A fictional short story by Greg Glassner
Rodney “Chub” Olsen managed to get through four years at Slippery Rock State College with a BA in marketing followed by two years in the Army. He returned home to Milledgeton, Pennsylvania in 1975 to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
Lacking direction and prospects, he latched onto a temporary position as a car salesman and “go-fer” at Carlo’s Used Cars, Towing and Body Shop, a modest multi-purpose enterprise loosely run along the lines of a fiefdom by Carlo Ludovico the hardworking, albeit mercurial proprietor.. Chub and his old high school buddies had hung around Carlo’s and Olson continued to do so through college.
Chub rented a room by the month at the rundown Lakeside Motel, which was at least a mile from the lake. His job as a car salesman included use of a “demonstrator” for transportation. This translated into whatever car no wary customer would touch with a ten-foot pole. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Chub reasoned.
Carlo always had a few interesting imports and sports cars on his lot, which had originally attracted Chub and his pals to adopt the business as their hangout, but the bread and butter was quick turnover of cheap rides and “E-Z Financing.” These cars started out as wrecks that insurance companies had totaled. They were then resurrected by the boys in the body shop between customer jobs.
One day, in the deepest recesses of the out-building, he discovered a mangled wreck under a brown tarp with assorted fenders and bumpers piled on top.”
Carlo’s business model hinged on collecting a down payment that equaled his initial investment in each vehicle. Most of these financially challenged customers would make at least a couple of monthly payments before finding various flaws in their purchase. Many buyers eventually defaulted on the loan. At that point the car would be repossessed. As the car salesman, Chub also got the honor of driving the wrecker and repossessing the cars so Carlo could patch them up and resell them to another sucker.
Not every customer was happy about seeing his or her ride departing on the hook of a tow truck and shots were sometimes fired. Chub was handed the company flack jacket when assigned repossession duty. His marketing degree helped in selling cars and his recent military experience came in handy when retrieving them.
It wasn’t all drudgery and dodging bullets and baseball bats, however. Chub was able to take a 1966 Corvette home as a demo on several weekends and a 1968 Porsche 911 on several other occasions. On these weekends off he hung out with some of his old high school pals and the ‘Vette and Porsche were deemed assets in chasing after attractive, unmarried twenty-something women.
Like many body shops, used car lots and wrecker services, Carlo’s had a large fenced in open storage area – a glorified junkyard – and a concrete block outbuilding with wrecks too fragile to remain out in the rain and snow. Chub liked to explore these treasure troves as he had when a teenager.
One day, In the deepest recesses of the outbuilding, he discovered a mangled wreck under a brown tarp with assorted fenders and bumpers piled on top. This mystery intrigued Chub and he finally started removing the layers until he could squirm and burrow his way under the tarp and probe with a flashlight. The crumpled aluminum nose was painted red and had a small, yellow rectangular badge on it. It depicted a prancing horse.
“Geez, it’s a frickin’ Ferrari!” Chub exclaimed out loud, his voice echoing in the empty building.
After finding the proverbial diamond in the rust in the back building of Carlo’s Body Shop and Used Cars, Chub Olsen wasted no time on additional excavation, but immediately plotted a strategy aimed at acquiring it, regardless of condition.
Chub headed straight for the state liquor store after work and then headed back to the office armed with a quart of Jack Daniels Black, Carlo’s favorite libation, along with ice and some chips and pretzels from a nearby convenience store. Carlo sat and listened to police wrecker calls well into the evening to avoid heading home to a household of noisy kids. Chub had already hung around to shoot the breeze and talk cars several times so his arrival was not all that suspicious.
“Not much action at the Lakeside Motel tonight, so I thought I’d come back to keep you company,” Chub announced. Carlo seemed delighted, so the plan was underway. About halfway through the bottle, Chub steered the conversation around to the mystery car. “What’s the story on that mangled car under the tarp out back? I was looking around and realized it’s a Ferrari.”
A strange look came over Carlo’s usually open and smiling face and he exploded: “You don’t wanna’ mess with that. It’s got a curse on it!”
Stunned, Chub quickly retreated and spent the rest of the evening trying to get back in his employer’s good graces. But the quest didn’t stop there. In fact Carlo’s dramatic reaction only piqued Chub’s curiosity. He asked his fellow employees about the mystery Ferrari and didn’t learn much. They all knew about “the curse” and Carlo’s prickly reaction when any of them had asked about it.
The next time Carlo was away from the shop, Chub revisited the corner of the storage building, armed with a powerful flashlight and a notepad. He removed enough of the debris on top of the car and found a serial number on the body and the engine, a sophisticated and powerful looking twin-cam V-12. He could also make out enough of the bodywork to conclude that this was an old race car. It was in sad shape but it looked to Chub that it could be resurrected in a well equipped body shop. “And what a car it would be,” he muttered.
Over the next several weeks, he tried several times to bring the subject up with Carlo and got the same reaction.
While Chub Olsen was wary of Carlo Ludovico’s feelings about the Ferrari under the tarp and wanted to be respectful, Chub didn’t believe in curses, not that sort of curse, anyway. “Werewolves, zombies and vampires existed in movies and popular culture, right?” Chub told himself. “And killer cars like ‘Christine’ and a haunted Buick V-8 were figments of Stephen King’s fertile imagination. But a curse on an old race car?”
“No way!” Chub burst out loud. “I mean, there’s a frickin’ Ferrari, just sitting there in the back of that storage building.”
In the meantime, Chub did some digging and contacted Mike Smith, an old college pal who was so nuts about Italian cars that friends called him “Maserati Michael.” Armed with the engine and chassis serial numbers his friend delivered some answers.
“Chassis number 0646 is a Ferrari 335 S, and the engine number identifies it as a 4-liter V-12 with six twin-throat Weber carburetors,” Mike told him. “But according to my sources the car was a write-off after a racing wreck and never used again after the 1957 Mille Miglia,” Chub’s friend added. “Wasn’t that the last time they ran the Mille Miglia?” Chub asked. “Sure was,” his friend added. “You’ve got a piece of Ferrari racing history there. Restored, it would bring big bucks at a classic car auction.”
“But not until I spent a year driving around in it,” Chub replied.
By the spring of 1976, Chub knew a lot about the car’s history. It appeared that the car at Carlo’s was indeed the Ferrari 335 S driven in the 1957 Mille Miglia by the dashing Spanish aristocrat, Don Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca, Marquis de Portago, or simply “Fon” Portago to friends and fans. Portago and his co-driver, Edmund Nelson, were running as high as third overall late in the 1,000 mile road race when they made a pit stop during which Portago’s latest squeeze, actress Linda Christian, impulsively leaned into the cockpit and kissed him. A photo shot at that moment was later dubbed “The Kiss of Death.”
Perhaps the smooch added to Portago’s desire to go all out over the final leg of the grueling race. Less than 40 miles from the finish a tire blew out, causing Portago to lose control at 150 miles per hour. The Ferrari hurtled itself into the crowd, killing the young Marquis, co-driver Nelson and nine spectators including five children. That tragedy, so soon after the 1955 Le Mans crash, spelled the end of the Mille Miglia as a race.
“Was Linda Christian’s ‘Kiss of Death’ the ‘curse’ Carlo kept mumbling about?” Chub wondered.
Curse or no curse, it was a very valuable car, and Chub redoubled his efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Next week Part 2 of 2.
It was the 1955, not 1956, LeMans disaster, of course, but this tale has me hanging in there for the other installment.
Enjoyed the read – looking forward to part 2!