Pillow Talking

The other night in a trendy Manhattan restaurant, the conversation turned to pillows. Seems that Oprah just did a feature on bugs in bed pillows and, apparently, they’re more common than anyone thought. Who knew? But, I’ve got to tell you, as an owner of two beach rental properties with 40 pillows, I’m more concerned about stains. You might not see bugs in your pillows, but there’s no hiding an old soiled pillow.

As conscientious landlords, we make an annual pillow-purchasing pilgrimage to the Kmart for the pre-Memorial Day, two for one $5 pillow special. You should see all the gay boys loading up, especially when the “grandfather” pillows are on sale. Oh, they might look expensive, tarted up in classic blue and white striped Martha Stewart fabric, but underneath, they’re still just cheap poly-foam. What do you expect for five dollars?

This year the Kmart featured crisp white Joe Boxer brand pillows. This confused me. I remember Joe Boxer brand boxer shorts and boxer briefs from back in the 80’s. They were quite trendy for awhile among the Dupont Circle fabby boys. The yellow Joe Boxer smiley face with his tongue hanging out always looked kinda lewd to me, like he’d just finished giving a really great blowjob. When the hell did they start making cheap pillows? A use for the leftover material perhaps?

Anyway, about a mile into our return trip from the Kmart, we realize we had an incident brewing. The pillows were no longer quietly sitting in the back of the truck. Oh no, they were jumping around and threatening to fly out of the bed at any moment and out onto Route One. But I couldn’t stop. And I wasn’t going to stop. There was too much traffic. And there’s no way in hell I was gonna dart around through traffic just to snatch up a $2.50 pillow. Me, well, I’d just leave the damn pillows in the highway to get hit and smashed and run over and ripped up and pushed back and forth by all the cars and trucks until they all finally migrated into the median strip where they’d eventually be retrieved by someone from the county government or some resident of a Dewey Beach flop house.

In the end, I just eased back on the gas pedal and the pillows settled down. Another truck-related incident averted.

How much can you haul with what you got?

There’s a whole Ford F150 web forum devoted to this question. I know this because of a recent incident involving 2 tons of pea gravel and the definition of the verb to haul.

I normally interpret hauling as meaning to transport, as with a truck or car or on my back. For example, I managed to haul all that crap down to the beach in just one trip or I hauled those landscaping stones all the way from Greenwood in the back of the Volvo wagon. In truck jargon there is a decided difference between hauling and towing. The hauling capacity of the F150 is only about 1,700 pounds whereas the towing capacity is greater than 6,000 pounds. Who knew? Truck TV commercials don’t get into these sorts of semantics. Hell no. They give you the impression you can haul anything. Ford tough is what they say. So, naturally on Saturday afternoon, I thought nothing of loading two tons of pea gravel into the back of my very own Ford tough pickup.

Well, that was a mistake. The truck sank a good three feet under the weight. It looked strangely like a pimped out low rider, sans purple lights underneath. The tires were squashed and less than five minutes into the drive down to Dewey Beach we heard a loud pop and I just knew it was one of the tires. Breaking down on busy Route One with a two-ton load of pea gravel just wasn’t going to be fun. But, luckily it wasn’t a tire. Maybe, hopefully, it was just a strut or shock absorber. Anyhow, we made it to Dewey Beach without further incident and unloaded it as fast as we could. The truck slowly rose back up.

Afterwards, I went looking around online for more information about hauling capacity, hoping I might also find out what the loud pop was. I didn’t. But I did find this site where guys talk – brag – about their hauling and towing prowess. Here are a couple of exchanges.

TexasKid1: I don't know about the numbers, I can tell you my truck tows a 33 ft 9000lb trailer with a hitch weight of 950lbs. It hauled 1300lbs of cement last weekend 240 miles without sagging the rear end at all. Its hauled gravel, trees, a bunch of other stuff with no problems. I go out in the desert where most people only take 4x4's no problems there either. (2000 F150 SC XLT 5.44-sp auto)

FarmBoy: I've hauled over 2000 pounds worth of retaining wall brick a couple times. Only about 10 miles from the Home Depot so no big issue. I would not recommend any long trips with that weight, but it was fine for me. I've hauled over 1000 pounds several times up to the family cottage. I tow a snowmobile trailer in the winter, but that probably totals out at 2500, not much. Tow the boat to the launch every year...about .5 miles away the boat probably weighs 3000. Most of my trucks tow over 15% of their miles due to my snowmobiling habit. It is not a lot of weight, but can be a challenge in bad weather. My trucks have never let me down. I like my truck to look nice, but it is used for work, not just cause it's cool to drive a truck. (2000 F150 4x4 SC/SB 5.4 Auto, Tow Package, ORP with the sticker for 2000, Cab Steps, Lariet. Oxford White/Harvest Gold 2 tone)

And my favorite.....

Raoul: Hate to put you guys to shame but, don't think this can be topped. I've hauled my wife, her sister and their mother at the same time. Only bottomed out a few times and maintained a steady 40 mph. OD was off and temp gauge never left normal. Towing mirrors would have come in handy though. (99 Lariat Regular Cab 2WD 120"WB 5.4 3.55LS, Tow,Dark Toreador Red/Harvest Gold, Line-X)

Axiom or oxymoron?

A delightful blend of Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, and Chardonnay. A good value at $10, says the Wine Spectator of White Truck, one of two brands put out by the Axiom Wine Company of Napa Valley, California. It's sort of dry -- the review, not the wine. Who writes these reviews anyway? White Truck, in this wine drinker's opinion, is nothing fancy, just a nice sipping wine. Perfect for sunny spring afternoons in the backyard and paired with some grilled sausages and cheese grits. Who says a truck and a bottle of wine don't go together?

Some people like taking ideas to the extreme

Think if you put all the furniture out in the yard, leaving only the beds in the rooms. So, people would get ready for bed outside and then walk to the darkness of the empty house to sleep, remembering, as they try to find their way, of the party danced.

-- Aurelio Grisanty

Laughter is good medicine

My father went into the hospital for an angioplasty procedure. He needed a stent to reopen a clogged artery to the heart. It all went very well, and the old boy is already feeling better. Thankfully, he didn't need a pig valve in his heart, like Jesse Helms. Interestingly, as he left the hospital, the first thing he saw was a white Ford F-150 pickup. Said it made him laugh.

The apple never falls far from the tree

I had just finished mixing a third Bloody Mary when my father gleefully handed me a blue RC Cola racing t-shirt. He’d been talking about it the entire weekend, even envisioning my wearing it to a swank Washington cocktail party, perhaps under a navy blazer and paired with some white bucks. It was, he kept telling me, an appropriate fashion statement for a man now driving an F-150. And, even more, it was a collector’s item, he explained, given that RC Cola’s race sponsorship days were over.

Its camp, is what I think. Pure Southern camp. Like Dolly Parton, South of the Border, and those “wooden cut-out fat lady bending over” lawn ornaments.

Some years back, my father had gotten involved with RC Cola and its sponsorship of a truck in the Craftsman truck series, now called the NASCAR Busch series. I’m still not exactly sure how or in what capacity. What I do know is that RC Cola sponsored the “86” truck, a blue Ford F-150 driven by Stacy Compton, a journeyman driver who now drives the “59” truck sponsored by Kingsford Charcoal and Bush’s Baked Beans. My father began following the RC Cola team and “86” truck to races in places like Bristol, Tennessee, and Martinsville, Virginia. He even went so far as to buy an Eddie Bauer special edition Ford Explorer SUV to drive to the races – so he’d fit in. And that’s not all. My brothers tell me he once sported a fake beard and camouflage hat at a race.

Lest you assume that my father is your regular garden variety redneck, I must assure you he isn’t. He’s a retired accountant and money manager who lives in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina, where there are lots of trees and building restrictions. He drives a big Cadillac and drinks Bloody Mary’s. The man personally picked out all the wallpaper for his South Carolina beach house. And, I can count on my left hand the number of times I’ve seen him in a shirt without a collar. If anything, he’s a redneck poseur.

I asked him if RC Cola had approached Moon Pie about sponsoring the “86” truck. What a great marketing combination that would have been. Classic Southern camp -- an RC Cola and a Moon Pie, the original Southern "working man's lunch." Yes, they had, but Moon Pie declined the offer. Seems they thought it wasn’t an appropriate marketing vehicle for the product. We shared a good laugh about that, agreeing that the Moon Pie clientele probably attends NASCAR races. Seriously, who else eats the damn things nowadays?

As I examined the RC Cola t-shirt more carefully, it hit me. My father isn’t a redneck poseur. He’s campy. And, somehow, I’ve inherited his peculiar sense of humour, a combination of Southern pride, self-mockery, and irony. How in the hell is this possible?