#304 Monster Wheels

The other day my kid came home—he’s sort of moved out—and wanted to borrow twenty bucks for food. He figured he could Value Meal his way through the week till his next paycheck. “What happened to your last paycheck?” I inquired fatherly. “I blew it on some wheels,” he said. “Cool,” I enthused, finally he was getting his own car. “Let’s take a look.” We went outside and he showed me what he had said. There was my car I still let him drive. On it were some new wheels. “Oh, I get it,” I said like the un-cool oldster I am, “when you say wheels you mean wheels. Wheels doesn’t mean car anymore again.” “Oh yeah,” he said, “it still does, I just meant wheels wheels.” And wheels wheels they were. He called them 18s, which I suspect refers to the wheel diameter, as the tires themselves now looked like they’re about as thick as the ones I put on my tenspeed. “No spinners?” I asked, trying to regain a modicum of hipness. “Yeah,” he spit, “like I can afford spinners.” I looked at the Civic with all its dings and dirtiness and birdcrap stains, the interior jampacked with Value Meal detritus, dirty clothes and coffee cups. But goldurnit he had some nice shiny wheels to roll that pile of junk around.
It reminded me; I was in a car dealer’s the other day and chanced to pick up a catalogue from Les Schwab. Ol’ Les has gone way beyond the Free Beef days. Oh sure, he still peddles tires but today he’s also spun off heavily into the wheel business. What goes around comes around. And to make even more opportunities to sell even more wheels and therefore more tires, he also installs lifting and lowering kits. So yes, while I expect somehow that Les Schwab would be a place you could get a raised suspension, so you could put those big monster tires under your big monster truck to cart home your big monster carcass of meat, I didn’t suspect they were also the place you could go to get big wheels, and lower your chassis, as you pimp out your ride. Is this a great country or what? Les Schwab is here to pimp your ride. I saw this one set of wheels I couldn’t believe, they were like 22s. And they showed them in a picture on a Cadillac Escalade. I always think Escalade is a great word for a great big car cause it sounds like a mountain brook coming off a soon-to-be-melted-by-global-warming glacier. But no. Escalade really means the act of scaling or climbing the walls of a fortified place by ladders. As high off the ground as Escalades usually are, a little flip down step from the running board would be a good idea. You can then escalade into your Escalade. But I see something very very wrong with lowering any SUV. Wasn’t the whole point of SUVs the sport thing? Take it on the backroads; see a little America in the raw. Not the way this SUV was lowered. Forget about stump-humping, you couldn’t clear a manhole cover in this monster.
America, ya gotta love it.