I'm in Los Angeles and need a car, so I go to a used car lot and buy an Oldsmobile 88 from the 1950s. It's bright canary yellow and in decent shape, especially the radio. But what's really extraordinary about it is that the engine is a large potato. Someone replaced the original a long time ago with this giant spud but for some wild reason it works perfectly. I'm driving around LA in my old new car with a potato for an engine and feeling great that I have the only automobile in the world whose engine you could fry and eat if you were hungry.

One day I stop at a light and the car stalls. That worries me, especially because the thing has well over a hundred thousand miles on it. So I pull into a gas station and tell the mechanic what happened. He opens the hood and without any surprise at what he sees, tells me to drive it into the garage. He and another guy winch the potato out of the car and throw it on the ground where it breaks in half.

Inside, like any normal tired-out engine, it's glutted with thick black oil and gunk. I'm horrified they did this to my cartoon motor. I ask how much it'll cost to get another. They say they can only replace it with a new, normal one but that's not expensive--a few hundred dollars.

Right before I wake up, I can't decide what to do. I keep thinking "Why can't they put another potato in there? Who needs a new metal engine?"

EDITOR'S NOTE

Future readers may need to know that in the 1990s, late in the Oil Era when electric cars were still prohibitively pricy, there was a wave of experimenters who adjusted internal combustion engines to run not on gasoline or diesel but waste cooking oil. They got most of their fuel from fast-food restaurants--often oil used to cook French fries. Such engines worked--and really did smell like potatoes.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, 1996, p.42

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