I like green most of the time—deep green, emerald green, British racing green—but this was just wrong, tragic, as if some stoned autoworker on a long-ago Detroit assembly line painted it that color on a bet.
“Do it, Hubbard. Do it. I dareyou.”
Squirt-squirt-squirt…
“Ohhhhh, man! I didn’t think you’d really doit.”
It could make you queasy just looking at it, the only pickup in Calhoun County, Alabama, that no one—not even the most shiftless of men—wanted to lean on, in case that paint job would rub off and spread like science fiction.
It was an impulse buy, as I recall. I traded a silver ’74 Firebird for it, but only after two nitwit teenagers—befuddled on Boone’s Farm and bereft of insurance—sideswiped me on a rainy night in ’79. There is nothing sadder than a beautiful car all beat to hell, and I couldn’t afford to fix it. The pickup was ugly, yes, but it was honest about it; it wasn’t puttin’ on airs. At least, I remember thinking, it was probably mechanically sound.
It was not. It needed shocks and a new front end, which would not have mattered if I lived in a state with smoother roads. But Alabama is not famous for its infrastructure; at one time, as I remember, about two dozen elected officials were indicted for taking kickbacks on concrete pipe. All I know is, every time I drove off the lip of a