I've mentioned my lovely neighborhood in my profile, with the fabulous Memphis rednecks, Rooster, 'G', and Jackass Jeremy all living here. I mentioned the fabulous Germantown asshole, Robbie, and his gay lover, Curtis, from Mississippi, who come by quarterly on Sundays at 4 a.m. to do things to my cars, or did before the Memphis Express Shipping Company moved the quarterly loads to Saturday nights at 10 p.m.
This weekend I discovered that they are playing with my tires again.
They found out that if you deflate a car's tire to less than 15 pounds of pressure it creates a dangerous condition. The low tire experiences excessive friction and heat, especially at highway speeds, and is prone to explode. If the exploding tire is one of the front tires the chances of a deadly crash resulting is fairly high.
Every now and then they'd let some of the air out of the front passenger side tire of my Buick. They did this several times for about 2 years, but since I rarely drive the Buick it doesn't do anything. The car just sits there and eventually I notice the low tire and pump it back up. Finally realizing this, they just recently decided that perhaps they should do it to my truck instead, which I drive every day.
It's not rocket science, but who wants a genius trying to kill you anyway?
So they just recently deflated a tire on my truck to 10 lbs. Then, just for good measure, they actually added air to the opposite tire on that same axle. They jacked it up to over 40 lbs. I suppose they hope this will put additional pressure on the deflated tire and finally result in a catastrophic blowout. Perhaps one day it will, but this time it simply annoyed me because I had to pump the one tire up and let air out of the other.
Coincidentally, the Memphis Express Shipping Company just had one of their quarterly loads.
I suppose I should be grateful for their stupidity. Some of the other things they've done have been far less humorous, such as stabbing the roof of my car which cost me $1000 to fix, unbolting my shock absorber so that it came out of the shock tower when I hit a bump on the highway, draining my master cylider of all brake fluid so that I had no brakes, disconnecting my throttle return spring so that my car accellerated out of control, and a long list of other hillarious pranks and practical jokes all intended to kill me.
You might think that filing a report with the local police would get some sort of investigation going and ultimately put a stop to this. But if you thought that then you'd be wrong. This is Redneckville and the police 1) don't know how to do detective work and 2) don't give a shit. So I have a stack of police reports which I suppose might be useful as toilet paper. And there is even a detective assigned to the case. He has never come out to my house to investigate anything and simply told me over the phone, "it's probably Rooster. He's crazy and he used to be a mechanic."
Lovely. So, if you are confident that Rooster has been trying to kill me for over 5 years why don't you arrest him and lock him away? No, no, no, because that would require getting up from the desk and driving out to Rooster's house. Detectives in this town don't do that sort of thing. I'm not sure what they actually do do, but they don't make felony arrests for attempted murder. They let that sort of thing slide, like giving speeding carjackers and their kidnapped victim a warning and then letting them go (yes, they actually did this, and the carjackers then killed the woman.)
Then the detective on the phone added for good measure, "maybe all of this stuff has just happened all by itself?"
Yes, a big knife hole just appeared in the roof of my car all by itself. And the brakes, which I had just checked the previous weekend, suddenly leaked completely dry without any fluid showing up on any of the wheels and no fluid ever leaking again after that once I bled the system. And the throttle return springs, both of them, magically came disconnected at the same time even though I had driven the car just a few days before and they were both connected then. And the gasket on my carburetor that was cut, causing gasoline so spew all over the engine and catch fire, this happened magically too, even though I rebuilt that carburetor a few months prior and tested it fully without finding any leaks, let alone a catastrophic one like that which you could not miss if you were looking under the hood.
So, why would Rooster do anything to me? Well, Robbie and Curtis 'allegedly' came by at 4 a.m. just before a load back when I worked with them at the Express Shipping Company in 1999, and smashed out a window of my truck by snapping a coin into it. It was late January, 10 degrees outside, and we had a quarterly load that morning at 5 a.m. I had run out to my truck at 2 a.m. for something and the window was fine.
Snapping coins was a stupid thing Robbie and Curtis did in the office for awhile, always aiming at coworkers in order to let everyone passing know that Robbie is the Alpha Male and Curtis is his bitch. Eventually Robbie decided that Curtis was getting out of line and snapped one right in Curtis' face, nearly blinding him. Then they decided that snapping coins was dangerous and switched to yo yo's, which they simply used for flicking in our faces, once again to let us know that Robbie is an asshole and Curtis is his bitch. This, too, eventually stopped when Robbie became threatened by Curtis' superior yo yo skills and whacked Curtis dead in the face with his yo yo, naturally proclaiming it an accident, as he had done when he hurt Curtis with the penny.
Anyway, I found my window broken and filed a police report. A neighbor, G's father, claimed he actually saw Rooster out that night at about 2 a.m. with a BB gun. He all but said he saw him actually do it. So the police roughed up Rooster for 2 hours while they tried to get him to confess. Problem was, of course, that Rooster didn't do it. My neighbor said years later that he never ever said he saw Rooster do anything and that the police and I must all be mistaken about that. Mmm hmm. Anyway, Rooster was pretty upset at being accused and had no idea that I wasn't the one who made the accusation.
Rooster used to be a mechanic. But he fried his brains like Ozzie Osborne with drugs and alcohol and now he sort of does odd jobs and lives at home with his mother. He does some crazy shit when he's on a bender, but I haven't seen him messed up in over a year.
Robbie and Curtis, on the other hand, fit the profile of a pair of sociopathic criminals, according to a friend in the Department of Justice whom I told about them. They are the sort of people who would indeed kill someone and think it quite funny. Not only that, but they are the sort that would fully expect to get away with it, believing themselves to be far superior intellectually to most everyone else.
So anyway, as I write this I am reminded that I didn't check my shocks to make sure all the nuts are in place and tight while I was searching for the source of the billowing smoke that entertained me so much on Friday night. I'll need to remember to do that tomorrow when I get the chance.
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