Thursday night when my phone rang and a friend asked me if I could do a favor, I said yes. But I had no idea it would make for such an interesting weekend, and with so many stories. Of course, some of those stories are better told in person than in writing, so they won’t be mentioned here, but overall, it made for a very entertaining and interesting weekend. Will you allow me to tell you about it? Good. And there’s your opening paragraph.

So the call I got from a friend, who shall remain nameless (and genderless) called to ask if I would run up and repossess a vehicle for him/her. Well, I’ve never been called the Repo Man. And the only experience I have with repossessing a vehicle is when my truck got stolen when I was in the service. I came back home for a weekend, discovered my pickup had been stolen out of my dad’s driveway, and went and got it back. I happened to know where it was, who was likely to have stolen it, and so I got it back. But I’m not really much of a repo man. Well, I wasn’t… until yesterday.

So my friend asked if I could make this happen discreetly, where the other party might even possibly think it had been stolen. My friend has a copy of the key, and a location where I might find the vehicle, and a pretty good per diem. So I agreed to take the job, called my wheel man, and we hit the road. We were hoping it would be something cool where the current person in possession was a hot chick with her top off or something. We feel like repo men should get to see boobs occasionally in their job. Sigh. Alas, it wasn’t a hot topless lass. It was still a cool experience though, and the only problem with all this was that the damn collection was in Oklahoma City.

I thought briefly of telling my friend, “I don’t go to Hoklagoma. Not for anything.” But I didn’t. The pay for this job was too much to pass up, and the opportunities seemed way too exciting. Siege and I of course made all the obvious Oklahoma jokes on the way up there. “You know the best thing to ever come out of Oklahoma? I-35 south.” Yeah. We covered them all. And had a good trip up there. Saw some idiotic people on the road – they drive even worse in Oklahoma – and had a few laughs. We took my little trusty comet instead of Siege’s gas giant.

We considered briefly, stopping by and saying hi to Threat and Catina, but Catina lives on the other side of the state, and Threat – well, we ended up just not having time. Too much dumb schlit happened. Like the guy who got right up on my ass. What makes this dumber than usual is that he rode my ass for so long, so interested in getting ahead of me, so impatient, but when I finally was able to get over and let him pass, he pulled up ahead a few carlengths, and I ended up passing him again because he slowed down.

Another dumb thing was the guy who passed us like nine times. Driving a very nice-looking Jeep Wrangler, apparently full of kids and women. Because they would pass us, then pull over somewhere – I’m assuming to pee – then get back on behind us and pass us again. This happened so frequently that I felt like I was beginning to get to know them. I invited them for coffee but they declined.

On our way up there, we stopped into Radio Shack to pick up some supplies, and overheard the employee woman helping an elderly couple. And she was filling them full of so much schlit it was starting to smell like a port-o-let in there. Telling the old man that on a composite cable (red, white, yellow) the yellow was audio, the white was video, and the red was just an extra audio cable.

Then the dude asked her what an S-video cable was and she said something to the effect of, “It’s a video cable that has a switch built into it, and it carries audio signal too.” Well, these old people, are they to buy this cable, are going to be sorely disappointed when they get home and find out that none of what the idiot bitch said was true. Seriously? If you don’t know about cables, you shouldn’t be working at Radio Shack. And if you don’t know about cables, don’t just make stuff up to sound like you know what you’re doing! Ask someone! Because undoubtedly, your customers will learn the truth, find out you were lying, and get your dumb ass fired! She went on and on trying to sell them schlit they didn’t need, and kept incorrectly explaining functions of cables. It was ridiculous.

So when we finally got up there, we sat and waited while the person currently in possession of the target vehicle finished putting another coat of wax on it. Yeah. Waxing a vehicle in forty-degree weather. Once the wax job was finally finished, the person disappeared inside the apartment momentarily, I guess to retrieve something, and left the driver door open on the vehicle. So I jogged across and slipped inside, started it up and backed out of the parking place. I kept an eye on the rearview mirror as we exited the complex, and never saw the person come out shouting. So that was good.

What was not good was the contents of the boxes in the back seat. There were four pretty good-sized boxes in the back seat, and they were all filled with – well, you know what? You’re probably not interested in that.

Now I was told by my friend that anything we found in the vehicle, we could keep. Except, of course, the parts that belong in the vehicle. Like the spare tire and the jack. Which were conveniently gone. Well, not the spare. The spare was in the back of the vehicle, rolling around. The jack and tire tool, though – they were gone. Weird. Good thing we didn’t have a blowout on the way home. So anyway, we felt obligated to check every crack, crevice and compartment in the vehicle. And it was quite rewarding. Here’s the list of stuff we recovered:

• four boxes full of – well, not important
• a .40 caliber Glock pistol, new in the box
• two 9mm Glock pistols, new in the box
• a Smith & Wesson .357 snub-nose revolver
• Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits box set
• three cartons of Carlton cigarettes
• a medium-sized bag full of AA batteries
• a brand new HP laptop computer, with tons of home-grown porn on it

And that’s about all that’s interesting. See, the thing that I found weird about all this was the fact that some person who listens to Barry Manilow also has a car full of guns, cigarettes and porn. Sounds like my kind of person! There were several other odds and ends in the vehicle, some of which was interesting, but most of which I shouldn’t mention. After finding all this, I began to wonder what my friend had gotten into that required hiring a repo man to take care of this. I never questioned whether any of this was legal. I mean, I know my friend, and I know my friend actually owns the vehicle, so I knew I wasn’t stealing it. As far as the firearms though – were they stolen? I’ll never know. I dumped them in the Red River.

On our way home, it was pretty uneventful. We made it all the way back to about two miles from my house when we finally saw our first wreck. A truck blew through an intersection and t-boned a car like an extra-large cheese-stuffed sausage slamming into a wet envelope full of minnows. It was sick. Happened right in front of us too. Siege took off running across the intersection to see if they needed help, and almost got hit himself.

So it was a very interesting road trip. By the time we got home, my red-haired wife was pulling a pot roast out of the oven. We finished that off with a glass or six of bourbon, and relaxed on our back patio around the fire pit. Siege and I are now considering opening a side business where we handle repossesions and other small jobs. Because let’s face it: the odds are in our favor that eventually, we will finally have a job that involves a topless woman. And there be our reward. Until then, I guess it’s back to the grind, where – sadly – all the women wear tops.