Monday, November 17, 2008

Voyage of the Titanic - An Epic RV Adventure

Chapter 2 – New Rubber All The Way Around

Manson sat in the middle of the faded blue fold-down sofa, his arms outstretched, his legs stretched out across the blue kitchen-type carpet, almost filling up the entire space. The carpet was not original or new. He revealed damp pools of sweat in wide circles under both arms. The top of the sofa was now soaking it up too. Sweat was running off his forehead like a dripping faucet. He repeatedly pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead with it. It was getting hot already in the desert southwest, and, even in March, it was pushing 90s this late in the afternoon. It was pushing 200 degrees inside this box with wheels.

I sat in the passenger seat of the rig, which was a love-seat of sorts, a blue vinyl two-seater high back that could be turned around to face the sofa and also could be reclined into a bed, “for a tike”, as Charlie put it. I was watching my wife look and touch.

“This baby’ll sleep 10 easy,” he had said earlier.

I only saw beds for maybe four and a small kid, if you counted the love-seat. Maybe he was talking about putting sleeping bags on the floor. Like those tents they tell you will sleep up to eight. You have to lay out the sleeping bags and the sleepers according to a precise diagram to even remotely attempt to fit eight people in the tent. They don’t tell you how to get the eight people into the tent and into the sleeping bags, which will clearly take some sort of plan. They don’t explain how you would get out of the tent, if you need to take a leak in the middle of the night for example, either.

Barb is walking around inside the 6’ 8” X 30’ interior box. She sits on the queen-size mattress that takes up the entire bedroom area in the back, and looks around, pleased, then down the aisle, through the open door, at me way up twenty-some feet in the love seat. I’m watching her, following her with my eyes. She steps in and out of the bathroom quickly, not much to see in there, toilet, sink, medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet is clearly not one of the original components, and not designed for the RV industry, so it looks out of place. The bathroom door shuts but she can’t get it to latch, so she gives up. The tub and shower stand alone on the other side of the aisle, and there is nothing that shuts this bathroom area off from the rest of the living space. Presumably someone could be watching TV….. wait, there’s no TV. I just notice it. Not even a place where a TV might have been. I see there’s a “custom made” plaque of sorts, where TVs go in the newer coaches, in the center of the area above the windshield and the roof, with three circular needle gauges about three inches in diameter, a temperature gauge, a barometer, and a compass. None of them appear to work. The temperature needle, I notice, is off the grid, so it might be working. It feels like its well over its maximum possible reading, in the coach. She pulls the shower curtain aside and checks out the tub.

Next she looks over the small L-shaped kitchen with the three-burner stove and the little oven. She pulls the oven door down, looks in. This obviously reveals a non-appropriate situation by the look on her face. She does the same to the micro-wave, a forty-nine dollar Target add-on probably bought at a garage sale. The micro-wave shelf is a hastily built box, stained a color that isn’t even close to the rest of the cabinetry. The cabinets above and below the sink all have a mismatched assortment of latches and pulls. She opens each one and looks in. She tries to open the little slatted window over the sink but the knob appears to be stripped and turns with no effect. There are broken and missing slats in the mini-blind covering it also.

Next to the tub, on the other side of the aisle, is a built-in wardrobe with two drawers underneath. She pulls out one of the drawers and has difficulty forcing it back shut. I make a mental note that the drawer slides are obviously damaged, maybe missing. She opens the wardrobe doors and looks in. Next to that is a three-way refrigerator.

“This refrigerator works on propane, 12V battery, or 110 house current depending on the switch you set it on,” is how it was explained by Charlie. Ultimately, I think it worked on 110 only, if at all.

She opens that too though, and I’m sure she almost passes out from the stench, but she tries not to show it. In my case, I’m not sure if the new stench is coming from the refrigerator she just opened or what’s sitting on the sofa. Both are down-wind of me. She flips up the shelf at the end of the counter and it falls right back down on its hinge. This would give her an additional ten inches of counter space if it had stayed up, making a total of two feet of usable counter space, maybe, but very difficult to walk down the aisle without bruising a hip. The kitchen and bath area are covered with a fake wood floor, also not for the RV industry, and not original.

Finally, the inevitable words come out of her mouth.

“I really like this one.”

That was all she said. I didn’t really like this one much at all. It was too big. It had clearly seen better days, and even worse, I was to find out later. It had a lot of “extras” that were not, shall we say, engineered correctly. It did only have 54,000 miles on the odometer though. Not bad for a 15-year old coach, less than 4,000 miles a year. I was going to have to succumb to the illusion that the mechanical on this Southwind was maintained better than the interior of the coach.

There were a lot of things on this coach that might not work properly, even though Charlie promised that everything would work when we drove off the lot. For one big thing, there was a one and a half inch gap above the windshield on the passenger side, and it looked like the glass was ready to fall out of the opening completely. A good push would have sent the huge piece of glass shattering to the gravel parking lot below.

“Gonna have to fix that,” I said.

‘Of course, no problem, we were going to fix that anyway,” Charlie shot back.

“I don’t know,” I start. I’m talking to Barb. “Lot of work here.”

“I know, but we can do it,” she said. “Mostly just needs to be cleaned up.”

Eternal optimism, if we just clean it up it will be good as new. This place was going to take a lot more that just a sponge, a mop and a bucket, a lot more.

I got up and walked outside to check out the exterior. Manson grunted himself up and followed me. You could tell he was happy about getting back outside. Then he said it again.

“New rubber all the way around, lotsa miles left in those tires, that’d cost ya a thousand by itself.”

The tires did look new; they at least looked shined up. They all had air. Each of the six of them has about 100psi, for future reference.

The outside of the Southwind was clean but had a dingy, un-waxed look.

“You can wax this right up,” Charlie says when I bring it up. “Just been out in the sun a lot. You’ll get it to look like new.”

I glance over the huge exterior surface of the coach and think that if I ever get this to look like new, it will kill me for the effort.

Well I figured I better ask, since we seemed to be sidestepping this issue, “does it run?”

“Sure it runs, starts right up.” Mr. Manson seemed offended. I dare I question that it would run.

My wife is walking around the coach and is at this very moment on the other side, away from me.

“I’ll just go get a key and be right back.” He disappears into the sales shack.

My wife comes around from the back of the motor home. “So what do you think?” she says.

In my head, I think we’re crazy, but I say something else. “It could work.” Pause. “We can probably afford the down. Did he say how much it was?” Pause. “I wonder how much the payments will be?” Long pause. “It does have new tires.” My wife doesn’t answer any of these queries.

Manson comes waddling back with a key on what looks like a hotel key ring. Big orange oval with a number on it, Room 237 I think.

He climbs back into the coach with a grunt or two and plops down in the driver’s seat. The big coach sways. I follow him in and watch him as he, inserts the key, pushes the shift into park, and turns. Nothing. He turns the key back then tries it again. I could hear a few faint clicks and then nothing.

“Battery’s dead, been sittin’ out here too long. I’ll get her plugged in and the batteries will charge up just fine. You should keep it plugged in anyway when you have it parked, just to make sure you have a full charge in the batteries.” Another lesson on the proper care and operation of the motor home, from Charles Manson, whom I am now convinced has never owned one of these.

He left out the part about motor homes having two, sometimes three DEEP CELL batteries. “DEEP CELL” translates into “fucking expensive”. In fact the most expensive batteries you can find, and, at the moment, I just believe that all they need is to be charged.

Charles Manson, sweat pouring from his brow again, yells out into the junkyard.

“Kurt, bring that charger up here and get the Southwind hooked up. Batteries are dead.”

A short, bent over, old man appears from the shadows, through the gate, pulling a large industrial battery charger, the cord unraveling and falling behind him as he goes. It’s plugged in somewhere back in the abyss of motor home parts and pieces, in a lean-to shed that will, I’m certain, ignite with the smallest of sparks, and has no business having power run to it. Certainly a Code issue. He hooks it up and, I assume, sets it to start the engine, because Charlie goes back in and, in a few brief seconds, the beefy V8 roars to life. It runs.

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