Reports came in last week that Harold had been killed by his partially ex-girlfriend, who was and is a partially or fully-working prostitute, who was jealous about his marriage to a fully-retired ex-prostitute who had been a friend of hers back in both of their prostitute salad days.

His name was not Harold the junkman, even though he ran an auto yard. He was plain Harold, but his lifestyle and personality were anything but plain to my way of thinking. To begin with, he had served time for some undefined crime in his youth. Twenty years, the street people said, though quite likely the reality was less than half that. That's a pretty good rule when dealing with junkies, hookers, petty thieves, winos, and mental misfits out on the streets; divide whatever they say by two, then subtract a little more.

Had the marriage that split the two female friends been recent, some might have seen this as a crime of passion, of unrequited love. But the marriage was twelve-years-old. Inexplicably, Harold's partially ex-girlfriend waited until now to shoot him six times (adjusting for street hyperbole: two) at his home in front of his wife (in a bar where they'd met for drinks) with a sixteen-shot Glock (a mail order .38).

I'd heard the news of a woman shooting a long-time acquaintance either on the radio or TV, but the names and locations meant nothing. I'd never known his last name and he'd had as many locations, business and/or residence, as most people have pairs of shoes. As for her name, it ended with "ie" like Cookie or Kimie or something like that, but it bore no resemblance to her Christian name used in the official reports of the crime. Her long record of prostitution was fully documented and reported.

Harold operated a slightly criminal auto towing, salvage, and parts business. It was not a chop shop or anything as industrious or sinister as that. In fact, its criminality lie more in the area of zoning violations, revoked drivers' licenses, encounters with the local bailiffs, and, especially, of environmental violations..

Arriving at one of his lots, I would see no one. Once I'd located Harold, and it became clear that I was not an officer of the court, etc., men in dirty clothes came out of nowhere and began cutting parts off cars with oxyacetylene torches or removing engines or whateverelse they'd been doing before I'd arrived.

Harold operated out of several locations in the time I knew him, but they were all remarkably alike despite their geographical separation. The one on John R is most memorable only because it is now part of the proposed Tigers/Lions stadia site. Soon, million-dollar athletes will play on soil only slightly less contaminated than Chernobyl, and Harold is probably responsible for most of it.

By the time he took possession of the property, it was already polluted. The lead roof tiles and the lead piping of the old home had poisoned the soil lead-grey color.

The stately 1890's mansion served Harold as a warehouse once he'd had the local derelicts gut it. He paid them with jumbos of beer, rotgut, and cheap wine, and the whole job maybe cost him $70. It wasn't pretty, and the hole they tore in the side to drive the cars thru was jagged and would never be properly covered. The pile of rubble left in the alley was a permanent monument to their labor. Harold probably stored 40 cars inside at any given time. For heat, he'd tapped into the gas main running to one of the vacant lots nearby, and the heat was generous near the one suspiciously-new industrial furnace. The welding system also ran off the gas, but he still had to buy oxygen.

Transmission fluid, motor oil, brake fluid, gear dope, bearing grease, jack oil, and everything else in the petroleum cosmos permeated the soil so that the ground was slick underfoot. The cheap tennis shoes of the help disintegrated into a slimy mess in days, though Harold wore oil-resistant boots.

Harold didn't worry about the damage he was doing to the property because he was a squatter, not an unknown quantity in that previously desolate part of downtown Detroit. The police, who were the only government representatives to notice Harold's occupation, were far too busy with the rampant vice and crime to enforce zoning regulations. Harold was occasionally hassled but never charged. He was a personable guy, and I think the police preferred him to the honest-to-goodness criminals whom they regarded as subhuman.

Harold's Foxtown location was my first encounter with him. My transmission was not shifting properly, and the diagnosis was a clogged screen.

Now, this is simple work, but incredibly messy, and difficult to do without a hoist. After the introduction provided by my brother, Harold had the car up on a tow truck with one of his junked-out refugees crawling underneath before we finished opening the beer. The junkie soon crawled out splattered in transmission fluid, with the dripping, clogged screen held high between his fingers as if it were a dead rodent. Harold put his cigar in his mouth then took the filter in his big black hands and puffed affirmatively. "Uh hm, $2.50 for the filter, 75 cent for the gasket...; give me $20 for the whole thing." (Retail value, $135.) He wiped his hands on his pant legs.

One of his minions went off to the parts store. We drank beer and watched some of the crew cut the front end off a pickup truck with Harold's super-fueled torch. It might have been easier to unbolt, but the visceral buzz of the torch makes it the tool of choice for most scrapyard tasks, including cigarette lighting, pan-frying, parts removal, and metal cutting.

And cut they did at Harold's. No car ever made it out alive, only the most useful parts, hacked off with the fiery cleaver. Generators, radiators, transmissions, and whole engines were most frequently excised. Big-time junkyards get the cars with good body parts, and guys like Harold get the rest. Occasionally, he made a few extra bucks off someone like me, but there aren't too many people out there willing to let chronic substance abusers with torches do repairs on their cars. (The failure rate is higher than average.) Most of the money is made hauling junk in, then taking it apart and recycling it.

The tow truck is the core of this kind of business, and Harold always had one good one and several in parts around his yard. Certain streets in Detroit are "bounty" areas where any police-certified tow truck can hook an illegally-parked car, take it back to his yard, and charge storage until it is claimed. If the owner never claims it, and the city doesn't want it, Guys like Harold dismember the cars for parts and scrap the rest. Because his overhead was so low, what with not having to make mortgage payments, tax payments, insurance payments, or any other regular payments aside from his daily tithe to tobacco and alcohol, his net profit was pretty near his gross intake.

Feasting on the scraps of our mechanized society, Harold and his brethren exist in a fringe world on abandonned or spent industrial properties throughout the metropolitan area. Most of us drive by or live near these places, but rarely think about them, the abandonned gas stations or auto repair shops or light or heavy industrial locations, most of which do not show up on anyone's environmental cleanup list.

The last time I saw he Harold, he had a badly-damaged, good-running 1983 AMC Eagle with a five-speed transmission. The car was too-badly beat up to consider driving, and we all remarked on what a shame it was because the motor still ran fine, in the tradition of big inline sixes.

Subsequently, I bought a 1983 Eagle, and when the transmission broke I went looking for Harold to see if he still had the car. That's when I heard the news of his death.

I didn't grieve much over Harold's death because we were acquaintances, not friends. In fact, I was a bit jealous of his picaresque final chapter: getting killed by a spurned lover compares favorably to turning to jello in a nursing home. On the other hand, the rest of his life was mundane and gritty: so too, probably, were the circumstances of his death.

So, slightly grieving and coldly dejected at the loss of a good parts cars, I moved on without a bargain basement automotive resource. I cruised some junkyards, but the respectable places don't carry such an outdated and obsolete car; they would never even bother to hook one.

I'd given up all hope of finding it when my brother, the autistic savant of auto salvage, tipped me off to another AMC product at a yard he'd "run across".

When I drove down the public street leading in, it became clear that no one could possibly just "run across" this site. Buried at the interesection of a city street and a major rail line, the site is "squattable" because the city closed the street at some indeterminate time in the past, leaving a lot where the former thoroughfare approached the railbed.

Screening the operation from the main street a few blocks away is an abandonned intercity bus of the 1940's, its art deco aerodynamics suggesting the previously romantic aesthetic of technology. Mounds of minor junk fill the seats, and the whole thing looks like a soon-to-depart tour bus for industrial refuse.

When Harold emerged from behind the bus, I grinned, almost overcome with joy to see him alive. As he lumbered toward me across the greasy hummocks of debris, I realized that it wasn't Harold, at least not in the direct, physical sense. But this one, like the Harold I had known, was stamped from some Harold archetype, destined by the Fates to exist in the margins of society, The Flying Dutchman of discard and decay.

Without proper introductions, this neo-Harold would not drop his guard. Though we talked parts for a bit, it was obvious that he was uncomfortable and wanted me to leave. Behind him, three or four junkyard troglodytes hid in the shadows, and he occasionally cast a reassuring glance over his shoulder. He asked for a couple of days to get the parts off and seemed relieved when I finally turned to walk back to my car. The troglodytes giggled derisively when I tripped on some half-submerged metal fragment that nearly broke my toes.

When I returned later in the week, neo-Harold mumbled some excuses and reassurances, but it was clear that he wasn't going to do business with me.

He has chosen to work and, presumably, live in places abandonned by the rest of us, and he'd prefer that we not mess with him. Frankly, I don't think he likes or trusts us.

Again, I left dejected, the AMC parts visible but inaccessible. Then another Harold surfaced, the actual son of my original Harold, known as Baby Harold. He had the 1983 Eagle that had caused me to look for Harold in the first place. His inheritance, I suppose. I drove to a near-abandonned house on Mound Rd. where the car sat with many others, completely against city ordinance, in and around the yard of the ancient house.The car is in good shape and has all the parts I need, but I can't get my hands on it because I can't find Baby Harold. In true Harold fashion , he eludes ordinary perception, despite the money he stands to make on this deal.

I contacted Harold's widow, who holds the title to the car, but she won't give up the green slip without $200, twice the price she claims she could get at the "mill." Further, Baby Harold's whereabouts are as much a mystery to her as to me, but she wouldn't tell me even if she did know.

The search for the AMC Eagle trans will continue, and I'll probably run into more of these elusive underground types. But I want to know: What are they hiding? Why can't or won't they deal with the rest of us?

Copyright 1997 by James B. Moran / jimmoran@merit.edu

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