(Lucky, Santa said sleigh, not slay!)

Never thrown a rod before. Warped a head once, though. (No comments, thank you -- it was a VW head, not mine.) But this is my first thrown rod. It's no tribal rite of passage ceremony, but nevertheless, today I am a man.

Santa phones around for a taker.

This is one McLean, Illinois car dealership that will be talking about Santa's visit for quite a while. There's a tow truck driver who'll be doing the same, because he has to wait outside with Lucky for 45 minutes while we entertain the locals inside in the warmth, as I try by phone to fob off Lucky's carcass for love or money. It's not going well; the junkmen want to charge me for taking the car! One guy won't deal with me until he's assured that X Magazine is not pornographic. He was satisfied when I explain "let X =" to him. But he still didn't want the car. Geez, when they told me the car was a dog, I thought they were talking about the paint job. At this point I'm almost positive we've fallen into the plot of a bad Stephen King movie (if you'll pardon the redundancy). But I can't tell whether it's Cujo or Christine. Or maybe just Misery.

Hardee's restaurant, just off I-55 near Bloomington

We tried to get a room at the Comfort Inn. No dice. Could it be our convincing performance as two vagrants in scavenged Xmas costumes? "Uh, don't we have that...big...GROUP coming in?" says the manager to the desk clerk, who's obviously not in on the joke. Well, no one's going to mistake this for a Hospitality Suite. No one in a Santa suit, anyway. In protest, I remove my Santa habiliments on the street in front of Comfort Inn. I notice a great shift in public reception when the Santa cap is replaced by a black ballcap with a rattlesnake logo. Without words, it says, Don't Tread on Me.

So we're stranded at an Illinois Hardee's with no place to stay. In the movies this would be where we start having a succession of interesting adventures, meeting up with fascinatingly strange characters who lead us on a magical journey of self-discovery. [Unless it's an Oliver Stone movie, and thank God it isn't.] Instead, we're doing the swing shift slumped in a Hardee's booth surrounded by whatever in the way of personal effects, momentos, and X Magazines we were able to salvage from the doomed Lucky pup, which is now in the hands of a tiny, hairy, Midwestern junkyard grease monkey named -- no kidding -- "Junior." (Unfortunately, I forgot to grab the Fisher-Price Little People airplane, which used to serve as Lucky's hood ornament.)

Initially unfriendly, Junior turned out to be fairly helpful, after we plied him with cigars and good ol' boy talk. (Burford said he was willing to let Junior rub up against him, but auto mechanics apparently have different rules from flight attendants.) The owner of the garage next to Junior's bought Lucky's brand-new set of tires -- a $160 set of tires -- for $50, total. Final fetching price for Lucky: 0 dollars, 0 cents. File under Future Reference: when the tires are worth more than the car, it's probably time for the car to throw a rod or something.

That this Junior, this Mr. Goodrunt, should have Lucky for NOTHING seems a classic cosmic injustice. Did Junior deserve Lucky? Did Junior willingly agree to drive Lucky cross-country dressed in a Santa suit? Did he have a toy video camera with which to immortalize Lucky's trip?

I don't know. But if he did, he didn't say anything to me about it. So Junior gets the car, another guy buys the tires, Pat gets his beloved battery back, and I, what do I get? Bubkes.