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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
January 24, 2010
Fiction first published
in a WIP dated November 14, 2000.
© 2000, 2010 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Man With a Message, 2007
© 2007 by Bud Grossmann
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TOO MUCH ON ONE MAN’S PLATE
In 1977, Hawaii residents David C. Fischer and his wife, Vivian Lum, purchased a new white Honda Civic hatchback automobile in Las Vegas, Nevada, and drove it as far east as Galloway County, Wisconsin. Then they went west again. For reasons we need not here specify, Fischer and Lum registered their vehicle in the Commonwealth of Virginia; the car was wearing Virginia tags when they shipped it from Los Angeles to Honolulu.
About a year later, when the Virginia registration was due to expire, Fischer went to a DMV office in Honolulu and presented his paperwork to register the car in the Aloha State. The DMV clerk plucked a pair of plates from a shelf and set them on the counter, but Fischer glanced at them and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but may I see what else you’ve got? My wife is going to want a number she can memorize easily.”
The clerk replied that the plates must be issued in sequence. Fischer was welcome, she said, to purchase “vanity” tags for an additional fee of one hundred dollars. Fischer shook his head and declined the offer. He would figure out some way to remember (and help Vivian remember) the number they had been issued: DPT-289. He paid the fees, took the plates out to the Honda, and set them on the passenger seat where he could contemplate the Dee Pee Tee Two Eight Nine on his drive back home.
Fischer recalled a “Dragnet” episode on television when he was a kid. Sgt. Joe Friday, speaking to a group of school children, suggested a method for memorizing a license number in case the kids ever witnessed an apparent crime and wanted to assist the police in locating a vehicle that was involved. Try to make a sentence out of the letters, the lawman advised, and then see if the numerals have some sort of meaning, too. Maybe the numbers would make you think of a date or a time of day, or perhaps an address or a rhyme.
Although David Fischer was a somewhat prudish fellow, a naughty declarative sentence popped into his head when he first tried to do something with DPT. Dave Pulls Titty. Let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt: he had once lived in the Dairy State.
Fischer then considered the numbers. Two, Eight, Nine. Two hundred eighty-nine. He recalled a Ford V-8 engine, two hundred eighty-nine cubic inch displacement. Fischer could see in his mind the chromed emblem on the front fender of a Mustang, the numerals two, eight, and nine set upon a wide-spread “vee.” Further, he specifically pictured a gleaming red 1966 Mustang hardtop with a white interior. It was a car he had long coveted, a ’66 Mustang with four-on-the-floor stick shift and, under the hood, a rumbling two eighty-nine.
No cows populated Fischer’s daydream after all. Instead, he envisioned the red Mustang parked under the stars on a summer’s night in front of the screen at a drive-in theater. The Ford’s front seats were unoccupied, the doors were locked, the windows were up. Fischer was in the back seat of the car, stroking the bosom of a warm, willing woman. DPT-289. Dave Pets Titties in a Ford Two Eighty-Nine.
He chanted the sequence several times aloud. Dave Pets Titties, Two. Eight. Nine. Dave Pets Titties, Two. Eight. Nine. Dave Pets Titties! TWO! EIGHT! NINE! Fischer arrived home, parked in the shade of a macadamia tree, and took the old plates off the Honda, bolted on the new.
When Vivian came home from work that day—she had ridden the bus—David said, “Honey, I got the new plates for the car. Did you notice?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I noticed. But why’d you get that number? I’m never going to be able to remember it.”
“Sure you are,” Fischer said, and he proudly described his mnemonic.
Vivian, ordinarily a sweet woman, looked as though she’d just bitten into a lemon. “That,” she spat, “is the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life!”
After supper that same day, they went out, Vivian and David, on some errand or another in their Civic. On the way back, they stopped to buy gasoline at a self-serve station with a convenience store. Vivian stayed in the car while Fischer filled the tank. He went inside the store to pay with a credit card. The cashier imprinted the charge slip and presented it to Fischer for his signature. “Please write your license number on there, too,” she said.
Fischer smiled. He had it memorized. He scribbled his name and then began to write “IGA...,” and he stopped and looked up at the cashier and stared into her eyes. He could remember the drive-in theater, but the scene had gone dim, had gone dark. The only words that came to the prudish man’s mind were I Grab Ass in a Chevy with a Three Twenty-Seven. “Just a sec,” Fischer said. “I gotta go look at my tags.” ♦
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This page was updated January 24, 2010, 1520 CST
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© 2010 by Bud Grossmann
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