My childhood friend Crawford and I were rummaging around a junkyard. A real junkyard, with precarious stacks of wrecked cars tossed casually about by a forklift operator we could only assume—hope, even—was blind drunk and furious with life.
"Holy shit!" Crawford said. "Holy shit holy shit holy shit." He had such a way with word.
I investigated and soon was equally overjoyed. There in his hands, his gloriously grubby, stupid, evil hands, was a diesel truck horn. That we would take it home was a certainty. But how to install it, and in whose car?
"I really don't see that being much of an issue," he said, removing key components from his engine to make space for a giant old fire extinguisher we would use as an air source. And thus did we engineer what only teenage boys could engineer: a ridiculously loud car horn that one activated by pulling on a rope inside the car and deactivated by letting it finally run out of air 60 seconds later.
Many years afterward, Crawford was a teacher in a small Ohio farming town, the type of town that has 20 kids in its high school marching band, four of them pregnant. I was visiting, he was in meetings, and for whatever reason I was driving his car. Yes, the same car.
Some idiot was weaving and driving slowly, and I was more than delighted to reach for the rope. The eruption of the horn was so loud, you felt the concussion hit your chest. As cars lunged out of the way in the little downtown area, I noted that everyone within sight was intensively admiring our engineering. A half mile later, the horn finally fell silent.
When I picked up Crawford a half hour later, he'd already heard about the incident. His boss had given him the standard issue Ohio-hick-town-when-your-dick-friend-drives-your-car-he's-representing-the-entire-school speech. Surely you know it.