to publicly embarrass him, to teach him a lesson and to pile on to the “I descended in Nice!” lampoonery. I hope that I was not so small, even at that age, as to be that deliberate and Machiavellian. And in fairness to myself, it’s also possible I was just being mischievous.

Exhibit A in my “mischievous” defense (not because you care, but because I think it’s funny) is the following side anecdote. In 1988, when I was racing for the Cuesta Community College team (using my brother’s ID because I wasn’t a student), I did a road race that was one long loop. About halfway through I flatted, and had neglected to put spare wheels in the neutral support car. Not knowing this, the driver of the car (a racer’s girlfriend) saw me on the side of the road and pulled over. She jumped out, eager to help, and said, “You’ll have to find your own wheel because they all look the same to me!” I confessed I didn’t have a spare wheel and asked if she could just drive me to the finish line. She said sure, no problem. So I put my bike on the rack and got in the car.

Shortly later, a rider dropped back from the pack and rode alongside us. “It’s my boyfriend!” the driver said. She rolled down her window and he said, “Give me a bottle.” Not even “please.” I hated him immediately. She hurriedly dug through his gear, found a bottle, and handed it up to him. As he rode back up to the pack he took a drink, and then came back to the car. “Dammit, this is water,” he said. “I want Carbo-Plex!” His girlfriend got all flustered, digging through a pile of bottles with of course no idea which contained what. I said to the guy, “No problem, I’ll mix you up a bottle. Come back in a couple minutes.” He rode back to the pack and I got a fresh bottle, filled it about a third full of water, and then put in at least half a cup of Carbo-Plex mix—far more than the requisite scoop or two. I shook it up really hard, then topped it up with water. “Gosh, you really mixed that up thick!” marveled the driver. I assured her that yeah, it takes a lot of mix.

The guy came back again, took the bottle without a word, and started riding back to the pack. I tapped the driver and said, “Watch.” Sure enough, the guy took a big pull of the bottle and then violently spat out the sludgy drink, spraying it from his mouth like a hydrant. His girlfriend and I laughed mirthfully. (In a perfect world she’d have thrown him over for me right after the race, but this isn’t fiction.)

So, yeah, it might have been more in this same spirit of mischief, rather than through actual premeditated sabotage, that I gave Eric some deliberately bad advice regarding our first race of the season. As it happened, I was going to have to miss the race since I would be out of town for a wedding. I can’t remember if Eric came to me for advice, or I sought him out and gave it, but I told him, in confidence if not actual hushed tones, “What I think you should do in this race is just go solo, right from the gun. Like, literally from the very first mile. Nobody knows who you are, they’ll just let you go. Ride all-out the whole time and maybe you can stay away.” This struck him as crazy advice, even in the absence of road racing experience, because this race was like 70 miles. To fight the wind all that time, vs. a pack of 50 or 60 guys … it was insanity. Of course I knew this; that was the whole point. He was going to fail spectacularly and get his comeuppance. But I wore my best poker face and acted completely serious. And who was he to question my advice? We A-team riders were revered on that team, and I was the second most experienced guy after T—. Eric seemed grateful for the strategy and said he’d give it a try.

I didn’t tell anybody about my little scheme, because I regretted it almost immediately. The fake advice had rolled off my tongue easily enough, but who does that to a teammate, even an annoying one? I soon recognized my behavior for what it was: a dick move. But there seemed no way to roll it back. For one thing, Eric didn’t often ride with us, being still new and probably not feeling accepted yet, so I didn’t have much opportunity to talk to him again. Plus, what could I say? That I’d just been screwing with him, so that I could laugh behind his back at his credulity?

And so it seemed the die was cast. I would come back from my trip, hear about his foolish misadventure in his very first bike race, and possibly deal with the blowback should he tell everyone he’d only been following my tactical advice. If our teammates concluded that I’d simply been an idiot and had naively given Eric bad guidance, well, I could handle that. But what if they not only realized I’d been purposely setting him up to fail, but appreciated my ruse and had a good laugh about it? What if my treachery was admired as a much-needed way to secure the comeuppance of this brash, arrogant upstart?

Somehow—and remember, there was no Internet back then, no smartphones—I didn’t hear how the race went until I was at the Monday bike team meeting, and the first person I talked to was Eric himself. As he approached me I really didn’t know exactly what I’d say, only that it would be an apology. But he spoke first. “Dana,” he said, “you’re a genius. Your plan worked perfectly. I went from the gun, soloed the whole thing, and won by eight minutes!”

Holy shit. It absolutely had not occurred to me that my ludicrous tactic could actually work. Such an outcome is virtually unheard-of in cycling. It’d be like a quarterback leading his football team to victory without ever throwing a single pass, or a basketball player outscoring the entire opposing team without passing the ball once. It turns out that as talented as Eric had already proven himself to be, we’d only seen the tip of the iceberg. Sure, there are other possible reasons for his crazy move working: the other racers might simply not have seen him go, or might not have believed it, or thought he was going off ahead to take a piss. Or maybe they intended to reel him in but waited too long. Had there been a breakaway, the speeds would have been too high for any lone rider to stay out alone that long, but perhaps the sprinters’ teams (ours included, T— being hella fast) controlled things all too well. Whatever the case, Eric had won and was on cloud nine. And I had to pretend not to be surprised.

I have a pretty good poker face, and I think I gave an Oscar-worthy performance. “See?” I replied. “I knew you could do it. Great job.” Eric was beaming. He had no idea what a dick I’d been, and actually thought I was not only a good guy, but the first one on the team to do him a solid. I continued, “But here’s the thing. You can never try that again. They all know who you are now. You’re a marked man.”

I was essentially telling him he was a made man. If there’s one surefire way to silence your critics, it’s by proving them wrong, and Eric certainly had. Nobody snickered about him anymore … he was a winner, and he was ours. And something else changed: in light of what he perceived as tactical genius on my part, he now fully respected me and he showed it. Ironically, I now felt unworthy of this respect, built as it was on my undiscovered treachery. Not that I would ever have come clean; that could have served me somewhat, in tempering my guilt, but it certainly wouldn’t do a thing for him. I had to just live with my lie, which actually wasn’t that hard because hey—no harm no foul, right?

Perhaps more unexpectedly, given Eric’s glorious victory, is that it didn’t increase his bravado, and in fact, over the ensuing weeks and months, his tri ways fell away. He started wearing cycling socks, got some basic black shoes, stopped talking about triathlons, and eagerly tapped into our expert knowledge of road racing, asking all kinds of good questions. I suppose he didn’t feel the need to push up against us anymore, because he finally had the simple thing he’d sought all along: respect. And isn’t that what everybody wants, after all?

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XVIII

Introduction

This is the eighteenth and final installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. (No, it’s not really the final one, so far as I know. Just seeing if you’re awake.) Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, and Volume XVII is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another, and can be read in order of importance, in First World Order, in the order in which they were received, in any other order you like, and/or not at all. (Note: I do not recommend that last option.)

What are Bits & Bobs, in the context of this blog? They’re like the bits of film left on the cutting room floor after a movie is made. Except you know what? That’s a nice metaphor but completely false. These are not leftovers but pertinent snippets from letters I wrote people. Some of the letters were actually printed letters, on paper, couriered by the post office. Others were of course emails. I only selected stuff that I figured any audience might find entertaining, especially nuns. Obviously snippets like “my flight gets in at 7:46 p.m.” would be excluded. (“Especially nuns?” No, I don’t know why I put that.)

Pay attention to the dates. These bits and bobs sprawl all over the place—or, to be more accurate, all over the time.

March 8, 1990

You know, there’s actually a very good reason for procrastinating on a [school] paper. The writing process is very complex, and very personal. What you write has everything to do with your life experiences, and I figure the longer I wait before writing, the more life experiences I’ll have to go on. Something could happen to me right now, for example, which could change the next paragraph of this letter. So it is with my paper. It’s not due for several more days and I’m still young … I should wait.

November 6, 1992

I sprained my right index finger about three weeks ago. I was at the bike shop after-hours truing a wheel and a customer suddenly bobbed up in front of me. Somebody must have left the shop door unlocked, and the customer ignored the “EMPLOYEES ONLY” sign. Scared the crap out of me, and as I flinched my finger went right into the spinning wheel. A few days ago , since it wasn’t healing, I jerry‑rigged a cardboard splint for it, but that didn’t help. Finally I broke down and saw a doctor. Well, a nurse, anyway. She seemed more concerned than I had been, and gave me a real splint which I’m supposed to wear for six weeks! I talked her down to three weeks, but the splint is still a major hassle since it holds my most important finger in a basically straight position.

“But wait,” you’re saying, “this letter is typed—how do you do that?” Well, I have to be able to type, since I have at least fifty pages in papers due before the end of the semester. The splint really does concern me (or rather, it did, as I shall explain). It’s a two‑centimeter‑wide aluminum plate (padded out with foam rubber) which extends beyond my fingertip, and the aluminum is curved at the end. I tried a number of typing drills—the word “jumpy” being the best challenge—and the splint would indiscriminately strike the “u,” “h,” “m,” or “n” key when I was trying for the “j.” The word “jumpy” came out anything from “hynpu” to “nhmph” or even “hunmjhupuh.” What would I do? Without the ability to type, I’d have no papers to turn in, thus failed classes, no graduation, no job, NO FUTURE. Something had to be done. It was then that I remembered the motto of the Marine Corps: Semper Fidelis. No, wait, that wasn’t it. What came to mind was a little saying I’ve somehow attributed to the Marine Corps: “Adapt, Overcome, Improvise!”

I remembered a small worn‑out mechanical pencil eraser I’d replaced a few days earlier, and dug through the trash until I found it. It’s perfect: hard rubber, about seven or eight millimeters in diameter, and maybe five millimeters thick. I glued it to the end of the aluminum splint, and you can see the results. I’ve been typing at about ninety percent of my normal speed (that is to say, about seventy or seventy‑five words per minute). While it’s somewhat trickier than normal typing, I really don’t mind it. The only minor problem is that every so often—once in three hundred words or so, perhaps—the eraser stub gets caught in the intersection of four keys, and hangs up, trapping my splinted finger. This gives me that same queer, shocking sensation as being clotheslined or when the front wheel of your bike somehow locks up.

November 10, 1992

A question my friends like to ask me is, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” I tell them, “I’m gonna get a job,” and then the real interrogation begins: “What can you do with an English degree?” they ask. At least they realize now that it’s too late to persuade me to change my major … that had gotten old over the first couple years. So, recently I was talking to a friend I hadn’t seen in ages, and she asked the same thing. “I’ve got a job lined up,” I told her, “in a factory, deburring plastic parts on an assembly line. You see, when plastics are molded, there are flashings left over from the holes the liquid material was poured through, into the mold. It’s actually pretty tricky work, because if you slip with the file you can ruin the whole piece.” I was pleased to have pulled off the entire description with a straight face. “Wow!” she said enthusiastically. “That’s great!” Sheesh. She took it hook, line, and sinker. So you can see how little respect we English majors get.

September 27, 1996

My pasta is infested. I’d bought like twenty pounds of De Cecco from the restaurant supply store down the street for super cheap, not worrying about what looked like maybe minor water damage to some of the boxes. I store most of the pasta under my bed because our kitchen is so tiny. Well, a week or so ago I saw little flecks of something when I poured the pasta in the boiling water, but wrote it off as minute cardboard debris. I made up a big batch of corn goo pasta and as E— and I began to eat, we both noticed that there were little specks in our dinner. I isolated one and determined that it was reddish in color and seemed to have a protuberance at one end. I ran and grabbed my albeit cheesy microscope and had a closer look. As I had begun to fear, it seemed to be an insect: six legs and a snout at one end. I fished out another speck and examined it; same thing. My next question was, what kind of insect could it be? I racked my brain to try to think of what kind of insects have a history of invading foodstuffs. Then it came to me: a word commonly used to describe the meals endured by peasants in Russian novels: “weevily,” as in “his grey, weevily porridge.” So I looked up “weevil” in my CD-ROM dictionary and found this definition: “Any of numerous beetles, of the superfamily Curculionoidea, especially the snout beetle, that characteristically have a downward-curving snout and are destructive to nuts, roots, stems, fruits, and pasta.” (Yeah, I added that last bit.) A picture was even provided:

E— couldn’t bear to eat the pasta, but I was hungry and just kind of ate around the weevils. I regaled my boss at work with this anecdote and he told a story of some relative who was a POW in Japan and was fed weevily rice. At first the POW refused to eat it; then he just ate around the weevils; then, eventually, realizing he wasn’t getting enough protein, would not only eat the weevils but would push them back down into his rice when they tried to escape up the side of the bowl. Reassured by this story, I’m continuing to eat the weevily pasta, since I have so much of it. Last night I made perciatelli, which is tubular like macaroni but straight and long like spaghetti. It’s particularly weevily because the weevils crawl inside of it. But it’s fine … I can’t even taste them.

September 9, 2009

A few days ago [in preparation for the Everest Challenge bike race], I shaved my legs for the first time in three years. I think it does make the legs feel a bit cooler. Plus, my leg hair was literally blowing in the wind during the Mount Diablo descent two weekends ago, which I’d found distracting. I think shaving may offer a placebo effect as well. Couldn’t hurt (unless you nick yourself). Anyhow, congrats on biting the bullet and joining me for the race. You will not suffer alone, unless you drop me.

I don’t mind driving you home on Sunday night after the race. My un-doping regimen [only using caffeine before bike rides] means that one NoDoz can wake me from the dead, and/or keep me going on a late night drive after two days of cycling overkill. And I even have a valid driver license, because I braved the DMV today to get a temporary license extension since my real license is, for some reason, moving at the speed of a glacier through the bureaucracy.

September 22, 2009

I don’t have a time trial bike you can borrow, but if you’re really, actually doing a triathlon you’ll need an appropriately dorky jersey as well, ideally one made by (well, branded by) a former pro triathlete. And you’re in luck: I still have a Scott Tinley jersey you can borrow—see attached photos.

Notwithstanding the mesh side panels, I had to make the jersey even more Tri by cutting off the sleeves so I could wear it “properly” with arm warmers (per T—’s astute observation about this dubious sartorial choice triathletes make). The hole in the chest is from when I got shot during a triathlon by an angry biker on the sidelines. Either that or I crashed on the Golden Gate Bridge and slid on my heart rate monitor transmitter; I can’t remember which. I don’t have the matching shorts anymore, which T— (in his capacity as UCSB bike club president) forbade us to wear during races; I gave those to my wife’s would-be ex-stepmother-in-law, who wore them with pride and aplomb for years. Though not in triathlons.

October 2, 2009

[To my bike team members and some other friends.] It’s been a long bike racing season. If you’ll be too tired to cook on Saturday, October 17, but not too tired to eat and drink and hang out with other bike people, celebrate your fatigue with your spouse/other and/or kids by coming to the Albert house. If you’re too tired to move, have someone drag you here. If you’re too tired to eat or drink, we’ll put you in a barber’s chair and pour beer and salsa right down your throat.

What? Salsa? Not homemade pasta? That’s right. Because we’re too tired to cook this year, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mario’s La Fiesta, we’re bringing in Mexican food—lots of it. Beer and the raw materials for mixed drinks will also be provided. If you have m4d sk1llz at the blender, a spot in the kitchen is reserved for you. Bring your favorite beer if you like.

I realize now that I’ve used a vague acronym in the past: RSVP. While this can mean “Regional Senior Vice President,” it also stands for “Répondez S’il Vous Plaît.” And while this phrase literally translates to “respond if it pleases you,” it can also mean “respond, damn it.” It is in that sense I now say, “RSVP” so we’ll know how much food to order.

October 20, 2009

There’s a guy out front (visible through my office window) parking a horrible fake-wood-paneled Buick Roadmaster station wagon. He’s taking a very long time. He’s an old weird guy with plaid shorts and a jacket. Kind of a cross between L—’s husband and my dad. Now he’s done parking and is cleaning the interior meticulously. He has an unimpressive dog. He wants $6K for the car. People are mighty strange.

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