If you’ve killed two birds with one stone, you are a master. If you’ve killed two birds with like twenty-something stones over the course of about two years, then you are probably kind of an idiot, or maybe even deranged.
Guess which one I am.
When the average DIYer attempts to diagnose a problem with their vehicle, they tend to look for one root cause. One bird. This is what I’ve been doing with my 2002 Toyota Celica GT-S, since early 2020.
At first, it was just a misfire. A little orange check engine light on the dashboard was easy to ignore, especially considering the state of the world in 2020. The internet said the code was ‘severe’ and to ‘stop driving immediately.’ The internet said a lot of things during that time, like ‘stay home.’ But for some reason, it was a lot easier to find strangers to hook up with during social distancing. So since then, I’ve always taken online advice with a grain of salt and a condom.
The misfire persisted. Then the car started dying (‘stalling’ is the technical term, but it lacks dramatic flair) at idle. Depending on your perspective, you could either consider this development:
a) a new issue, separate from the misfires
or,
b) an evolution in the severity of the misfires.
Or, you could be like me, and choose option
c) teach yourself how to heel-toe the gas and brake pedals with one foot to keep the engine alive so you can keep driving around chasing skirts when you should be at home isolating yourself like a good citizen.
I was living at my mom’s house at the time. After a psychotic break and a suicide attempt, I’d dropped out of grad school. But not before racking up a hefty pile of debt. On top of my undergrad debt. On top of the helicopter bill (don’t ask about the goddamn helicopter bill, I don’t want to talk about it). I was less than broke and as close to rock bottom as ever.
Anger was the air I breathed. Especially after I found a job. You’d think that would make it easier, but not in my case. Ever since high school, I was afraid of becoming an ordinary, run-of-the-mill college grad who falls right into a nine-to-five desk job and sits around in a domesticated suburban prison until retirement. That’s what drove me to grad school, and then to psychosis. It was a fear of the ordinary. And lots of drugs.
But now, I’ve become exactly what I had feared. Every time my mind has a second to wander off, this thought creeps back into my head, and I just freeze. I’m paralyzed. I die at idle too, just like my engine.
We can choose to fix what’s wrong, or find a way to live with how it is. So when I drive, one foot’s working the clutch while the other is bouncing over the gas and brake, always one step ahead of death. And I’ve found ways to deal with the reality of my career. Drinking. Sex. Delusion. I’ve slipped through enough cracks at work to still have job security with a guarantee of almost no stress. But when I used to drive to work every day in West Chicago, the billboards over 294 and Mannheim would read: Divorce Lawyer, Find Jesus, Zero-Down Car Loans Now, Treat ED Today, and repeat. So what am I really guaranteed here?
What’s the difference? Why am I proud of my heel-toeing, but ashamed of my job? At the end of the day, isn’t it all just coping?
About four months ago, my car started dying catastrophically (‘cutting out’ is the technical term, but if you want technical expertise, you’re looking in the wrong place). On top of the dying at idle, it would die at unpredictable times and speeds. No special footwork or tricks or driving finesse can save you when your vehicle spontaneously becomes Fred Flintstone’s car.
My assumption was that this new ‘feature’ was an evolution of the old problems, back down to the misfires. So I ignored all the parts I had already swapped, thinking I was still missing the real culprit. It was confusing, trying to combine all of my problems and to find one thing that would be causing them all. I decided on the timing chain. Cam and crank codes, misfires, spontaneous death and treacherous idle. It seemed like a sound theory. Maybe the chain stretched out, or jumped a tooth or something.
Turns out –
God, this is so hard to write now that I know how dumb I am.
Turns out the timing chain had nothing to do with it. But hey, that was a fun $800 and half a week of labor. So after that stroke of genius, my mechanic, my family, my friends, and even random strangers at the shop were all telling me to just junk the damn thing and get a ‘normal’ car.
But I had another brilliant idea instead.
I bought a new fuel pump. OEM. The good stuff. I was really drinking at this point. But in some kind of haze, my research of bad fuel pump symptoms matched up exactly with the dying at idle problem. Some fuel pumps go bad slowly. Especially if you have a habit of running the tank to empty. Since the pumps are submerged in the tank, the recirculated gas that doesn’t get used by the engine comes back and swirls around the pump, cooling it down. When your tank is empty, the pump gets hot. When your pump is also starting to fail, your engine probably dies at idle and won’t start again until the pump cools down. $350. I did the job.
The next day, the car died again.
I spent the next hour looking up at the gray clouds, praying for the creator to just send down a thick bolt of lightning and end this pointless charade. Then, something occurred to me.
The engine didn’t die at idle, it died at speed. And there was something else, too. To double check that I wasn’t crazy (at least not anymore, mostly), I keyed on the engine. After a while, I was able to turn it over and start the car again. I looked at the dash. It was just as I thought. There was no check engine light. It had been years since that light was off.
That’s when it all clicked. I was able to limp the car back home to my mom’s garage in the suburbs. Then I got straight to work.
You see, one of the parts that I had swapped in an attempt to fix the dying at idle issue was the crankshaft position sensor. I had bought a cheap aftermarket replacement and installed it long ago. It didn’t change anything. But who would have ever thought that a cheap, knock-off, aftermarket replacement part might start going bad sooner than expected? It was a wild theory. But I still had the old OEM sensor.
Putting in the old crankshaft sensor was harder than the timing chain job, the fuel pump job, and even the clutch that I had to swap when I first got the car. On the seventh-gen Toyota Celica GT-S, you have to thread this dirty bastard of a sensor through the valley of fuck. It goes up behind the drive belt, behind the water pump, into a jagged little nook behind the AC compressor and the alternator, which is filled with sharp spiky shit all over the goddamn place, and then you end up in this little shithole where there’s no possible way to get a hold of the sensor from the other side where it’s supposed to clip in.
About five hours later I found a custom solution which involved accidentally demolishing all of the holding brackets on the sensor plug, tearing a bunch of unnecessary skin off of my knuckles, and just barely pulling the little piece of shit through the hole with an old aux cord and a rusty wire hook.
That was two weeks ago.
The car hasn’t died since. And it rips harder than ever before. I can actually hit the 7800 rpm redline. It pulls, stops, idles, and I don’t even have to do any special tricks to keep it alive.
There were two birds, not one. The pump, and the sensor.
I couldn’t believe it. After all this time, it was finally over. Like I’d just climbed to the summit of an immense mountain. When I found myself at the top, I encountered a moment of pure joy. But then I saw all the other mountains.
I started getting depressed. More and more thoughts kept snaking into my brain about the reality of my life, my job, and the trajectory of my career.
It’s as if I was using the problems of my car as a coping mechanism to deal with bigger issues. Now that I’ve fixed the car, I’m confronted with another choice. Fix what’s wrong, or find a way to live with how it is.
But the other night, after I started the car and was going to buckle my seatbelt, I blinked – and when I opened my eyes, in the dead of night, without a single disturbing engine sound to accompany it, there it was.
A check engine light. I read the code. Random Misfire.
Three.
Three birds.
And the third one’s a sneaky motherfucker.
