After spending two years in automotive purgatory, I’ve developed an opinion. As with most opinions in today’s world, this one is supported by spurious anecdotes and dubious philosophical meandering. It stands proud like a rusty ladder on top of moldy floorboards above a gaping sinkhole.
This purgatory was a car that needed to be fixed, but hung on by a thread just barely enough to function. The car refused to be an easy fix, was an absolute sunken cost fallacy, and yet, was fascinating because of how it could balance on the edge of working and yet not working for so long.
Before those two years in that world between worlds, my opinions were less sophisticated. I had a poster of a Ferrari on my wall, thought shifting was cool, but wasn’t exactly sure how a dipstick worked exactly and didn’t really want to admit that. The few ‘car guys’ I met, or envisioned, seemed like people who knew what they were doing, in my imagination. Today, now that I’ve actually met and spent time with these ‘car people,’ I think this: ‘Automotive Enthusiasm’ belongs in the The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
It’s eight AM on a Saturday. Your body moves, but your mind won’t be awake for at least another few hours, maybe another twenty four. Your head undulates like an upside-down pendulum. You’re sweating processed booze. Everything is too bright. The compulsion to consume water, sugar, salt, and caffeine is as strong the need to breathe.
Can you feel it? This is the state of mind and body in which I did most of my automotive work. The car’s in pretty good shape, considering.
You walk in. No one is at the front desk. You push open the door that says “Do Not Enter” and walk through. On every wall, your eyes encounter a calendar with a naked, large-breasted woman on it. None of them are flipped to the correct month, and even fewer show the correct year. A mediocre vehicle floats above you, elevated, facing the street, taking up the space as if to ward potential customers off because it’s too early for actual work. You continue through a tunnel towards the back, past more photoshopped women gazing at the camera lens, a coffee machine with some twenty year-old biscuits sitting nearby, and a small tractor with a warm case of Polish beer on the seat.
As you move from out of the darkness, the wide expanse of the back space always surprises you. Shafts of sunlight from the tall roof cut down through dust and smoke, glinting off the machines. They stand high on the legs of hydraulic lifts, staring forward, like statues. Today, there’s a massive one hanging with its belly ripped open. The guts, bones, brains, and fluid lines all hang out, strewn and dripping across the floor, bare metal exposed to the elements. Across from it there is an old one, staring down from under its patina of wisdom.
“O KUUUUUUURWA!” A voice screams from somewhere unseen. Then comes whistling. Then singing lyrics to a song where every word is apparently “NA NA NA NA NA NA”
This is R. He’s the Willy Wonka of this junk factory. We call it the shop. Its been in his family for two generations. Located on your typical Chicago street corner, there’s a fancy, expensive brewery on one side, and a couple of guys in ski masks stealing your catalytic converter on the other.
When I first had my totaled Celica delivered from a salvage auction in Arizona to the the nearest Home Depot parking lot, we thought the car was dead. When I told R that it would need to get towed the rest of the way, he told me to get in the passenger seat.
Then he proceeded to not only single-handedly bump-start the car (which had a broken clutch disk), but also weave through rush hour traffic while holding one conversation on his phone, another on his earpiece, and a third with me, while alternating between English and Polish depending on the conversation, and then switching from English to Polish or vice versa depending on which conversation he was losing patience with, all while cursing at every single driver and pedestrian around him in not only English and Polish but some Spanish too, and also cutting through gas stations at intersections so he wouldn’t have to stop and stall, until he did stall, before using the car’s momentum to bump-start again while moving.
“OKEE OKEE, LOVE YOU, BYE BYE” he said as he hung up on someone I was pretty sure he just cursed out, but it was hard to tell.
“WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT”
Did he mean the car, the person on the phone, the world? Who knows?
The people I met at R’s shop all seemed to be driven to work on their cars by an unseen force, much like how people who live under bridges seem to be hearing voices. Like the guy who once pulled in with an immaculate, deep metallic candy red 350Z. The wheels were golden BBSs on tires that looked like drag slicks. His airbag suspension dropped the car lower after he parked, leaving about a micron of space between tire and body kit fenders, which were peppered with chunks of projectiled tire rubber.
We all hovered around in admiration and asked questions to pretend like we knew something. He popped the hood to reveal a pristine engine bay, in which sat a custom-built twin-turbo VQ35. His affliction ran deep. There was probably about a hundred grand in parts and labor in that car. It was probably worth half that at best.
Seeing high-end custom builds is rare at R’s shop. Except for his own collection, most cars that come in are just run-of-the-mill daily drivers. People with tons of money to throw into a car generally go other places where they can get further ripped off. You won’t find a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs at the Dollar Tree. So it was strange seeing such a vehicle in this shop. Could it be that he had run out of money? It would certainly be the first time ever in history that an automotive enthusiast made a financial blunder.
“Why two turbos?” Someone asked.
Two is better than one? Go faster? More power? There are a billion meathead answers to this question. This guy had a glazed and distant look in his eye, and looked a little dazed, as if the high-sustained G loads from all the twists and turns on the track over the years had starved his brain of its requisite oxygen.
After an uncomfortable delay, he turned towards us.
“One for each divorce,” he said.
Then there’s hammerman. He starts early, stays late, and is almost always hammering the daylights out of something. They say he’s doing “body work” but I suspect some kind of pathology.
It’s isn’t just a hammer. There’s mallets, baseball bats, and crowbars, too. Occasionally, he employs power tools. Built like a pipe cleaner, this wiry old man bends over and swings around reciprocating blades, angle grinders, and acetylene cutting torches as if they were children’s toys. Like a mad Santa Claus in his chop shop, he inhales the toxic fumes and molten showers of sparks like he’s smelling a nice candle.
Once, I saw him spend five hours beating on a fender when he could have just bought a new one for thirty dollars. Does he have very solid principles? Is he really concerned about the environmental impact of getting rid of the fender? Is he just nuts? I’ve been wondering about the difference.
We struck up a conversation once. It turns out my mom’s side is from the same town in Poland as he is. After dropping a few unpronounceable-in-English names, we complained about the Communists for a while, as is customary. Communism is generally a pretty good blanket explanation for why certain elderly Eastern European people seem totally batshit in the modern world. Anyway, he told me this story.
Some days they worked. But some days there was no work, so they would take what little they had to go out and drink. They walked downhill into town to the bar, and uphill on the way back. But there was one of their friends who always drank, but never paid. So one day, they ordered a round of drinks. But they ordered one drink less. The guy who never paid didn’t get a drink. And they said, ‘you never pay, so now you don’t drink.’
“And then what happened?” I asked.
Hammerman said nothing. He just turned, walked away, and started relentlessly banging on some piece of metal, like a Polish-Chicagoan John Henry. I wasn’t even sure the metal was part of a car.
About the story? I didn’t ask. I try not to upset him. We’re friends, I think.
When my car first started having problems, I came in to the shop and asked R about it. When the revs dropped down to an idle, the engine would die.
“SO DON’T IDLE” R said.
In retrospect, I don’t think he was sober when he said that. But the next thing I knew, I was at the shop every Saturday. I was the guy whose car couldn’t idle, so I always kept my foot on the gas.
The other thing about the dregs of society who hang out at the shop, is that everyone thinks they know everything. So if you’re seen spotted trying to figure something out, before you know it you’ll have three Polaks, two Mexicans, one Italian, a Serbian, and some fat racist generic white dude all explaining their version of the solution to you with one hundred percent certainty as to their being correct. And then they’ll all be wrong. On Saturdays, with the assistance of this council of geniuses, I would come up with some half-baked idea on how to fix the car.
I worked during the week, made some money, and bought the parts. Saturday came along, I installed the parts, started the car, warmed it up, and – it died. Then I’d do it all over again the next week. And the one after. For two years.
I was trapped in the whirlpool of the shop. Around and around in circles I flailed, not fully sucked down into the depths of despair, but unable to see the light of freedom, either. Or maybe I just didn’t want to be free? Freedom, in this case, meaning ownership of a car that actually works. It’s worth considering if the illusion of choice is more important than the freedom itself.
But I’m not so sure I have a choice. Because one day, I solved the problem. After nine hundred and ninety nine idiotic solutions, I was hit with a lightning bolt of critical thinking. For once, I ignored everything everyone at the shop had to say. Then I swapped two specific parts, and the engine has not died since.
I mean, it has a ton of other problems, but it runs and drives good enough.
Then I wondered. What now? I found myself faced with an unexpected depression. I couldn’t help obsessing over the used car marketplace, researching cars I didn’t need. What else could my car use to run even better, I wondered. Maybe I should pull my engine. Then I would need a backup car. And I might as well make the backup a fixer-upper too.
I wanted to go back.
Disorder is a term that has been whittled down and sharpened to frighten. But disorder is the wind that strengthens the bark of the tree. Without disorder, we’d all be like those flappy blow-up things at sketchy used car dealerships.
But also, wind kills people. The National Weather service reported that in 2022, there were 51 ‘wind related’ fatalities, and 36 ‘high wind’ and ‘thunderstorm wind’ fatalities in the US. Stay safe out there, people.