I’m lactose intolerant. It’s not that I can’t eat cheese, milk and other diary products, it’s just that I’m ready to get out of Wisconsin.
My cousin, Kim Morgan Jemison, has joined me on this leg of the adventure. As we flew from Birmingham to Madison, I assured her that the automobile had spent the weekend in the warm and cozy confines of the Car Spa in Deforest, Wisconsin. I felt secure in the knowledge that the good mechanics of Parks Automotive had a.) fixed the mysterious croaking demons that bedeviled the Brougham last week and b.) attended to other odds and ends such as rotating the tires, adjusting the brakes, changing the oil, and replacing the rear wheel bearings.
I bragged that the car would run as Cadillac should, and our trip would a veritable purr from Wisconsin to Kansas City, now that the electrical bugaboo had been addressed.
We touched down and dined at Culvers, home of the Butterburger (Kim is a vegetarian, so that worked out great). Then we spent the night at the Holiday Inn Express, breaking my new rule that I will no longer stay in hotels that do not have bars.
This morning, the chipper folks at Parks came and picked me up. After paying nearly $800, I motored back to the hotel and retrieved up Cousin Kim. I took a moment to show her all the proud features of my overpriced Cadillac. The stainless steel roof, the mouton carpeting, and the giant “bullets” on the bumper. After all, we’re meeting press and assorted old car people, and Kim needed to know a modicum of Cadillac heritage before we began this leg of the journey.
A big rat lurks in Wisconsin
Across the street, the Cheese Chalet beckoned. Festooned with a giant mouse and a prodigious cow’s udder, the Chalet has a feeling of some sort of Edelweiss drug trip. Nonetheless, the fine proprietors of the Cheese Chalet showed us around their large store that was filled with hundreds of varieties of cheese, from 12-year-old cheddar (divine) to chocolate cheese fudge (get barf bag ready). I was particularly struck by the cheese hats and the foil wolf goddess wall decorations.
Parked at the lovely Cheese Chalet
Don’t talk to me about the outhouse salt and pepper shakers at that Alabama rest stop you visited.
Foreshadowing folks. Foreshadowing.
Filled up on cheesy consumables, we boogied up I-94 towards St. Paul, stopping only once to trade in the humongous CB radio (and 10-foot antenna) that Kim had lugged northward from a Pilot Truck Stop in Birmingham. Evidently, Kim thought that only Birmingham was graced by Pilot Truck Stops, and thus subjected many a head in Delta’s first class cabin to a healthy thwack by a CB antenna. Unfortunately, the Cobra Classic CB required an electrical PhD from MIT to install, so Kim sweet-talked the Pilot cashier into a trade for a portable CB. (While at the counter, a trucker offered two free portable CBs that had been a gift from his father-in-law, which should have clued us in to how monumentally craptacular the portable CB is in the eyes of the pros.)
Back on the road, Kim and I brushed up on our civilian broadcast lingo, each nervous to push the CB’s black button. Should I be “MotorFOOL”? Should Kim resort to her 1978 handle, “Dixie Darlin’”? Perhaps we should identify ourselves as “the Big Blue Cadillac?”
The Pilot cashier had advised Kim to talk, wryling noting, “If you’re a woman, them boys will talk to you about anything.”
We were also advised that some CB lingo has changed. “Breaker-breaker 1-9” is evidently no longer fashionable. And “10-4 good buddy,” means you’re looking for a hairy man-date in a dim corner of a truck stop. I didn’t dare ask if, “I’m knocking on your back door,” still meant tailgating.
Finally, we decided Kim should just blurt, “Can you hear me now?” which she repeated for the next 30 miles.
“Hey, WalMart truck! Can you hear me now?”
“Hey, McDonald’s truck! Can you hear me now?”
“Hey red truck! Can you hear me now?”
Eventually, some poor trucker said, “Yes. Very well. It works.” And with that, he cut all communication.
About 45 miles south of Eau Claire, we encountered a friendly trucker and talked to him until the Cadillac abruptly died. Yes, you read that right. As we sputtered to the side of road, the trucker said, “Are you okay” as he passed.
I responded that no, we were not okay, the G.D. Cadillac was in need of a 18 wheeler to put it out of its misery and that he should come, posthaste, to crush the car like a Diet Coke can.
“What was that good buddy? You’re breaking up?” and poof, he was gone.
The CB’s range evidently extended all the way to the trunk. Still, it was probably for the best. He’d called me “good buddy” and I didn’t want to be tailgated today.
They make a mean cheese omlette
When we coasted to a stop, the car was still running (even thought it had clearly lost power at 65 mph). So I limped off the interstate and pulled into the Timber Valley Restaurant in Hixon, Wisconsin.
We’d made it 103 miles.
Under the dashboard. Oh, the indignity of it all.
After an appropriate amount of profanity, I decided to replace the ignition switch with the correct, 1957 model my friend (and Motorpool user) David King sent me this weekend. This required the usual contortions, which Kim photographed for posterity. I apologize to the various diners who were subjected to my 2-hour litany of cusses, grunts, and exasperated outbursts.
Find the author.
What was it? The coil again? The points? An evil Satanic spirit of Cadillac hatred? I didn’t know whether to call AAA or an exorcist. I opted instead for my mechanic Mark at Impatient Creations and Mike at Mastermind Inc. They both gave suggestions ranging from a bad distributor cap to mis-gapped points.
In fact, the nearly 30 men exiting the Timber Valley Restaurant all opined like Bill O’Rielly at the DNC over my car. Fuel pump? Distributor? Coil? Points? Bad gas? Ethenol? Communists? Obama? No man could resist the pull of the mighty Eldorado Brougham. Its open hood was black hole of mechanical despair, from which no testosterone could escape.
A woman in distress
While I was on the phone, my charming and lovely cousin Kim batted her eyes at two unsuspecting gentlemen. By the time she was finished batting, “Murph” and “Chris,” volunteer firemen in Hixon, told us to take their Jeep to a parts store that was 10 miles away. What guys! What a state! Who, in today’s world, says, “Here, take my car.”
It’s the kind of thing that restores your faith in America. (We left ‘em two Motorpool.com t-shirts).
Faced with what to purchase at the parts store, I opted for two coils, two condensers, and two sets of points. If they’d had a spare 1958 Cadillac, I would bought that, too.
Back at Timber Valley Restaurant, we decided that a little mechanical spasm was a good occasion for breakfast. This is because the Timber Valley Restaurant did not serve gin martinis. So we opted instead for lard.
At the gas station: a slightly depressed native with bad posture.
Drunk with every bad kind of cholesterol, I announced to the good people of Hixon that, “I’m getting the hell out of Wisconsin, even if it’s on the back of a AAA tow truck! And you can keep your cheese!”
Without installing my spare parts, I simply fired up the old Brougham and pulled out onto I-94 (again). Five miles later, the car lost power, then caught, lost power, then caught. Kim suggested that I talk nicer to the car and maybe even name her. The volume of my invective increased 10-fold, and I slammed the accelerator pedal into the mouton carpeting with the words, “GO you old paperweight! Don’t make me push you again! I’ll yank out your sparkplugs and 10-4 you right in the tailpipe!”
Miraculously, she roared back to life and we proceeded without incident to St. Paul.