Vato and Blood: Tow-Truck Business Partners and Old Comrades

Vato and Blood are former Vietnam comrades and tow-truck partners whose relationship takes shape through practical cooperation, comic rivalry, and a song they keep revising. Their shared past surfaces in the stories they bring to DL and Takeshi Fumimota, while their present is measured in late-night towing runs, familiar county roads, and repeated arguments that rarely interrupt the partnership itself.

From Vietnam to the V & B Tow Company

The account of their friendship reaches back to Vietnam, where both men mainly served around the motor pool and sometimes joined convoys. During a period at the Long Binh complex, they went to a recreation bunker and watched television while other servicemen kept their distance from them. A Walt Disney cartoon supplied the unlikely prompt for their shared refrain: after hearing Chip and Dale sing, Blood began improvising himself into the duet, and Vato immediately answered in kind. Their first version did not settle into harmony. They disagreed over how its ending should sound, with Vato preserving the cheerful direction of the cartoon tune and Blood pushing it toward a rougher joke; even the wording of their improvised verses became a point of contention.

That small disagreement became a durable pattern. In later years, as business partners, Vato and Blood continued to sing the duet, but they only occasionally managed to finish it in agreement. More often, one changed a word, the other objected, and the performance broke down into a glare or renewed argument. The song nevertheless endured as the V & B Tow Company’s informal noticeboard: its changing verses carried their comments on current concerns and plans for the near future. Their inability to agree on the lyrics did not end the routine; it gave the routine its continuing form.

A partnership built on judgment and shared work

Their work depends on more than choosing whichever vehicle appears most valuable. At the Woodbine Motel, Vato and Blood patrol the parking lot in a Custom Deluxe named Mi Vida Loca, assessing cars for possible towing. They explain that a vehicle’s make matters as much as its apparent price. A Rolls-Royce owner might treat reclaiming an impounded car as an amusing adventure and leave a tip, whereas towing a Mercedes can be a poor business decision: its owner may not take the situation lightly, even when reclaiming the car. The joke depends on their professional calculation. Their job requires them to anticipate not only what a vehicle might bring in, but also the likely response of the person who comes to retrieve it.

The two have even attended a roundtable near Marin on the interpersonal problems created by towing. Their work gives them an ordinary but consequential form of expertise: they read cars, owners, and the probable costs of a decision before they choose what to tow. When they meet Takeshi Fumimota and DL in the motel parking lot, that experience is presented through their leisurely inspection of the vehicles rather than through formal exposition. Their business is an ongoing collaboration in judgment, and their banter accompanies the practical choices on which it depends.

The song as an ongoing argument

The comic duet makes their differences audible. In the Vietnam memory, each man tries to take control of the tune by altering its refrain; later, each new version gives them another occasion to disagree. The performance is not a record of a quarrel that has been settled, but a ritual that lets disagreement recur within the relationship. Its changing lines also provide a shared medium for subjects they are discussing outside the song, including their plans and their current disputes.

One example concerns the birthday of their third business partner, Thi Anh Tran. Blood discovers the date by chance in her file, and he and Vato agree that they should surprise her by taking her to lunch. The decision of where to go becomes another argument. Blood rules out several kinds of Asian restaurants on the assumption that she has already eaten that food throughout her life; Vato proposes a Mexican restaurant instead. Their exchange gives the song’s informal noticeboard a practical counterpart: they use talk, jokes, and competing suggestions to work through an actual plan for their colleague. The evidence does not resolve where they ultimately take her, but it shows both men sharing responsibility for the surprise.

Friendship beyond the workday

Vato and Blood’s companionship is not confined to the tow yard or to present-day business. After encountering Takeshi Fumimota and DL during a late-night run, they appear the following day at the Karmology Clinic with stories connected to Vietnam and Ortho Bob Dulang. Their accounts mix war memories, tall tales, and fragments of experience that have not yet become clear explanations. The visit shows them continuing to tell and shape their shared past together, even when they do not arrive at a fully coherent account.

They also become familiar with the history of Takeshi Fumimota and DL’s karmic-repair enterprise, including the Death Palm, the Kunoichi retreat, the Puncutron, and the one-year-and-one-day constraint. They do not offer the pair unsolicited advice, although the subject provokes lively discussion between themselves. Vato imagines turning the story into a sitcom and responds to it with an expansive imitation of a studio audience. The joke marks a distinction in their relationship with the clinic’s founders: they are interested and amused, but do not assume the role of counselors.

By the time they have been in business together for a couple of years, Vato and Blood know the roads of Vineland County well enough to drive them in darkness. Their work takes them through suburban streets, grassy and sandy tracks, muddy passages, and unstable ground where they sometimes attach winches to trees to recover vehicles. Their repertoire includes old Porsches and elaborately painted fishing vans. They have also encountered things in the forests and along the Seventh River that are best left unspoken in some local taverns. This hard-earned familiarity gives their partnership a material setting: they know the territory through repeated work, while their old military refrain continues to turn shared history into an argument they can carry with them.