Between the pizza place and the car wash was this huge dumpster. One day, one of the cooks there was trying to sell Ralph an unregistered .45 automatic. I don't know the law exactly, but I do think that you are guaranteed a jail term if you're caught with a gun like that--five years mandatory if the gun was used in a crime. I think. Regardless, the Gresge was skeptical. He didn't believe the gun was in working order. So the cook took him out to the dumpster and fired into it. It did work. The Gresge bought it for three hundred bucks and added it to his arsenal.
He was also big on buying junky cheap-shit cars and working on them, cannibalizing them, anything. He bought this awful station wagon for two hundred from this high school kid. He never drove it, never worked on it. It reminded us of that guitar in Spinal Tap. "No, don't look at it. Don't even think about it."
One day, Gresge woke up and the car was gone. Stolen. He very calmly got his .45 and sat on the porch in the rocking chair and waited. Sure enough, a few hours later, the car came back. Ralph went down to it and showed the gun to the driver and then got in. Turns out to be the kid who'd sold it to him.
"Shit," said the kid. "Fuck. I kept an extra key. Shit man, stop looking at me like that. I just wanted to buy some groceries for my mom. Shit. C'mon man."
"Drive."
He made the kid drive to the Ithaca police station and turn himself in for "grand theft auto". Of course, this whole time, Ralph's gun was a much more serious offense than what the kid had done. But the kid got out and raced into the police station.
So Ralph got the car back.
And: he ate all the kid's groceries.
RICHH --urp