During those happy days I learned how to operate a heavy-duty crane. From that time all the way up to today, I’ve always felt that learning how to operate that heavy-duty crane, and learning how to control that machine that flattens automobile bodies into small iron cabinets, are the two single greatest accomplishments in my life.
Of course these accomplishments didn’t occur overnight; I started from scratch. Whenever you start learning something with the very basics, they always seem completely unrelated to what you’re actually trying to learn; the junkyard industry is no different. Annie first taught me how to strip the cars of those things we didn’t need; this is something that even a dog can do. However, as we were stripping the cars, Annie threw out a few sentences that made me feel that what we were doing was actually quite interesting. Concentrating on those sentences, I didn’t feel so much like a dog. She said, “Some of these objects are completely useless here, but somewhere else they might turn out to be somewhat useful. And then in some other place, they’ll prove to be even more useful.”
And so each time I strapped on that canvas tool belt and climbed into one of those outwardly atrocious automobiles, I would begin to carefully search—search for those items I felt were utterly useless yet definitely had some use somewhere else. Well, let me tell you, boy, did I find some. In one week I found enough items to fill up half of a convenience store.
Every day I found enough change in the cracks between the car seats to buy one or two bottles of Coca-Cola. And if my luck was good, some days I would even discover one or two earrings set with gems. I always gave the earrings to Annie, who wore them every day; it didn’t seem to matter that the right and left earrings didn’t match. Most of the perfume bottles that I found in the cars were still half-filled; stacking them up in the sheet-metal outhouse made the place smell almost like the cosmetics section of a department store. I even picked up a couple of books; I think one of them was a weekly journal written by some kid, really weird!* So even a weekly journal can be published and sold! Later, one by one, I tore out the pages to wipe my hands on—that little book was useful after all, it cleaned better than any tissue or paper towel out there!
Usually I would work with Ahzhi and Old Bull. But sometimes Ahzhi would have to go to Uncle Xu’s friend’s place in the streets to make sure everything was under control, leaving only Old Bull and me. Old Bull didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. This was his shortcoming. But his strong point was that he could take the most complicated job and teach you how to do it in the most clear and simple way. What I feared most was getting halfway through stripping a car and having Ahzhi called away to take care of something. Old Bull would start up, telling me which karaoke bar or restaurant Ahzhi was going to, what kind of a chump the boss there was, and just what kind of guy the big boss who ran things behind the scenes was. Then he would tell me which girls at each place were easy to get on with and which ones to keep your dick away from. Old Bull always said that he’d never tell me which girls Ahzhi screwed around with, but by the next time Ahzhi got called out to some other club, he would always forget and blurt out the name of the girl from the time before. It’s a good thing I’m not as much of a blabbermouth as him; otherwise Ahzhi would have whipped Old Bull’s ass a good couple hundred times. Later, I learned a special skill: whenever Old Bull started to repeat his annoying rambling, I wouldn’t really listen. Instead, I’d just occasionally let out an “Em,” “Ah,” or “Oh”—as long as I periodically gave him a little “Ah,” he’d be satisfied. I think it was from this point forward that I became more refined. In case you don’t know what “refined” means, let me tell you. Being refined takes two people, a speaker and a listener. Refinement is when the speaker has no idea what he is saying, and the listener in turn has no idea what he is listening to.
Anyway, I still had a most fruitful learning experience. At first I used an X-acto knife almost the size of a hand saw to cut off the seat cushions—back then I couldn’t even distinguish between plastic and leather lining. Often I’d end up covered in sweat, with tiny oddments of sticky cotton soaked in my sweat all over my face. After I finished with the car the ground would be covered with bits and fragments of things I couldn’t even recognize. And then one day Old Bull told me that you had to know how the seat cushions were installed in order to know how to properly strip them. What they installed first you took out last, what they installed last you stripped first; it was all a question of sequence. After that Old Bull taught me how to remove a set of seat belts. “This is called the ‘inertia reel,’” he said. The “inertia reel” was the first thing I learned how to recognize when I started working in the junkyard. “This is a ‘culvert drill hole,’” he continued. A “culvert drill hole” was the second thing I learned to recognize. I will never forget these two things. It only took Old Bull thirty seconds to strip off the seat belt and hand me the four screws. Looking inside the car, he said, “The guy driving this set of wheels wasn’t even wearing his seat belt when he bit the big one!”
“How do you know?”
“The screws in the reel were so loose that you couldn’t strap on the seat belt if you tried. The indentation on the left is so deep it must have been caused by a major accident.” Old Bull climbed out of the car and went around back to check out the rear. As he brushed the oil and dust from his hands, he said, “Moreover, it was a multiple-car accident. At the time of the accident the car was brand new. This unlucky fellow must have been pretty damn lazy—a brand new car right off the assembly line with a broken seat belt, and he doesn’t even bother going back to the dealer to get it fixed. He deserves to die!”
This was really interesting. Later I climbed in and out of God knows how many stripped foreign automobiles, domestic cars, luxury wheels, average run-of-the-mill rigs, cargo trailer motorcycles, and stretch cars, and let me tell you, I could always tell what each car was like before it met its end.
It was actually Ahzhi who was completely indifferent to all this. Once I told him: the owner of this Opel had a dog with long white fur. He answered, “Boring!”
Normally during the daytime, Ahzhi’s larger eye would shrink slightly and his small eye would expand a bit, so his face didn’t appear as terrifying as usual. I think this was because there were fewer ghosts running around during the day to aggravate his alien eyes. When Ahzhi wasn’t communicating with ghosts, the only thing he seemed interested in was machinery. And he never brought up his escapades with women. He just told me not to waste all my time wondering what this or that automobile used to look like. A car was just a car. He said that even an abandoned, demolished car was still a car. Pick any one of these cars, they’ve all got 13,000 parts, 1,500 of which operate together at the same time. Moreover, each one uses 60 or 70 different types of materials. “You should try to understand how the cars work, and stop fantasizing about where the damn things come from.”
Ahzhi is the person who taught me how to truly understand an automobile. He would always be saying that an automobile is something that should never have to break down. A car isn’t like rice, vegetables, fruit, or people, which all go bad after a while. The material that a car is made from is extremely resilient; it should last far longer than any person. Each time he stripped off some part, he would always say that the part was still good—it may not have been new, but it was still good. Once after we spent half the day taking apart a 70 or 80 percent new engine, we sat down on the dirt slope to take a breather. That engine was placed on the ground with its bottom axle directly facing us.
“Uncle Xu said that an engine like this revolves 6,000 times in one minute!” Ahzhi said. “Fuck! Imagine how useful it would be if you could grow one of these on your body!”
I thought what he said was really funny, assuming he was going to go on about how much having an engine like that would improve his sex life, but in the end he just heaved a sigh and said,“Machines are much more formidable than us, they never die. A person can’t even come close. When we are alive we are already feeble enough, not to mention what happens after we die.”
“Can you really see ghosts?”
He nodded.
“Don’t you get scared?”
“They are even weaker than you, what the hell is there to be scared of?”
“Did you learn your ‘super-chops’ martial arts skills from those ghosts?”
“I never set out to learn anything.” Ahzhi eyed me for a second and then turned to gaze at that axle, saying, “Humans are extremely feeble and decrepit animals. There’s no point in learning anything.”
“But I learned a lot from you!” Somewhat excited, I pointed to the engine axle and said, “That’s the vibration damper, that’s the crank, lubrication oil comes in through those holes over there, over here is the flywheel…”
“So what’s the use? What part of your body can revolve 6,000 times in one minute?”
That’s the kind of guy Ahzhi is. When I was just learning how to operate that crane and picked up a U-shaped BMW, turned it 360 degrees, and set it back down in its original spot, Little Horse, Little Xinjiang, Old Bull, and even Annie all gave me a round of applause. Ahzhi was the only one who didn’t clap. But later, after I learned how to operate the compactor and crush automobile frames flat, I could suddenly relate to what Ahzhi was feeling.
“This set of wheels is really wasted this time!” I exclaimed.
“It’s just an empty frame,” replied Annie. “It was wasted before it even showed up on our doorstep.”
I don’t know why, but every time I thought back to that last sentence spoken by Annie, I couldn’t help but feel that she wasn’t talking about cars, but about all of us—especially Tarō.
