Zulch Auto Works

Posted on May 12, 2004 in College

There really was a Zulch Auto Works in San Bernardino, a brick cube to the west of the freeway, to the east of the tracks, in a nowhere of one bedroom houses, ochre studio apartments that rented for $100 a month, and a cold storage warehouse with easy access to the yard of the Atcheson, Topeka, and the Santa Fe Railroad.

I don’t know what they housed on the upper floors; I drove by it slowly enough to look inside only once, for a few seconds. A young mechanic — maybe twenty-five — sat, bare-chested, in front of an engine he was rebuilding next to the garage door, smoking a cigarette and wiping the sweat from a sooty, wooly mustache that he’d put a lot of noneffort into growing. Beyond him were the black arms of the support girders and auto handling machines; a Cadillac jacked up; and other half-naked men scratching the hair in th smalls of their back as they pondered how to reconstruct the car that a loyal citizen of San Bernardino had placed in their care. I couldn’t look for long: a robin’s egg blue Buick came up behind me.

Before it vanished down the sluice which had sucked the brothels of Mill Street, the small Chinatown, the Japanese truck farms, and the Red Cars that could bring you to the heart of Los Angeles in an hour for just a nickle, I just had to see Zulch Auto Works and tell people what I had seen before the last potatohead sprouted and crawled off to some fairer metropolis down the interstate.

Hardly anyone goes to San Bernardino to spend the rest of his life there anymore.