RICK

From the moment he was born, cars were at the center of his existence.  His father owned a gas station at the time of Rick's birth.  By the time Rick was three his older brother, Bob, who was then seven, was already helping out his dad after school, on weekends, and all the time during the summer.  So it was not too surprising that early on Rick formed the idea that the gas station was the center of the universe, and that the meaning of life was cars.

During high school, while his dad's gas station remained the center of the universe, the meaning of life metamorphosized from a singularity into a duality;  no longer simply cars, it became cars and girls.  The intensity of Rick's relationship with cars problematized his relationship with girls, creating an equivalence between the two and finally leading to an identity of sorts:  that, in a way, girls were cars.

Rick pursued girls with the same single-minded purposefulness which he applied to working on cars.  In so doing he forged an occult system linking his car work with his girl pursuit.  A system that linked his effectiveness at car refurbishing, repair, styling, tuning, driving, etc. with his success at attracting, holding, and scoring with girls.  He believed the more he improved the performance of the car he was working on the more he would improve his success with girls.  At first this system applied to any car he worked on, whether it was a car belonging to someone else that he was repairing as part of his duties at his father's garage or whether it was one of the series of cars that he purchased for himself, fixed-up and then sold for a profit before moving onto another vehicular conquest.  After his father was killed in a freak accident which simultaneously destroyed his gas station*, the tumultuous confusion of Rick's emotions during his grief and mourning at the loss of his father led to feelings of guilt at his linkage of work done on behalf of his father's business to his burgeoning sexuality and he vowed to only work on his own cars.

Neither he nor his brother had any desire to use the insurance money to rebuild the gas station.  Bob used his share to purchase a big rig and went into long haul trucking, spending most of his time on the road, for, as much as Rick was devastated by the tragedy of their father's loss, Bob was even more affected to the point of being unable to bear the constant reminder of his loss that life in Fairvale entailed, finding his solace in a life on the open road.  Rick, used his share to open a used car lot, hiring his dad's top mechanic to work on fixing up the trade-ins while reserving his own tinkerings for cars only he himself drove.

Upon completion of his period of mourning, Rick returned to his pursuit of girls.  This pursuit remained simultaneous with his quest for the elusive alchemical formula that would reveal the relationship between his vehicle-of-the-moment and his girl-of-the-moment;  that would inform his decisions, that would let him know what particular automotive malfunctionings would indicate the necessity of the termination of his present romantic liaison,  and when a girl problem meant it was time to ditch his ride for a set of new wheels.  This was to be a life long quest.

As the years passed, one by one the girls he had dated since high school got married and started families.  Slowly but surely they became women while he still needed girls.  While he aged, the girls he pursued stayed the same age.  In a certain sense, Rick had forced his internal maturation clock to come to a complete standstill at the moment of his father's death, unable to integrate the loss, he denied it with that part of himself that was tied to his sexuality, and lived there in a world that pre-dated his loss.  In another sense he had simply chosen a quest for which there was no final goal, which was doomed to be merely a formulaic variation repeating endlessly the same basic pattern.  Only an abandonment of his quest accompanied by an acknowledgment that the alchemy for which he was searching was a chimera could enable Rick to move on to the next stage of his life.  But this has yet to occur.

Where we stand now, Rick is decidedly middle-aged, and growing increasingly discouraged as he finds himself having less and less success in his pursuit of girls despite his ever increasing skill with automobiles.
 
 

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*see Dolly & Mona
 
 

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