Stories: The Story Of The Junk Band

Author: Charles Dickson (C3PO)
In the early 1990's when both Vygis and I were living the Bum Life in College Park, Maryland, and fixing up crappy cars for fun and profit we spent a lot of time in the local junkyards. Back then, there was one right in Beltsville, unthinkable in today's gentrified suburbia, that eventually became a part of the Brandywine junkyard empire before it was closed down, cleaned up, and replaced with a clean and neat commuter rail station. One day when we went in and straggled up to the counter looking for a brake rotor or something like that, after hearing our request the guy at the working there leaned to one side and picked the receiver up on a telephone with no dial that sat to one side, and called out the year, make, and model of the car we were working on, along with the name of the part. That phone had always been there, emanating noise that had just seemed like part of the dirt and dark of the junkyard environment. But now we realized that it was some kind of party line, and the voices were calling out requests for specific parts, auction style. Somebody on the line had our part that day, although we had to come back later to pick it up after somebody delivered it to the junkyard that we were at. But far better than that we left that day greatly amused by having found a secret in plain sight. We called it The Junk Band, and relished trips back to this and other junkyards that were interlinked by it, just to hear the crackly audio and know that We Knew What It Was. It was also a running joke between us that since the cars that we drove predated most of those at the junkyards we were visiting, we could be standing there and hear the make and model or our ride called out and go out to find it missing from the parking lot.
Category:Stories
Category:Mythologies:Car Repair