Changes

Omar Bricks has never believed in oil changes. I've always been one to say "Get it right the first time, jackass." Why waste time and money filling your car with shitty oil you're going to regret 3,000 miles down the road? Do the homework now and you won't have to pay some grease monkey rip-off wages to siphon out your shitty oil and spit it in a bucket a few months from now.

There's a whole industry that preys on this kind of short-sighted thinking. Lightning Lube, The Oil Slick, Carp. That last one has some letters missing from the sign, I'm not about to guess what the full name is supposed to be. Because if it turns out to be Carpenis or something great like that I'm going to be embarrassed that I've been calling it Carpals all along. And then there's The Change, which I thought was a clinic for pre-op transsexuals until I went in there to buy Ramrod Hurley a birthday present last year and they tried to lube my chassis.

But Omar Bricks isn't fooled, at least not by the oil-change places that aren't named like sexual reassignment chop shops. I'm not about to waste my hard-earned cash swapping out perfectly good oil, so I buy the good stuff up front. From Wal-Mart, I'm not sure what the brand is called. It's got a bunny on it.

And this all worked fine and good for years until last week, when I had to take the Bricksmobile IV into the shop because it was belching flames again and this was getting me written up for a ticket every time I'd drive past an elementary school and some kids would coincidentally catch on fire. The cops never had a shred of proof, of course, but if you're a lazy cop and you've got some dude driving an unpainted foreign car with a flamethrower for a tailpipe through the same neighborhood where you've got kids on fire, it doesn't take long to figure out who to pin the frame on.

So I took the Bricksmobile IV down to Ricky's, one of the only shops in town I trust, after the only other place I trust, Bill's, burnt to the ground in a freak accident while I was idling outside the day before. Quervo, the guy who owns Ricky's, dropped the bomb and told me I'd been putting Nestle's Qwik in my engine instead of oil, and as a result the whole thing was fucked, in a delicious-smelling kind of way. Turns out I'd never owned a car long enough for the disadvantages of using chocolate syrup to lubricate your engine parts to become evident; I'd always managed to blow the car up or drive it into a swimming pool before the chocolate folly caught up with me.

So, although it went against everything I believe in, I told him to go ahead and change the oil just this once. Put in the good stuff, you know, but don't break the bank. Anything with an animal on the bottle was cool.

At first I thought Quervo might give me some shit about asking him to work on some weird-ass Panamanian brand of car with license plates from an ATV, but he was cool about it. Or at least he seemed cool, he talked a lot but it's not like I speak Spanish. That reminds me, I really need to find an English-speaking auto shop some time soon. Preferably one built with a lot of asbestos.

Bricks out.

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