YC Honda Noir in Lake Isabella

The saga continues. I was visiting YC Honda, this time as a retired guest, not a prospective returning employee. I was talking to my replacement, Johnny aka Juan Castillo. I was asked to hold a slab of beef, which I dutifully carried about for the remainder of the dream. But other than that, I was just there as a visitor, not responsible to do any work. 

I began giving Johnny what they call "the business," in Leave it to Beaver parlance. I told him what a shame it was that someone had ruined the whole day by ordering an engine for a car which I had noticed sitting gutted on a lift.

"Unless," Johnny said connivingly, "they ordered the wrong one, and then it's easy street, see?" The noir was palpable in his voice.

"Why would you wish that? How does that help the dealership in any way?" I chided innocently enough, in my estimation.

Well, it wasn't innocent enough for Johnny, who took offense immediately. He threatened me menacingly with a dipstick, pointing it at me like a foil, with which he intended to skewer me.

"It must be nice..." he began the standard reply to my implied accusation, launching into a tirade of irate indignance at the perceived inequity of the workload situation.

I cut him off, "No, Johnny. You got it all wrong. I'm not laying any trip on you." 

I tried to explain that it was all in fun, I was implying no guilt. He was having none of it and kept me at a distance with his dipstick sword.

I sought approval of another worker, a lower level grunt responsible for cleanup and shop maintenance. I don't remember his name. 

He was a  jeans and t-shirt wearing throwback to a '70s version of what auto mechanic-ing used to look like. He sported a strawberry blond mullet and rolled up short shirtsleeves, a pack of cigarettes, worn chevron-like on his shoulder, where an ASE patch or a tattoo might have just as easily resided. 

He didn't give me much support, but seemed concerned that I hadn't taken very good care of the meat, which was now filthy with shop dust.

I rinsed the meat off with water from the hose reel on the ceiling, which was intended for filling radiators and windshield washer fluid reservoirs.

"Good as new, see?" I said, using the wise-guy vernacular. Why I was affecting this same infectious 1940's detective movie dialect, I don't know. I guess it's common to adopt the lingo as a gesture of respect. 

It was all about respect in that type of shop environment. In real life, I'd have adopted a Mexican accent, using inflections common to the local custom. Just trying to fit in, bowing to the majority. At any rate, I wasn't the alpha in this situation, so if Johnny was going to speak like Bogart in some detective flick, I guess we all were.

I followed him to a place in the shop dedicated to the rebuilding of transmissions, where a torque converter assembly class was in session. They had the flying saucer shaped devices in pieces and were applying a friction enhancing goo on the interior before welding them back together.

"I didn't know you could teach monkeys to rebuilt trannys," I said, apparently unaware of my insulting choice of words.

Johnny didn't give it a second thought, as he was not the monkey I was referring to, but the teacher of monkeys, and as such, he looked down on the student workers as so much chattel.

Not much of this dream has really referred to Lake Isabella, so I'll simply state that I know that's where it was located. The dealership sat on the property owned by William and Grace Helton, my childhood surrogate grandparents. 

Some other drama had unfolded, but it is eluding me at the moment. Something regarding nightfall, coyotes, perhaps a horseback ride across the nearby mountain range, I don't know. Sketchy details of a patchy story, since forgotten. I gotta get up now, so I'll leave the notes unfinished. I've got Facebook to attend to. And I have to pee.