When I was a young man, Joe, a friend of mine, asked me to help him drive to Colorado to meet his wife. He wouldn’t let me drive at all. I was just company. By the time we were outside of North Platte, Kansas there was this terrible knocking in the engine.
After we stopped, I had him rev it back up again and the knocking came back. I said, “How is your oil pressure?”
He didn’t have any. He said, “Oh shit, I’ve got no oil.”
He had not checked his oil in memory and had fused the bearings in the engine together. We needed a new engine. We thumbed a way back into town in a tractor trailer and when we got to the garage, Joe didn’t have his credit card or number. The owner actually ordered the part and installed it. Joe paid him as soon as he got the information, but it was a real handshake deal.
The women in Kansas were, “Oh, my God beautiful”—nothing like you’d see around here. [Baltimore] There was a waitress named Piper Valkyrie, who I took out on a date. At the time I was dating somebody, so there was the whole ethical thing, so I didn’t try to take it any further. It was just such a neat experience to have dinner with such a polite, beautiful woman.
Now I’m here, and as Tattoo Rick always said, “I’m too old to be concerned with such things.”
Books by James LaFond
