When Georgie reaches Lem Filbert’s garage, Lem is not in, but Georgie’s old drinking pal and classmate, Guido Mello, is still working there, looking heavier and a lot soberer than he used to. Married now, couple of kids, as he says, he is showing the burden of that. Black grease on his fat nose where he’s rubbed it, adding to his general down-in-the-dumps look. Guido tells him Lem is out test-driving a car whose shocks and wheel bearings they have just replaced, but if Georgie has come by looking for a job, forget it. Lem has plenty of business, these being hard times when people have to fix up their old cars instead of buying new, but they also don’t pay their bills. “He’s an ornery sonuvabitch to work for and he pays shitty wages for too many fucking hours, but what can I do?” Guido says, and smears the other side of his nose. “Little as it is, my kids would starve without it.” “Maybe you should unionize,” Georgie suggests, and Guido snorts and says, “Yeah, me and who else?” “Well at least you could be union president,” Georgie says, but instead of laughing at that, Guido only shakes his round burry head and sighs. “Jesus, Georgie, we’re halfway through our fucking lives and what have we got?”
Long tall Lem rolls in then in the battered purple Ford he has been test-driving. Georgie greets his old mine buddy and baseball teammate and they shoot the shit for a while, Georgie filling Lem in on what little he knows about Wally Brevnik and the other Deepwater refugees who fled town after the mine closed and letting fly with his by-now well-rehearsed tales of the big city, which for the first time fail to impress, Lem meanwhile unloading all his sour gripes about the garage, the fucking irresponsible mining company, this pig’s ass of a town, and the whole stupid fucking world in general. No, there’s no baseball team; he hasn’t swung a fucking bat since Tiger Miller left town. Lem’s brother Tuck was killed in the disaster and Tuck’s wife Bernice is now living with him, doing the laundry and housekeeping and fixing him his lunch pail every day, just as if he were still working a mine shift. She is some kind of a nurse and Lem figures Tuck married her to have someone to massage his hemorrhoids. A peculiar cunt who wears Bible clothes and lives in some fucking crackbrained dreamland of her own, Lem says, and she has recently gotten involved with those evangelical wackos out at the church camp. They have been having rows about that, but he knows Bernice was always close to Ely’s widow and needs a connection, and it suits her angels-and-devils nuttiness, so he’ll just have to live with it. Georgie asks him why he doesn’t just marry Bernice, and Lem says, “Nah. Then I’d probably have to fucking fuck her.”
Georgie tells him he is back in town for a while and needs an old junker to bum around in, what has he got? Lem looks skeptically down his long nose at him, so Georgie, on the pretense of digging for a coin for the Coke machine, flashes his mother’s roll and mentions that he’s going to be working for city hall and might require wheels for that. Lem shrugs and takes him around to the back lot where a lot of old wrecks stand rusting in the sun. Lem recommends a small rebuilt Dodge coupe with about seventy thousand alleged miles on it, but Georgie’s lustful eye falls on an old two-tone crimson-and-cream boat-sized Chrysler Imperial with Batmobile tail fins and gunsight tail lights, a fucking classic and perfect for his more urgent needs. Lem says it has had a rough life and he can’t guarantee it will make it out of the lot without breaking down, but Georgie’s heart is set (“Well, it’s your money, go ahead and buy the goddamn thing,” Lem says. “I could use the fucking repair business…”), so they haggle for a while and agree on a price, and Georgie talks him into letting him give it a run around the block, setting his half-finished Coke down as if planning to come right back to it.
Inspired by the baseball talk and the lush weather, Georgie takes a run out by the high school athletic fields, first closing the glove compartment door on the top of the centerfold so that it dangles there to cheer him on his journey. He has done a lot of driving up in the city, that being mostly what he did except jerk off, and it feels good to get back behind a wheel again, and on mostly empty streets and roads where he can open up. The old crate makes a lot of clunky noises, has no pick-up at all, the gear shift is tricky and the steering wheel is pretty loose, but what it has, he knows, is presence. In it, he is somebody, and, window down and arm out the window, he blows kisses and tips his cap to all he passes to let them know he knows it. He decides to name the fading beauty after one or another of his favorite blue movie characters like “Nympho Nellie” or “Sadie Sucker,” but finally, given her colors, settles on “Red-Hot Ruby,” who, as he recalls, also had a big thrusting creamy ass and lipsticked her anus. It was an old black-and-white silent, but they’d gone to the trouble to hand-color the lipstick red. It jiggled around going through the projector, like the rear end of this old car on a rough road.
He is in luck. The boys are having their first practice of the new season. He stops, keeping the motor running, to jaw with the coach for a minute. He volunteers his services to help the kids with their hitting, while they gather around to admire Ruby. Georgie could never field a ball for shit, but he was a natural with any kind of stick in his hand. He had quick wrists, could watch a pitch until it was nearly across the plate, then whip the bat around like a fly swatter, and the coach remembers that and says, sure, come along any time. Georgie, waving goodbye, feels like this day is turning into the best day of his life.
After that, he rolls around the periphery of the town, the centerfold’s raised culo flapping merrily in the breeze, checking out the motels and roadhouses that the fire chief mentioned for later on. “Big night tonight, baby,” he says, rapping the dash. “Gonna get it on!” He passes, chattering away to Ruby, or else to the centerfold, they’re an agreeable blur in his mind, the Sir Loin steak house and abandoned drive-in movie, the sleazy old love-cabins motel which charged by the hour, the driving range and country club, a few golfers already out enjoying the first real day of spring. He’s joining the in-crowd, maybe he ought to take up the game, pick up a few bucks once he’s got the knack. He swings into the rootbeer stand with the intention of offering his bod to the short-skirted carhops, but there’s not a one looks older than thirteen, so he blows them kisses and rolls on out, passing the new shopping center, new when he left town, the turn-off to the gravel pits and old swimming hole, the road to the Waterton whorehouses, and the burned-out ruins of the old Dance Barn where the big bands used to come and where they served anyone who could see over the bar. First got his cork popped by the hand of another under the table in a hard wooden booth in there, the hand belonging to a girl just fifteen years old like his green young self. At the time, he didn’t really know what came next, or if he knew, didn’t know how to make it happen, so he lost out with that chick. Never mind. Many more to follow. Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them sigh.