Sometimes, The Gas Is The Thing...

The one thing about my friend Phlegm Z that was apparent from the day I met him- he was a problem solver and never let anything stand in his way from what he wanted to do.

He drove a small Isuzu pick-up loaded down with a rather large camper shell up the drive-way in a hurry and stopped in a hurry and hopped out of the little truck with his aviator sunglasses on and spoke loudly to me when he was introduced.

“What? Your name is Scottie? A carpenter? Can you help me widen the skylight in my camper?”

“I can. But what for?”

“I’m dating this nurse who keeps bumping her head, man! That’s why! If it’s bigger she can stick her head out the top of the camper!”

I got a good visual of this and laughed.

I liked Phlegm Z right away. His energy was infectious.

So an hour after I had met him, I had a bigger hole cut in the top of his camper. We put what is called a small curb on it and then used a skylight for a house on it. Phlegm Z was most pleased with what I had done for him.

“You like MEAT?” he asked me in a strong Danish accent.

“Umm… what kind of meat?”

“MEAT, man! Steak! T-bone. Tri-tip! You like MEAT?”

“Yeah. I like meat.”

“Good, man! I’ll go down and get us some MEAT!”

And barbeque's with Phlegm Z became a regular gig. When he was in town, I walked over from my house and away from my macrobiotic eating girlfriend, and ate MEAT with Phlegm Z.

He was gone more than he was around, and rented a room over the garage of the shop where he had a bed for sleeping and a floor and desk filled with computers he had taken apart and was working on. I learned from the Danish landlord Sten, that Phlegm Z was the “on call” pilot for Fed Ex, meaning, he drove crazily all around the country and filled in for sick pilots. He lived out of the camper which he parked at airports. He stole power everywhere he went with a long extension cord and some special clamps that could penetrate insulation and give him maybe 5 safe amps to use. Enough for a computer and a light.

When he was off, he came back and hung out at Sten’s place, worked on his trucks or his airplane or his cars, ate MEAT, told stories about his stuff he got up to, and spoke Danish with Sten. The wineries knew of his gifts and would solicit him often to help repair equipment or design new cooling systems or help maintain old equipment. Phlegm Z had more work he could do than he had relatives.

And he tried to do as much as was humanly possible. He’d work like crazy and then come back to Sten’s and EAT MEAT.

Phlegm Z loved steak and rice. Steak and salad. Steak and potatoes.

He was a protege as a child, but instead of playing the piano or violin or doing math in his head…

Phlegm Z could take things apart, fix them, and put them back together. He was a mechanical brainiac. He was a combustion engine genius.

The first story Phlegm Z ever told me was about the time he took a motorcycle engine and a large toboggan and an airplane propeller and put them all together to make a snow and ice contraption that he thought would be fun to cruise around on in his native Denmark as a kid.

Phlegm Z was ten. He was known around his small town in Denmark mostly because of who his father had been, but he was about to become well known in a way, wholly unintended. You see, Phlegm Z had mated the propeller to the motor and attached it to the sled, but that was as far as he had gotten. He hadn’t wired a kill switch for the motor yet. He hadn’t made a wire cowling for the propeller yet, to keep it from being exposed and slicing people up in little pieces. He hadn’t worked out his steering arrangements yet.

You know those air boats that cruise around on the Everglades with the big fan in back and the flat-bottom boat beneath? The ones with the big wire cage around the fan?

Phlegm Z’s thing looked like one of those, only there was no cage around the fan, just the bare blade, and he started his up over snow, something he had planned on, only at a much later date. The way he tells it, he was just turning the motor over to see if it would fire a couple of times. It was full of gas, yes, but he was certain the carb was way out of adjustment and the thing wouldn’t run. He had just wanted to see if it would go “KABUB KABUB”.

It did. It also then started going “RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR…” as the motor built up rpm’s and the sled started heading down the road. Phlegm Z jumped aboard just in time, then pulled up a piece of iron scrap that was luckily lying on the bottom of the sled, and dug it into the snow as a crude method of steering the monster he had just created.

The carburetor was letting a lot of fuel mixture into the cylinder but not so much that the engine wouldn’t ignite it. This meant idling was more like screaming down the road, which is what Phlegm Z was doing. In fact, what he was doing was about thirty miles an hour, in a sled, with a screaming motorcycle motor turning a small airplane propeller with nothing around the propeller to keep an arm or a leg intact.

Things were not going well for young master Phlegm Z at that particular time in his childhood. He was screaming “Look Out!” of course in Danish, and digging his iron bar into the ice and snow the way a canoeist might use a paddle, and pretty soon the local police and fire and what have you were chasing Phlegm Z around, shaking their fists at him, trying to tell him to stop that dangerous thing immediately.

But there was no way to stop it until it ran out of gas. Which it eventually did. In about three hours. Phlegm Z got it out of town and out to a local lake, which was frozen over, and there he road around and around in big circles as the sun began to set and he began to get very cold.

Eventually, the gas ran dry and the motor quit and the big scary propeller stopped turning and the town got to have a first-rate glimpse at what a stupendous genius Phlegm Z actually was…