Your car will punish you.
Yes, if you act up. If you fail to take proper care of her. She will
take you to Colorado, or to Mississippi, or Chicago and on your way back she
will stall on you – at night - and refuse to go. And the winter cold will freeze
and bite your ass. And you will cry and nobody will be around to console you.
Or you will post it on Facebook, and a few patrons will like it (hehehe, you
catch the irony?). Some of them will poke you on their way out of your page (and
hope you poke them back…isn’t that the rule?). You will be miserable, my
friend. Helpless. You’ll fall apart. You’ll come face to face with Karma. And you’ll
feel her warm breath against your face.
Now
why is he harping on about cars and Karma and all that stuff we care so little
about? Check him; is his head correct?...Mhh, really? Give him a drink then!
You must be saying now in your head. But you know what? Until you come across a
man stranded on a lonely highway in the dead of a Winter’s night – a drunk man
wailing like a coyote because his ass is fast turning into a block of ice – you’ll
keep asking if people’s heads are correct. But even if you don’t drive on
highways at night you might still run into Sam – that jolly old drunkard we
helped to a gas station - someplace else and he might tell you the story himself. It’s
sad but the way he tells it is funny as hell. He lies, and adds stuff,
and alters the narrative depending on who he’s telling the story…but who
cares, if the story is funny?
Sam is a garage man. He has
since become my go-to garage man, you know, because of that one incident. He
treats me well whenever I come around. People remember simple acts of kindness
shown them in moments of great need so, yeah, I go to him. Sometimes he fixes
and other times he refers me to other garage men. The thing I have come to
enjoy about visiting garage men, though, is that one contradicts the other. It
is very much as in medicine, or the field of criticism in literature. Just when
you think you have the answer to something that’s been bothering you, you find
that you are mistaken.
[You drive into a garage] A
little man tinkers with your machine for an hour and then he asks you for a few
coins, and whether he’s done the “correct” thing or not the car runs. That’s how things roll in a
small neighborhood garage. A big service station will lay your machine up in
dry dock for a few days, break her down in molecules and atoms and when they
are done with her she will run for a while and collapse. And as expected, her
collapse will depress you…and you’ll rush her back in, again. Now, most people
know just enough about cars to get them from the house to the market (and back,
of course). A carburetor, to them, elicits as much interest as a guide book to
Vienna would have to someone living in Sierra Leone…and so it’s only natural to
want to take their car to a big service station when something goes wrong. Well,
great mistake, I tell you…but it’s better to learn by experience than by
hearsay.
So you go to the service
station. And immediately you come smack up against a man dressed like a
butcher, a man with a pad in his hand and a pencil behind his ear, looking very
professional and alert, a man who never fully assures you that the car will be
perfect when they get through with it but who intimates that the service will
be impeccable, of the highest caliber. That sort of thing. They all seem to
have something of the surgeon about them, these big service station men. They
seem to imply, you’ve come to us at the
last ditch; we can’t perform miracles, but we’ve had twenty years’ experience.
This should calm you down…but just as with the surgeon you have the feeling
when you entrust the car to these immaculate hands, that they’re going to
telephone you tomorrow, after the engine has been taken apart and the bearings
are lying all about, and tell you that there’s something even more drastically
wrong with the car than they had first suspected. And they do. It’s something
serious, they say. Something serious,
what!!! It didn’t look too bad, to begin with!
Anyway, after a few
experiences of this sort you get weary. Your faith starts to wobble. You send
out feelers and learn that just around the corner from the big service station
there’s a little fellow (his place is always in the rear of some other place
and therefore hard to find) who’s a wizard at fixing things and asks some
ridiculously low sum for his services. An honest man. He has a few extra hands
that help him. Great people, usually. And jolly, and blessed with many talents.
I remember once when I visited Sam, and a certain man stopped by to ask for
directions. I remember one of Sam’s mechanics taking a greasy red pencil and
tracing a road for the man backwards while answering two telephones and cashing
a check. Can you believe that? And if you think that that is something, wait
till you have conversations at these garages. You soon learn that an average handyman
in garages of this kind is also a fanatic about something unheard of. Like
mosquito farming (hehehe…no; I lie). Never mind.
Back to where we began:
drunk Sam is stranded on the road, his blue sedan is in a foul mood. Cause? Negligence.
Sam’s. He’d failed to replace her broken catalytic converter. And she (the car)
is so mad she’s refused to move. So poor Sam has to hitch our ride to the next
gas station…but long story short: a car is like a donkey. Yes she is. What
brings on the heat for her is fuss and bother. Feed him properly, water him
well, coax him along when he’s weary and he’ll die for you. Everything being
equal, it’s not the pressure or lack of pressure in the exhaust pipe which
matters – no, it’s the way you handle her, the pleasant little word now and then,
the spirit of forbearance and forgiveness. Try that and your ass won’t freeze in
the cold like Sam’s.
