The Pickup Lines Form at the Rear By Buster McNutt I had never owned a pickup truck, and I did need to take that old Lazy Boy and the six-foot tall wooden Tiki doll (don’t ask) down to the dump, and what with all those Urban Cowboy crazed Debra Winger cowperson hat wearing wannabe-etts on the prowl…I mean, they don’t call them “pickups” for nothing! Anyways, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Kinda like that thoroughbred worm investment Latrell talked me into a few years ago. This guy in Kearney, Neb. (the worm capitol of the world) had sold us a dozen certified stud worms. They had pedigrees a couple inches long. Deal was, we’d close them up ina milk car- ton and pipe in Barry White music for a couple days, and then rent them out to local worm farmers to jump-start the next generation of catfish bait. Nobody told us that worms didn’t work that way, since they are asexual and pretty much all play on the same team. Well, no wonder they stay un- derground all the time—you just know they get tired ofall those stand-up belly crawler comedians doing their “don’t ask—don’t tell” routines down at the local grub bar. Anyway, my buddy Gary was sell- ing his Chevy pickup to buy a station wagon, which at the time I thought was pretty strange. It makes perfect sense now that I’m older and wiser (okay, maybe not wiser—but that’s still one out of two, and even Reggie “I-Got- Your-Candy-Bar” Jackson never hit 500!). The pickup even had one of those camper toppers on it. Gary had built little cabinets inside, hung curtains, and even had a rope and pulley sys- tem that lowered a foam rubber mat- tress down from the ceiling. Forget stud worms—TI should have rented Gary and his truck out! Actually, he had fixed all this up for camping with the family. Gary is one of my more severely verti- cally challenged friends. He could pretty much stand up inside the topper without hitting his head, unless he was wearing his Mystic Lodge of the Fra- ternal Apocalypse headdress, which is another story for another day. Camping in the back ofa pickup truck had never hit the high single dig- its on my list of things that I’d really like to do before the world ends and/ or I qualify for a reduced price sub- scription to Modern Maturity maga- zine, whichever comes first. Lady M’s idea of roughing it is sleeping anywhere that you can look out the window and see the words “Holiday” and “Inn” on the same sign. So I deep-six all the Muchkins-Go-To-Wally- World para- phernalia. Store-bought bed liners were still thinking about being invented at the time, so I bought one of those indoor/outdoor carpet remnants from Kay’s Mart, and stuck it to the rusting bed with a mixture of 50 percent gas- ket cement and 50 percent ground-up asexual thoroughbred stud worms. Once again, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Pickups are incredibly useful for hauling stuff. I think there are entire categories of stuff that were secretly invented by the truck manufacturers just so their customers would have plenty of stuff to haul. Plastic swim- ming pools, storage building kits, lawn tractors, and rotweiller exercise wheels come immediately to mind. Many’s the week I would haul stuff across town, and then go back the next week and haul it right back home. I had pretty NOVEMBER, 1999 much dogeared my copy of The Joy of Hauling. My Iron Butterfly and Meat Loaf eight tracks had been replaced by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard cassettes—and I didn’t even have a cassette player! I had even installed a CB radio, so that Lady M could call me in mid-haul if she found more stuff that needed hauling. The downside is the pickup trucks are apparently even more useful for hauling other people’s stuff. You want to hear from friends and family that until now you were pretty sure had turned state’s evidence, been admitted to the Witness Protection Program and moved to Nebraska where they were given middle management jobs at one of the more aggressive asexual thor- oughbred stud worm farms? Just buy a pickup. Generations of family and friends best forgotten, along with their hibernating, patiently waiting-to-be- moved stuff immediately emerge from the primordial sludge of days gone by. It’s like waking up one day, and dis- covering that everybody you know is selling life insurance, vitamin supple- ments or skin care products. You might as well hang a “kick me” sign on your back and tattoo the name “Patsy” on your forehead. In a world of increas- ingly vast quantities of stuff desperately needing hauling, your life (and truck) is no longer your own. The real insult is when people who own their own later-model trucks ask to borrow yours, because theirs is too nice to move the particular stuff-dejour around in! This actually happened. Uncle T. Roll McNutt borrowed my truck to haul a load of mulch for his garden. He couldn’t use this truck be- cause he had just reglazed the bed liner and it would be dangerous to drive around in a $30,000 truck with a load of slip-sliding-aw