This Is The Season To Let The Real Gs In

Yes, that's right. It's been nearly two years since a part-time employee of mine cut a deer in half with my Town Car --- but the damage is now fixed, courtesy of my friend Josh.

I want to take a moment (and a blog post) to recognize what Josh did for me, because it was fairly above-and-beyond and because it gave me yet another opportunity to understand character. In those innocent, long-ago days when I simply accepted FB friend requests, I became Josh's friend even though I didn't immediately recognize his name. Over the past few years we've spoken on a variety of automotive and non-automotive topics, mostly through FB's chat app. Back in April, he offered to paint a new hood for the Town Car and I took him up on it. In the half year since then and now, he found a hood (and bought it before I paid him for it), painted it, buffed it, resprayed where necessary, and waxed it.

This past Saturday was my first chance to meet him in person. Isn't the modern world crazy? I'd sent him five or six hundred bucks without knowing if he was even "real" --- and he'd put in dozens of hours of labor without knowing if I would ever show up. It took us two hours to swap the new hood on and then we went to lunch with his lovely wife. He did all the paint, prep, and repair work for free --- because, he said, he enjoyed reading my work on TTAC. He didn't ask me for anything in return and if he had a hidden agenda it was still well-hidden by the time I drove away from the restaurant towards Lake Michigan to spend the evening at a home on the beach.

In the past twenty years, I've tried to do favors for people where possible, but I sure as hell have never done any serious autobody work for anyone. Maybe a job recommendation or a few hours cleaning a garage or something like that. Certainly not a pro-grade paint and install on a Town Car hood.

They say that "character" is what you do, or how you act, when you have nothing to gain by your actions and nobody is watching. What Josh did shows character, plain and simple. By contrast, the current idiocy we're seeing from TTAC's former editors on their Facebook and Twitter feeds is an example of lack of character.

Ed Niedermeyer and Bertel Schmitt have proven to anyone who still notices, or cares, that they will do whatever it takes for a few clicks. If they have to publish a TTAC reader's email address and violate the trust that reader placed in them, it doesn't matter. If they have to participate in or instigate Wikipedia vandalism so they can write about it later, that's fine. In the argot of the street, Ed and Bertel are bitches, plain and simple. A bitch will stab you in the back, the way Ed helped get rid of Robert Farago so he could have Robert's job. A bitch will make up some dramatic story based on false information, the way Bertel's done with his bizarre multi-part, ten-thousand-word rant that would have been better entitled "I Don't Know Anything About How The Internet Works And I'd Like To Prove That To You At Face-Numbing Length." A bitch is someone who won't deal with you face to face, someone who can't be trusted, someone whose morality is entirely and frighteningly situational. A bitch has long, convoluted explanations for his actions when the truth of the matter is there in black and white --- he did what he did because he's a bitch.

Any rap enthusiast knows, however, that the street balances the hos with a sprinkling of Gs. A "G" is a gangster in the traditional sense, someone with a sense of honor, someone who does what he says he's going to do even when nobody's watching. One G is worth a thousand bitches. There are times I become depressed about my time in the auto business, because I've met dozens of people who are willing to do anything for the smallest possible reward. They'll lie to the reader in exchange for a night in a luxury hotel. They'll slander someone because that person beat them around a racetrack or got a writing gig that they feel should have been theirs. They'll lie about a woman sleeping with them to punish that woman for laughing in their face when they made a pass. If some of the very specific rumors I've heard from multiple quarters lately are true, they will force young journalists into sexual relationships by threatening their employability.

It's enough to make me want to walk away from the game forever. And then I remember the Gs I've met behind the wheel and the keyboard. People like Robert Farago and Kevin York and Alex Nunez and Derek Kreindler and Greg Smith and many others. People who can be trusted to do the right thing when nobody's watching. People who stand behind you to back you up, not to twist the knife.

This past weekend I met another G, and that balances out whatever bitch-made buffoonery I saw take place in the week before. At three in the morning on Sunday, when I left a frankly amazing lake house so I could see my son six hours and 389 miles later, I fired up the Town Car and pointed it down the long, winding path in the woods that would take me from that sprawling, pastel-and-picture window "cottage". Both headlamps fired up for the first time since 2011 and I saw the Continental star on the hood standing straight and true under a canopy of trees. It was nice to have the car fixed, but it was even better to have it fixed by a true friend.

Gs up, hos down.