Sleeper

I heard back East they got sections of the paper called “I saw you.”

I'm not sure what exactly it's for or why anyone would care that someone seen them walking around a park or feeding birds top-end sourdough breadcrumbs around a statue or running with the blue shorts and the tanktop t-shirt flashing mineral sweat through small groomed pores and meditating on concrete and trendy mp3s. It don't make any sense to me, but I'm not a huge fan of bulk-lot quantity humanity. Noticing anybody at all seems a waste of sensual apparati.

But I saw you, you fucking punk.

About the time I agreed with an untrendy mp3 about making a pretty woman love me, no matter what I do. My sweat was wet through with the hot sun and darkened by work. A broke car, a wounded beast of unnecessary burden, lay without the ability to generate 12 volts of alternating current to power its heart next to me. My knuckles bled into the yellow dirt and into the greasy heart of one of Dodge's biggest mistakes. The bass player pedaled the fifth for an interminable moment while you drove by and then Albert King rewrote the fucking book of Genesis with stars screaming flashing woman's hips bends of detuned steel gut guitar string. Not a huge deal, really.

I built a motor once. During my summer of speed and cheap women.

The 400M hulked on the engine stand while me and Jake run a hone up and down the cylinder jackets. We had the block stripped naked and dipped and bored thirty thousandths of an inch over the old cylinder radii. The air conditioning pump, smog pump, and any other extraneous homage to comfort or ecological responsibility was left in the mud. We loaded the heavy steel crank, the longest stroking crank offered in a Ford V8, and the rest of the rotating stock into the block. We dropped in the RV cam 12 degrees ahead of the factory timing, Nader be damned. We had the heads polished, satin in the intake ports, mirrored in the exhaust. The heads got stiffer springs to fight back the power of larger cam lobes. The rods were manganese steel.

The manifold was a Wieland aluminum piece of industrial art. The carburetor was an old school Holley with four barrels of 950 cubic feet a minute air delivery, manual choke, stainless steel fuel line. We took out his bondo, primer, and oxidation red Torino's tired 302 . We locked a 2100 RPM stall converter on the front of the C4 transmission since the Ford Motor Company's four hundred cubic inch displacement modified block is a goddamn torque monster with a habit of eating drive lines for lunch. The 400 barely fit in the engine compartment, the headers barely cleared the crossmember. We ripped out the electronic ignition modules, vacuum choke controllers, sensors, and little Detroit mystery boxes from the firewall and fenders. The entire electronic compliment of underhood electronics consisted of ten wires.

The posi rear end turned a couple 235 45 R 16's on black spoke Kragers. We prowled the streets in that monster. We rumbled and screamed down the country two lanes that now sport turning lanes and stoplights and subdivisions with streets named after the flora and fauna and streams they displaced.

That car was an ugly stripped down straight line machine with a fire breathing monster under the hood. That's what you call a sleeper, kids.

I saw you drive by, and I'm pretty sure you saw me. We didn't wave. I think I saw you the other day, too. With your thin wisp of English major goatee on that cherubic marshmallow face. I didn't recognize you right away, and honestly I was distracted by pumped and strained muscles I had been pushing to their limits in the gym and sore hands from working the heavy bag into a pulp.

I saw you. Anticipating what you probably knew would be your fate the day we met again. We have history. You went white. Whiter.
You've always been a bitch.