I hate directions – never read them. But I’m hoping you’ll read this – if you haven’t read Part One yet – please click here, then come back for more!

ANOTHER BONEHEAD BACKSTORY!
It was a Sunday morning, after a fairly good overnight snowfall. The usual crew spent the night in Bernie’s basement as we often did, because that’s where the beer was. We get up to see the snow and decide to take the Coronet up to the mall to practice skidding and sliding. It’s only a mile away and it’s early on Sunday – so there’s no cars in the unplowed parking lot and very few on the road.

We hit the virgin snow with a vengeance – taking turns giving it gas then slamming on the brakes, resulting in some sweet spin-outs. A bunch of junior Steve McQueen’s we were! Problem was, all that spinning moved around most of the powdery snow, leaving slippery ice patches on the asphalt. Oops. Bernie, in a glorious move hit one hard, sending us spinning endlessly around until one of the tires hit something and the car flipped over onto its side. Now what?

Nobody was hurt, and we all climb out. Now we’re four boneheads standing around the car that’s sitting on its side wondering what our next move is. To this day I wish I could have been in one of the passing cars looking at us and mocking our utter stupidity. You have to realize too – this was long before cell phones, so we were only concerned if a police car passed, we figured we had enough time in case anyone saw us, then went home to call the cops.

Ok, so our plan was to push the car upright, get back in and get the hell out of there. Not as easy as we thought it would be. You see, there was ice and snow…right. It was fucking slippery. We couldn’t get a lot of leverage, so we simply left. Actually, we ran back to Bernie’s house to get his brother to help us out.

His brother had a tank – a late 60’s Buick LeSabre – which weighed about twelve tons, plus he was completely insane and probably would get a kick out of this. We got him out the door, got some chains and ropes from the garage, jumped in the Buick and went back to the mall. Surprisingly the car was still there on its side – untouched, no snow plow had visited the lot as yet, so we thought we could pull this off.

We managed to run some of the lines around the undercarriage of the car and attached them to the trailer hook and trunk latch of the Buick. We think one quick pull will right the wrong – but we were mistaken. All it does is drag the car a few feet, scraping huge swaths of paint along with it. We try putting some of the lines higher on the car, but this time when the he hits the accelerator, the Buick konks out. It’s right about at this time we’re thinking we’re truly defeated, when a Police car shows up with a tow truck. Now we know we’re defeated.

The Police received a call of an abandoned car on it’s side, so we knew nobody reported us screwing around and causing the accident, but the evidence was pretty overwhelming – what with a parking lot full of figure eights and skid marks in the snow. The experienced tow truck operator was able to right the Coronet quickly, and the damage was pretty extensive. They had to call a second truck to come and get the Buick, turns out the engine seized, not totally because of our efforts to pull over the Dodge, but also because Bernie’s lame-brained brother never put oil in the car. So the family was down two cars on one snowy Sunday morning.

As I recall, Bernie had to take a lot of extra shifts at the Taco Bell  we worked at. I think I recall having to drive him to work an awful lot those days too.