I never fight anyone with arms longer than their legs. : Lookin’ for Mr. Goodpig

It was 3 o’clock in the morning when the rage hit me in full force. I sat up suddenly and shouted “That son of a pig’s mother!”

This naturally awakened my wife, who patted me and said, “There, there, your stepdaddy’s dead and buried and can’t hurt you anymore.”

“It’s not him,” I said, sitting up.

“Well, the war is over, dear, and the communists have all been chased back across the 38th Parallel, so pack your gun and go back to sleep.”

“We didn’t call them guns in the Corps. They were rifles. U.S. Rifle Caliber 30 M-1. A gas-operated, clip-fed, air-cooled, semi-automatic . . . .

“All right, all right.”

” . . . shoulder weapon. Weight, 9 1/2 pounds; muzzle velocity . . . “

“Hold it!”

“Can I just say that the average rate of fire was 30 rounds a second?”

Three a.m. is an awkward time of night. Too late for sex and too early for breakfast.

There being nothing to do, I am rarely awake at three. When I am, my wife knows there’s a problem.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“That damned mechanic,” I said.

“You woke me up to curse Mr. Goodwrench? Curse him after 9.”

“It just hit me. I spent almost a hundred bucks at the place and they did that to me.”

She sighed and turned on a light.

“All right. Did what?”

It’s this way.

I took my car to a service station in Woodland Hills because the battery had been going dead overnight. We decided I had to have a new battery. Simple enough. You don’t need a degree from Cal Tech to figure that out.

“I’ll have someone put it in,” the service manager said.

After several minutes, a scowling mechanic appeared. He jerked up the hood of the car without saying a word and began yanking at the battery cables.

“Easy,” I said good-naturedly.

He glared but remained silent.

The man was obviously in less than a wonderful mood; but, what the hell, there are times when even Tinkerbell must get blinked off about something. Perhaps he had failed a course in Aristotelian logic at night school.

As I watched him remove my old battery, I noticed wires for my right headlight weren’t attached. The light hadn’t been working and I was pleased to see that the problem was so easy to fix. I mentioned this.

“I’m not fixing no light,” the mechanic growled, proving, at least, that he was high enough on the evolutionary scale to communicate in primitive terms.

“I’m not asking you to fix no light,” I said. “I’ll fix it.”

By now I had decided to hell with the reasons for his mood. The man was a Neanderthal. I pushed the wires together myself.

He, meanwhile, lumbered back to get a new battery, returned and promptly dropped it. He swore, picked it up, slapped it in place, jammed on the cables and said, “Crank ‘er up!”

I turned the key. Nothing happened.

“Pump the pedal!” he demanded.

“This is a fuel-injected engine,” I said. “Pumping is not essential.”

That offended him.

He demanded a try and, reluctant to fight him for my key, I let him have a go at it. I never fight anyone with arms longer than their legs.

He pumped the accelerator pedal, cursed, turned the key and pumped again. I was standing outside and noticed that a wire from the battery was unattached.

“Maybe it’s that,” I said.

He stomped out, attached the wire, grumbled about the car being old and its wires unreliable and turned the ignition again. The car, of course, started.

The mechanic stomped off without another word. I paid, closed the hood myself and left.

But then, the more I thought about it the more enraged I became, not so much at the lower primate who put the battery in but at the whole idea of having to take that from a place where I’ve spent money.

Normally I don’t even use service stations. I go to a garage called Japanese Village, where they would rather throw themselves into a moving fan belt than offend a customer.

But I went where necessity took me this time and was forced to deal with a guy with hair on his back who had probably failed the Hell’s Angels intelligence test.

“I should have taken him to task instantly,” I said to my wife. “I should have said, ‘Now, see here . . . . ‘ “

“He would have never responded to ‘Now see here.’ He is not the ‘Now see here’ type. Try, ‘Hold on, dude.’ Then spit.”

“Right,” I said. “Hold on, dude . . . “

“Don’t spit!”

“I’m not going to spit.”

“I wasn’t sure. Anyhow, start with Hold on, dude and take it from there.”

“Then spit.”

“Right.”

“OK,” I said. “The next time I go by the station, I’ll try it. Hold on, dude! “

I turned off the light and was drifting off when she tapped me. Sweet expectations danced in my head.

“Yes?” I asked, smiling in the dark.

“Now I’m curious. What was the muzzle velocity of the M-1?”

“Twenty-six hundred feet per second,” I said smartly.

She patted me again.

“I’m sure you were a marvelous Marine.”

Average.