From Wall Street to Skank Street -- Poking the frog at Gunther's Garage (Joe Bageant)

[Tace]

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

Mar. 10, 2010 -- If you have the balls to stand up to Gunther Gatlin, and pay in cash, you just might manage to get him to do his job, which is fixing cars. Gunther's Garage is jammed in between an unpainted shotgun shack and a weedy vacant lot on a skanky little side street in Winchester, Virginia. The place is really an illegal junkyard, but slips through the city code masquerading as a garage.

Patronizing Gunther's is not for wallflowers, gays, feminists or Yankees. You do not go there unless you don't mind being insulted. Gunther has a habit of greeting customers with remarks such as: "So what the hell is your problem?" Once he addressed a gay guy as "Twinkles." Sometimes he will just stand there, grease all over his Hawaiian shirt, pulling on his suspenders, and with a poignant pause, ask what a customer thinks is wrong with the vehicle. He listens thoughtfully, eyes toward the ground, then looks up and says, "Well that's the dumbest goddamned thing I ever heard." Gunther can make you feel like crawling away through the crack under the garage door, or make you feel like popping him in his unshaven jaw.

However, one thing Gunther will not do is cheat or overcharge you. Another thing he will not do is let a vehicle fail state inspection. Just about any vehicle that can be pushed into the garage's oily littered gloom will roll out the other side bearing the great state of Virginia's stamp of road worthiness. As the owner of an ancient rotted out, Toyota truck with bald tires, Gunther's got my business for life.

Beyond all that, Gunther is of a vanishing breed. He's one of those crusty homegrown experts who will expound on everything, from the vicissitudes of the stock market to America as an emerging police state:

It starts with car exhaust standards, and ends up with me having to pay for anti-terrorist training, so I can get the new license you gotta have now to tow cars. Just in case you hook up to a car with a goddamned bomb in it." I recommend that you not ask him about it because the entire tirade is almost forty minutes long.

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[MisterP]

1. funny thing is, I'm a Marxist but don't have any trust-fund money nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Joe is a National Treasure.

I hardly hear of him in the media tho, I fear he is over looked.

[tom_paine]

3. Our Corporate M$M/RW Lie Machine is about perception management and marketing

No place in such a soul-less edifice designed solely to keep we Plebians docile, confused and disconnected for someone with with wit, soul, heart, and a stubborn penchant for truth-telling.