My favorite people

Today I got an oil change and tune up for $20 from my old pal at the garage down the street from work. That guy is awesome. While I am not able to be this man myself, I am relieved to see that he and his kind still have a place in this world. It just wouldn't be the same without them.

Today he wore a simple Slayer t-shirt, and, since he wore a Cinderella tshirt during my last visit, I'm led to believe that he lives in a world of perpetual 1987. He exudes the very epitome of '80s metalhead, with his flowing mane capped by a blank black hat, black leather varsity jacket, tshirt tucked into faded acid washed jeans held in place by a silver-tooled leather belt and sensible thick-soled black leather shoes. You just know that somewhere in his deepest closet there exists a jean jacket with a Def Leppard logo stitched onto the back. Sometimes a man must even hide from himself.

His wife, with her bleached blond hair teased to the sky, adjusts her off-the-shoulder black top when she hears his conversion van pull up in the driveway. Greeted with a kiss, he idly tugs on her simple polished chain belt, spinning it back and forth through her acid-washed belt loops, and tells her to put on her black Indian moccasin boots as it's time to hit the road. WASP is playing at Jaxx. "Can you believe we didn't know?" he asks. Sometimes a man has to do what he must when there's rock in the air.

But she's ecstatic.

Later, after Chris Holmes' heady guitar riffs whip their inner teenagers into a frenzy, the moonlight glints off the chromed Busch beer tire cover, dancing across the slightly swaying ceiling of the conversion van in a dangerous counterpoint to The Scorpions' "Rock Me Like a Hurricane." As you all should know, when this van's a-rockin', well, you get the point...